A common line of thought seems to be that Mozilla/Firefox is more secure than IE, virus/exploit-wise.
This is probbably true, at this point in time.
A common misconception (which happens to be one of my pet peeves) is that this is because microsoft write bad code, microsoft devs are not security minded or are incompetent, open source code is better code just because it is open source, or Microsoft are in league with virusmakers, and various other manner of of BS.
Here's the news people: Microsoft can afford as good a development team as anyone else. They can afford to hire extra devs for their QA teams as well as their dev teams, QA devs that read code, something many software houses just hire techs that know mercury products for. They can afford to have two (probbably more) devs per line of code - one to stick back and fix bugs, another to run ahead with the next generation of code. Not many software houses can do that (thus affording a larger dev attention span to bugs) either.
And Open Source is as prone to bad methodology, bad coding, non-security-minded coding, bugs and what-have-you as any other code. OS devs make mistakes too.
The advantage MS has in many highly-paid devs is offset by open source being exposed to immense scrutiny levels by being open, but, having seen quite a bit of OS, this doesn't always guarantee someone will volunteer to fix it.
I don't think either has a check-mate advantage over the other in this respect.
Today, Firefox's security advantage lies in one single factor: The very little attention it is getting from the people who write exploits.
Once it makes more sense for them to assume mostly FF browsers will be running their malware, they *will* write malware for FF, open source or no open source. They *will* find ways to exploit FF, or any number of its (sometimes very-widely-installed) extensions, which do not undergo the same code scrutiny of the core FF team. They *will* find ways to exploit plugins, which are often not Open Source at all and are as exploitable as IE in this sense.
All it takes is a critical mass installbase for FF, and that cozy misleading feeling of security will fly right out the window.
1. Sue Google. 2. Get all the press you can doing so. 3. Lose. big time. 4. Use above as precedent.... 5. ??? 6. Don't even think about it. Do that and they'll eat your balls in court.
By reading this you are hereby granting me full permission to share any of your members works over any electronic or other media in any way I see fit without paying you a single cent.
I have an Athlon XP, KT400 Chipset and a Radeon 9700Pro, which is a rig I've been running since Christmas 2002. I game quite a lot.
I've been really annoyed by the dilemma of which way to go - SLI board with a 6800 GT/Ultra (a second one to be added in a bit later when they're cheaper on ebay), or a gradual upgrade from my Athlon XP and KT400 Board to an Athlon 64/VIA KT890 Pro (which will have *both* PCIe x16 and AGP) allowing me to retain my Radeon and squeeze several more months, maybe a year, out of it, before biting another bullet.
I guess this settles it. Here (KT890Pro + single-slot SLI) is my cheap upgrade solution that will both milk my Radeon a while longer, and by the time its spent, one can assume a single-card equivalent such as this of the then-most-cost-efficient high-end SLI setup will take its place in the PEG slot. Hopefully, it will be dual-DVI as well.
Assuming, of course, this "SLI card" will function in a standard x16 slot, as opposed to an SLI Mobo.
I have my own entropy-generator, 20 months old, and he climbs everything.
I have my two unix boxes and high-power gaming PC in a server cabinet in the garage, with USB and DVI cables stretching to the study. Peripherasls, such as DVD drive, kb, mouse, sound etc. are on the USB hub.
This is by no means child-proof. It creates more widgets on the desk for him to play with. The Pros however are:
The kid does not lay a working (open) box on its side and gets in, thinking its a bath tub, when the box is working.
The kid doesn't bang harddrives with rigid objects when the former are spinning
The kid doesn't stick his fingers into fans and fan grates.
It's a tomb-league-quiet setup:-)
What bluetooth peripherals will do is force you to into a battery-hassle (same as traditional wireless ones), and will allow your child to stash your wireless peripherals where you won't be able to find them. I don't recommend that.
LCDs are especially child-prone, because applying physical pressure to their surface breaks them.
The solution I ended up implementing is simple: I bought a kid-proof gate to the study, which is off-limits to anything that generates too much entropy.
SUN thinks it's about what progress they achieved. Think of it as distance.
What they don't get is that the Linux and BSD comunities think differently, more along the lines of how long it took them to achieved it. Think of this as speed.
The community is attempting to infer from this how long it would take sun to provide them the next thing they'll want.
SUN has been CRAWLING in terms of innovation and cutting-edge support. You can see this in many aspects of the OS. Modern shells such as bash and tcsh were introduced very late. I work for a huge Aussie SUN shop, and most people here still use the default csh.
SUN still thinks regards x86 hardware as toys, even while selling powerful Opteron boxes. Solaris non-SUN hardware support is still stoneage-era (and a lot of needs both in big and small industry just don't justify such expensive and overpriced hardware)
Their kernel networking mechanism is a joke compared to Linux IPFilter and its humongous arsenal of features (think of mangling, application-based packet tagging, packetshaping, etc.) the variety of FreeBSD's arsenal of 3 firewalls (OpenBSD ipf, ipfw and OpenBSD pf). Sun's offering in this respect is also stoneage.
SUN is making a lot of noise about their covered a distance with their new licensing, revamped GUI and rich kernel. That's the only thing they see.
What they don't see, and everyone else does, is that due to the fact it took them SO BLOODY LONG to get there, they really have nothing to brag about. All I see is that anything NOT in the core OS will simply take another 10 years to get in there. On Linux or BSD, it would take a month for the flaky version if you can live with it, 6 months for a reasonably stable one, and a year for something at least as production-worthy as any other commercial product.
When I find SUN implementation references for a new technology I'm trying to use while researching on google before I find how to do it on my own system, then I'll consider switching.
Till then, Solaris 10 is still a barely-decent upgrade path for the dinasaur systems (in either size or age context), and one big joke when considered a solution for medium to small ones.
Yes, the interviewer is pathetic, and the choice and wording of the questions is a waste of both gariott's time and ours.
Why not pose some REAL questions here? Here's my go. Richard, if you're reading this, endulge us:-)
1. Is single-player CRPG'ing a dead-end as far as you're concerned (and does your future lie in MMO) or do you see yourself involved in future major single-player titles?
2. Are we going to see any future CRPG-games you are involved in with an ultima-*like* atmosphere? (never mind the brand) and are they going single-player or MMO?
3. Are we going to see any future CRPG-games you're involved in with vast illinear worlds like Ultima 6/7 or Morrowind and are they going single-player or MMO?
4. What's your favourite *CRPG* game you were not involved in?
5. What's the coolest thing in the CRPG market you're looking forward to? (Other than Half-Life 2 you're obviously playing same as we all, judging by that 'physics engine' bit)
Everyone keeps bashing SP2 so much, I decided I'd even this up a bit.
Although I'm not an NT admin, I did install SP2 in a couple of places, and here's my take:
1. Added a simple, probbably far-from-what-we-here-on-/.-would-call-decent but TURNED-ON-BY-DEFAULT firewall to joe-clueless-user. IMHO, this will severely reduce virus infections on the vast amount of joe-user machines that are not properly mainained with good up-to-date malware-protection. Yes, a minority of 'joe-average's will have stuff break due to this, but the majority will benefit.
2. Enabled windows update by default. Again, will severely increase resilience of a vast number of joe-poorly-mainained-user boxen.
3. Tags files that were downloaded from the internet as such, and gives a proper warning when attempting to execute it. Another simple idea that will decrease suffering of people from malware.
4. [...Finally] added a decent popup blocker.
5. IP configuration GUI improvements. After 9 years of renewing a DHCP lease from the command line, they finally put a "right-click-on-tray-icon--->>REPAIR" option that gets a new one. right-click-->STATUS was also complemented with a new tab that... SHOWS MY IP ADDRESS. BRILLIANT! Sheesh, and it only took them 9 years. Buy hey, better late than never, I say.
6. After 2 years with flaky, unstable, bugged, alpha, crappy user UNfriendly blowatware bluetooth drivers based on the WIDCOMM "my-dog-can-write-better-software" SDK, Microsoft finally threw in their long awaited BT stack. And boy, was it a sight for sore eyes. It supports all my BT plugs out-of-the-box, Its simple and intuitive to use, and works like charm. BT network driver works great, as does syncing with PDA and a symbian phone. No more 30-minute battles with the Nokia suite, the BT tray icon that stopped responding and a guess-list of 12 serial port drivers to sync my phone with Outlook.
I tip my hat to MS for issuing an *excelent* BT driver suite, albeit 2 years overdue.
And yes, they crippled raw packet API on the TCP/IP stack, so nmap had to write a little workaround.
So go ahead and bash MS all you like, but as far as both myself and quite a clueless family members I inevitably get to support are concerned, SP2 did good. If fewer people have to spend their time, money and nerves treating virus-related computer problems, all the better.
Kudos Microsoft, and thats coming from a hardcore UNIX geek and fulltime Linux/Solaris admin.
Fast Networking and NAS at home
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Ethernet at 10 Gbps
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I saw some comments here saying Gigabit Ethernet is enough. There's nothing we can do with 10GbE.
I beg to differ. Sit tight.
Here's an idea for you geeks that for some reason nobody is busy doing yet.
Quite a few IT people I know run some form of Linux or BSD server at home, doing a variety of stuff from fileserver to firewall to mail/DNS server etc., though on their desktops they run 2K or XP for reasons such as gaming, simplicity, wife, and so forth.
Here's the idea. Pool all your harddrives at home on the Linux/BSD box, configure a software RAID-5, share it using samba and network-boot all the 2K/XP machines at home from this network-attached storage. Using Gig ethernet of course.
What do you get? Every box gets a system drive "Drive C" that can go at 100MBytes/sec. RAID-5 redundancy for all your machines at home. Harddrives, which generate heat and noise are no longer in your computers.
The benefits are enormous.
There's a small con though - you won't be able to drag your computer to a LAN-party (unless you drag the server too;-)
Currently there is a shortage of one element though: Software that can boot Win2K/XP using PXE from a fileserver. Such software exists in the commercial world and is made by a french company called Qualystem, which doesn't sell it in less than 1-server+25-client licenses, which costs a whopping 2750Euro. They show zero interest in smaller clients. A second product, Venturcom BXP, does the same but falls short as it has a dedicated server that only runs on 2K/XP/2K3 - no BSD/Linux with SAMBA for you.
If someone in the open-source community were to pick this glove up and write a small driver that emulates a harddisk for 2K/XP on one side (the kind you throw in for a RAID controller by pressing F6 when installing windows), and uses SMB/whatever to access a UNIX fileserver on the other, we'd all be able to rig up a very nifty setup, and use the combined speed of all our harddrives at home.
We'd also realize that Gigabit Ethernet is not enough, as a cheap 4-modern-ATA-drive RAID5 setup (which effectively streams enough data to store on 3 of them, one of the four being used to store parity info at any given moment) writes at 40MByte/Sec x 3 = 120MByte/Sec, and reads at 60MByte/Sec x 3 = 180MByte/Sec.
The Gigabit Ethernet _will_ pose a bottleneck. If we add more drives, the bandwidth requirement broadens.
There's also the small issue of the PCI bus, your server must have its ethernet off the PCI bus, like in Intel's 875 chipset, nVidia's nForce 250 or on a PCI-Express card. Otherwise the IDE and GB will choke each other on the too-narrow PCI bus.
Anyway. once people start doing this, 1000BaseT is back to where 100BaseTX has been for 5 years - choking. I say - Bring on 10GbE!
Re:The one thing I personally liked about the stor
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What you say is, of course, the documented course events took, and the more likely one to have actually happened.
The way grandparent post told it is the way this incident is recited by mothers to thier children around the fireplace in the Israeli Air Force.
I know because I served there.
That is... if there were fireplaces.
The one thing I personally liked about the story
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Of course in the IAF, this one gets told in a slightly different manner.
The way it's told, MD were called in to see the aircraft after it landed. Their engineers came, inspected the aircraft, photographed, took measurements, went back to do some wind-tunnel tests, called back after several weeks and concluded:
1. I played and finished Ultima 9. 2. Yes, it was buggy. 3. I never complained about bugs. I make it a havit not to, unless the game is completely unplayable. U9 was bugged, but not to the point where it caused me to stop playing.
About Troika, I'll add a few words: An RPG game of the class we're discussing here (the "OUTSTANDING" class, as opposed to the slightly lower "IF ONLY THE GAME HAD ___" class and the even lower "YET ANOTHER" class) needs to score well on ALL "KEY elements", and then it can score on whatever optional elements it likes. If it misses even one of the KEY elements - it's out of the OUTSTANDING league. I gave long consideration to these criteria, and I strongly believe they are the makers or breakers of a legendary game.
The key elements I can think of (and a simple almost boolean opinion of the contenders for top-league I played in the last decade) are: 1. [ Game Balance ] (U7: pass, U9: pass, Gothic1&2: pass, FO1/2: pass, Morrowind: fail, Arcanum: fail miserably) 2. [ Atmosphere / Immersiveness ] (U7: pass, U9: pass, Gothic1&2: pass, FO1/2: pass, Morrowind: fail miserably, Arcanum: pass) 3. [ Large Illinear World ] (U7: pass remarkably, U9: fail, Gothic1&2: pass, FO1/2: pass, Morrowind: pass remarkably, Arcanum: pass)
I may have missed an element, but everything else I can currently think of (surprisingly including PLOT) is nice-to-have. U7 and Arcanum had shitty plots, and it didn't even scratch their credibility as contenders for the OUTSTANDING league. Take care to make the distinction between the plot and the immersiveness/atmosphere. It's the latter that counts.
So here you see that in my definition of top-league, I played 5 games (U7, FO1&2, Gothic 1&2) that squeezed in that top league. The rest dropped out.
In fact, you could use the same criteria to categorize top-league for other types of games as well. "Lancers" for instance. Privateer 2 scored on'em all as well. Freelancer failed on the Balance due to a small and stupid design decision.
Of course you could argue there are legendary games that didn't have an illinear game world but still became legendary - but I stick with my three criteria. Even star control II became legendary for the simple reason it scored on all three.
Finally, if any devs are reading this, read what I wrote. Then live by it if you want to be the maker of legendary games.
I'll pick that one up. I once wrote in my journal the following: "Elder Scrolls3: Morrowind made a shot at a humongous world. They did manage to get that right. But they went astray. There was no Garriot. No Lord British. There was no atmosphere. It was just an endless [beautiful] world of immensely over-recycled content, unbalanced gameplay, flat-as-a-plank characters and utterly boring [and endless] fed-ex quests that required spending too much of the game time on travel. The company who made it just wasn't Origin, it lacked a guide. And the game was a flop."
The parent post pretty much pointed the same way. The vastness aspect was wonderful, but if you compare the uniqueness and style of Fallout 2 or Baldur's Gate quests to those of Morrowind, Morrowind has no soul. Not the towns, not the characters, not the quests. It's all somehow "flat and lifeless".
The second bad thing about morrowind is balance. Once you have a weapon that can paralyze, you're through the game. Even with difficulty cranked up to the full 200%. About 60% through the game ther e is practically no item in the known Morrowind universe that can outperform what you already have. Treasures become meaningless.
Unbalanced with easily-achieved godhood is the magic ingredient for a shitty game, for the simple reason it stops being fun to play.
The third bad thing about morrowind is the immense amount of recycled graphics. You find a pirate cave. Cool. Then you find a Skeleton/Undead cave. Cool. Then you find a mine. Cool.
Then you find roughly 100 more of each of the above 3, that feature NO uniqueness, NO carefully hidden goodies or easter eggs, No unique artwork, and basically differn only insofar as mildly different interior decoration and "micro-level design". (i.e. same rooms but put together in a slightly different way). To make this even more annoying, you need to manually keep track of which you cleared and which you haven't.
To sum up, I think they need more than "polish" to make FO3 a good game. I think they need to overcome some very untrivial hurdles in game design. Having however seen them make something of the Morrowind caliber, I do believe they're fully capable of it.
So it does in the end amount to whether they'll go with what they already did or try and take that step forward.
First off, thanks for the insight, and no, I'm not offended. In fact I pretty much share your view of how sad this GSS as you call it is, and was fully aware of it at the time I wrote the above as well.
It's Interesting. I'm sorta trying to figure out what it is that makes my funhaving tick.
My personal opinion - I like the sense of accomplishment, and I get it when I did something hard. I guess the gold star is a way of the devs saying "we knew someone would get to this hard-to-get-to point", and I guess I like games which know I exist in spite of the onslaught of Joe 'Casual' Gamers in recent years.
Maybe I'm just trying to prove to myself I haven't turned Joe 'Casual' myself.
1. I'm well aware of the AI-reverts-to-normal-level-after-loading-bug and played it patched to 1.1
2. I DID play the game with my own rules. I never killed anything human. and I only clobbered people who had stuff I wanted and there was no other way of getting it off them.
The problem with playing it with your own rules is that it's utterly unrewarding. No different from, say, completing Thief without ever using the Strafe Left button. Whoopee!
As for the rules thing - I strongly disagree with your approach.
The reason is simple: I like a game to reward me. If the devs don't know what rules you'll be playing by, they can't reward you.
Just HOW are you rewarded by not killing/KO'ing a single sould on a level? (simple answer: you aren't).
The reason I liked playing Hitman for SA rating is to get the rating and the unique weapon in the end.
The reason I liked spotting the really hard-to-find secrets in Deus-Ex is because of the charachter-enhancing goodies in them.
Damn, I remember when I was playing Baldur's Gate II a few years back, on the sub-quest of the Red Dragon where most courses led you to reaching some form of standoff with him, but given enough ingenuity and effort you could actually kill it. If you did, it clearly mentioned your achievement in your journal. I know, it's reeks of infantile, but having the game acknowledge that you did something HARD is.. fun:-)
Thief is an overmilked cow. Sorry, but it is. If Deadly Shadows was the first Thief installment you played, and you're completely oblivious of other fun things people put in other contemporary games (such as character buildup and improvement over time) and you're still too new to computer games to understand what "game balance" is and why (or whether) it's important, then hell yes, Thief is a great title.
But let me point out the following: 1. This is a third installment of the game. It boasts nothing new from the first two, except for a nicer physics engine and visual candy. This is good for a GOOD game, but BAD for a game that has a large amount of serious design problems. Read on. 2. Even on expert mode, the game is just too damn EASY. I'm not against giving the player options, I'm against all of them doing such a tremendously good job solving the problem. It renders proper choice of technique (read: require player to THINK) useless. You don't need to think which way is best to solve a problem. All of them are. Douse the torch, or sneak when the guard is on patrol, or clobber him and hide the body. Or head-shot him with a broadhead. Or flashbomb him and run past. It's not like he'll alert every other denizen of the map if you do. On a sidenote, the game is damn too forgiving. 3. The game does not reward excelence, meticulousness. Obtaining >90% of the loot doesn't require you to be attentive to small details so much as just be systematic. 4. It's ONE OF THE MOST REPETITIVE GAMES I HAVE EVER PLAYED. Probbably more than Doom 3 will be. 5. Character enhancement? Leveling? where? 6. AI - In Thief III everybody is a combination of Sherlock Holmes and a retarded cockroach. Someone will see an object, turn away, you grab it, he turns back, sees its not there, and he'll not raise the entire house. If you leave a door open however, he'll call a guard (which will come, peek in the shadows, find nothing and forget the entire thing).
Let's put this in contrast: Let's look at the Competition. A. HITMAN series. They too didn't change much for the last two installments. With them however, I consider it to be a GOOD point. PRO: The game most definitely rewards excelence. On the "Expert" mode (i.e. Finishing all levels with "Silent Assassin") It's HARD (read: more challenging and less boring). Technique choice is critical in many situations to do a clean job. Not every technique is good for every situation. This is so not only because [some] hitman weapons make significantly more noise and ruckus, but also because of proper level design. CON: While level-up doesn't exist in Hitman, you do get better weapons and are allowed to stash them and later take them with you on missions, but only if you wish to replay the missions a second time after you completed the first time with the default weapons. I did however find the "side-goal" of bringing a weapon back each mission to enrich my stash quite fun. PRO: Excelent level design. CON: You only notice how excelent the level design is if you play hardcore and attempt Silent Assassin. The casual player can just easily barge through, and the levels are untolerably easy. PRO: (I don't believe I'm saying this but after a bit of thought I'm firmly resolved on this): You can't save more than X times per level. Usually I stress this is a cheap, sorry and pathetic way for devs to artificially extend the amount of playing hours a game contains. I'm making an exception here. In Hitman the ability to make only so many saves forces you into taking care and doing things right, and generates suspence. I LOVED IT. Really.
B. Deus-Ex. (1, not 2!). Deus-Ex was NOT a sneaking game. It could be though. It was a successful combination of about 4 types of games, of which sneaking was a major one. If we only look at aspects of it that are present in sneaking-only games, we find excelent level design (which you could replay 3 times and find new stuff you haven't found before each time you play it) and very good rewarding of attentivene
All you need is two things - something to spin up the CD before shooting it, that would provide for much greater stability - a CD-ROM drive would be a nice place to start, and a mechanism to disconnect a spinning disk from the clamp and give it a solid shove forward along some track or rail.
Once you have something that shoots, you can go the extra mile, evolve it into something along the lines of a CD gatling and make yourself one of these and post us some pictures of the result. (Yes, I know, the projectiles in the picture are not CD's, but you have to admit there is a resemblance, and think of all the money you'd make selling it on thinkgeek)
Agreed, however I think you're missing the important point here.
The ENTRY PRICE you pay for a sitcom is a few bucks a month and 45 minutes a week.
The entry price you pay for an MMO is a few bucks a month and an inconceivably disproportionate amount of time a week. It's the latter element that more and more people realize as the real price of an MMO, and are consequently unwilling to pay it.
That's why quite a few people I know who played MMO's for a while just quit (and I doubt if they'll be coming back). Most modern MMOs highly reward people who literally live in them, and "punish" those who elect to spend "only" a few weekly hours. Use the decaying housing regime in UO as an example to that.
Another point - "older" MMO's are now provided free of charge on the net. UO 1st-gen servers and the like. Think of how OpenOffice affects the sales of MS-Office97-level suites, or how free Linux distros affect the sales of circa-98 desktop OS's. That doesn't help bring in money to the producers of new games. And there's no corporate market out shopping for MMO's.
You'd be hard-pressed to convince me to invest in an MMO business opportunity, be I a CEO of a VC firm, CEO of microsoft (I fully understand MS's rationale to jam out of this market), or just a guy with a stock portfolio looking for places to stick my money in. (currently, the last being my case).
Excelent point, too bad I don't have any mod points today:-(
I'd like to take your insight a few steps further though. Specifically the bit about us being able to invest our time&money (and hence pay for) multiple single-experience titles (like movies or single-player games) but no more than a select few ongoing experiences like TV-series or MMO's, and even that we take a break from or completely quit once we don't have the time to shell out.
What that amounts to is that the MMO industry is significantly smaller, market-cap-wise, than the single-player industry. Given the market forces have time to do their thing, the MMO industry will find itself with budgets that compared to single-player games is much like a TV-series budget compared to a hollywood movie budget.
But can games we'd want to play be made for significantly smaller budgets? I guess we'd be able to answer that in a couple of years, by simply checking if anyone is still making these titles or not.
My personal opinion though is that any kind of product that requires: A. A huge public to use it in order to break even and start generating profit and B. Immense investment in time from its subscribers (Much more than the weekly 45 minutes we need to watch a TV series) - something people, especially the kinds with obligations, or families and kids, or ways of using that time to make money will not reluctantly give away.
and an optional: C. Applies to a very limited public (which is computer-literate enough to actually get as far as finding out that MMOs exist and what they are) and D. Is in an industry with immense competition and huge corporations that can afford to lose tens if not hundreds of millions on the entire project.
Making an MMO thus has slim chances if any of generating money and is a bad bad bad business idea.
If EA had any financial brains (which they do but seem to be all clustered around the sports-game table, whereas their mothers-in-law seem to be running the CRPG/Adventure side of things), they'd re-hire Richard Gariott, give him a stash of money to buy a 3D engine that can handle a huge continuous map like Morrowind and tell him to go make a game with it. And not interfere or ax it until it's in retail. But hey, what do YOU expect from a mother-in-law?
But hey, that's just my 2 worn-out cents of frustrated rant.
DVD-R sales skyrocketed and everyone all of a sudden wound up getting a writer - the moment the blank price (usually calculated on a per-megabyte basis, though some people put VERY little bytes on each disk and therefore calculate the per-disk price) dropped below that of the departing CD-R technology.
In my little corner of the world no other DVD*R, DVD/R or DVD^R was adopted. Why? because the blanks cost significantly more than el-cheapo DVD-R's.
DVD-9 DL may already be there on the market, even the blanks may already be there, but if they don't compete in price with DVD-R, they may as well not be there. And same goes for blu-ray. - "Show me da money!" You want me to show you da moeny? Show us cheap blanks, I show you da money.
Slashdot Mirror
A common line of thought seems to be that Mozilla/Firefox is more secure than IE, virus/exploit-wise.
This is probbably true, at this point in time.
A common misconception (which happens to be one of my pet peeves) is that this is because microsoft write bad code, microsoft devs are not security minded or are incompetent, open source code is better code just because it is open source, or Microsoft are in league with virusmakers, and various other manner of of BS.
Here's the news people: Microsoft can afford as good a development team as anyone else. They can afford to hire extra devs for their QA teams as well as their dev teams, QA devs that read code, something many software houses just hire techs that know mercury products for. They can afford to have two (probbably more) devs per line of code - one to stick back and fix bugs, another to run ahead with the next generation of code. Not many software houses can do that (thus affording a larger dev attention span to bugs) either.
And Open Source is as prone to bad methodology, bad coding, non-security-minded coding, bugs and what-have-you as any other code. OS devs make mistakes too.
The advantage MS has in many highly-paid devs is offset by open source being exposed to immense scrutiny levels by being open, but, having seen quite a bit of OS, this doesn't always guarantee someone will volunteer to fix it.
I don't think either has a check-mate advantage over the other in this respect.
Today, Firefox's security advantage lies in one single factor: The very little attention it is getting from the people who write exploits.
Once it makes more sense for them to assume mostly FF browsers will be running their malware, they *will* write malware for FF, open source or no open source. They *will* find ways to exploit FF, or any number of its (sometimes very-widely-installed) extensions, which do not undergo the same code scrutiny of the core FF team. They *will* find ways to exploit plugins, which are often not Open Source at all and are as exploitable as IE in this sense.
All it takes is a critical mass installbase for FF, and that cozy misleading feeling of security will fly right out the window.
My 2 cents.
1. Sue Google. ...
2. Get all the press you can doing so.
3. Lose. big time.
4. Use above as precedent.
5. ???
6. Don't even think about it. Do that and they'll eat your balls in court.
Well, if that works, then what the hell...
Dear MPAA
By reading this you are hereby granting me full permission to share any of your members works over any electronic or other media in any way I see fit without paying you a single cent.
Thank you.
>> All your base are imagining an ad-hoc beowulf cluster of old korean overlords welcoming YOU!
You meant,
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, All your base are imagining an ad-hoc beowulf cluster of old korean overlords welcoming YOU!
I have an Athlon XP, KT400 Chipset and a Radeon 9700Pro, which is a rig I've been running since Christmas 2002. I game quite a lot.
I've been really annoyed by the dilemma of which way to go -
SLI board with a 6800 GT/Ultra (a second one to be added in a bit later when they're cheaper on ebay), or a gradual upgrade from my Athlon XP and KT400 Board to an Athlon 64/VIA KT890 Pro (which will have *both* PCIe x16 and AGP) allowing me to retain my Radeon and squeeze several more months, maybe a year, out of it, before biting another bullet.
I guess this settles it. Here (KT890Pro + single-slot SLI) is my cheap upgrade solution that will both milk my Radeon a while longer, and by the time its spent, one can assume a single-card equivalent such as this of the then-most-cost-efficient high-end SLI setup will take its place in the PEG slot. Hopefully, it will be dual-DVI as well.
Assuming, of course, this "SLI card" will function in a standard x16 slot, as opposed to an SLI Mobo.
Here's my 2 cents.
:-)
I have my own entropy-generator, 20 months old, and he climbs everything.
I have my two unix boxes and high-power gaming PC in a server cabinet in the garage, with USB and DVI cables stretching to the study. Peripherasls, such as DVD drive, kb, mouse, sound etc. are on the USB hub.
This is by no means child-proof. It creates more widgets on the desk for him to play with.
The Pros however are:
The kid does not lay a working (open) box on its side and gets in, thinking its a bath tub, when the box is working.
The kid doesn't bang harddrives with rigid objects when the former are spinning
The kid doesn't stick his fingers into fans and fan grates.
It's a tomb-league-quiet setup
What bluetooth peripherals will do is force you to into a battery-hassle (same as traditional wireless ones), and will allow your child to stash your wireless peripherals where you won't be able to find them. I don't recommend that.
LCDs are especially child-prone, because applying physical pressure to their surface breaks them.
The solution I ended up implementing is simple:
I bought a kid-proof gate to the study, which is off-limits to anything that generates too much entropy.
Good luck!
SUN thinks it's about what progress they achieved. Think of it as distance.
What they don't get is that the Linux and BSD comunities think differently, more along the lines of how long it took them to achieved it. Think of this as speed.
The community is attempting to infer from this how long it would take sun to provide them the next thing they'll want.
SUN has been CRAWLING in terms of innovation and cutting-edge support. You can see this in many aspects of the OS. Modern shells such as bash and tcsh were introduced very late. I work for a huge Aussie SUN shop, and most people here still use the default csh.
SUN still thinks regards x86 hardware as toys, even while selling powerful Opteron boxes. Solaris non-SUN hardware support is still stoneage-era (and a lot of needs both in big and small industry just don't justify such expensive and overpriced hardware)
Their kernel networking mechanism is a joke compared to Linux IPFilter and its humongous arsenal of features (think of mangling, application-based packet tagging, packetshaping, etc.) the variety of FreeBSD's arsenal of 3 firewalls (OpenBSD ipf, ipfw and OpenBSD pf). Sun's offering in this respect is also stoneage.
SUN is making a lot of noise about their covered a distance with their new licensing, revamped GUI and rich kernel. That's the only thing they see.
What they don't see, and everyone else does, is that due to the fact it took them SO BLOODY LONG to get there, they really have nothing to brag about. All I see is that anything NOT in the core OS will simply take another 10 years to get in there. On Linux or BSD, it would take a month for the flaky version if you can live with it, 6 months for a reasonably stable one, and a year for something at least as production-worthy as any other commercial product.
When I find SUN implementation references for a new technology I'm trying to use while researching on google before I find how to do it on my own system, then I'll consider switching.
Till then, Solaris 10 is still a barely-decent upgrade path for the dinasaur systems (in either size or age context), and one big joke when considered a solution for medium to small ones.
Yes, the interviewer is pathetic, and the choice and wording of the questions is a waste of both gariott's time and ours.
:-)
Why not pose some REAL questions here?
Here's my go. Richard, if you're reading this, endulge us
1. Is single-player CRPG'ing a dead-end as far as you're concerned (and does your future lie in MMO) or do you see yourself involved in future major single-player titles?
2. Are we going to see any future CRPG-games you are involved in with an ultima-*like* atmosphere? (never mind the brand) and are they going single-player or MMO?
3. Are we going to see any future CRPG-games you're involved in with vast illinear worlds like Ultima 6/7 or Morrowind and are they going single-player or MMO?
4. What's your favourite *CRPG* game you were not involved in?
5. What's the coolest thing in the CRPG market you're looking forward to? (Other than Half-Life 2 you're obviously playing same as we all, judging by that 'physics engine' bit)
Everyone keeps bashing SP2 so much, I decided I'd even this up a bit.
Although I'm not an NT admin, I did install SP2 in a couple of places, and here's my take:
1. Added a simple, probbably far-from-what-we-here-on-/.-would-call-decent but TURNED-ON-BY-DEFAULT firewall to joe-clueless-user. IMHO, this will severely reduce virus infections on the vast amount of joe-user machines that are not properly mainained with good up-to-date malware-protection.
Yes, a minority of 'joe-average's will have stuff break due to this, but the majority will benefit.
2. Enabled windows update by default. Again, will severely increase resilience of a vast number of joe-poorly-mainained-user boxen.
3. Tags files that were downloaded from the internet as such, and gives a proper warning when attempting to execute it. Another simple idea that will decrease suffering of people from malware.
4. [...Finally] added a decent popup blocker.
5. IP configuration GUI improvements. After 9 years of renewing a DHCP lease from the command line, they finally put a "right-click-on-tray-icon--->>REPAIR" option that gets a new one. right-click-->STATUS was also complemented with a new tab that... SHOWS MY IP ADDRESS. BRILLIANT!
Sheesh, and it only took them 9 years. Buy hey, better late than never, I say.
6. After 2 years with flaky, unstable, bugged, alpha, crappy user UNfriendly blowatware bluetooth drivers based on the WIDCOMM "my-dog-can-write-better-software" SDK, Microsoft finally threw in their long awaited BT stack. And boy, was it a sight for sore eyes. It supports all my BT plugs out-of-the-box, Its simple and intuitive to use, and works like charm. BT network driver works great, as does syncing with PDA and a symbian phone. No more 30-minute battles with the Nokia suite, the BT tray icon that stopped responding and a guess-list of 12 serial port drivers to sync my phone with Outlook.
I tip my hat to MS for issuing an *excelent* BT driver suite, albeit 2 years overdue.
And yes, they crippled raw packet API on the TCP/IP stack, so nmap had to write a little workaround.
So go ahead and bash MS all you like, but as far as both myself and quite a clueless family members I inevitably get to support are concerned, SP2 did good. If fewer people have to spend their time, money and nerves treating virus-related computer problems, all the better.
Kudos Microsoft, and thats coming from a hardcore UNIX geek and fulltime Linux/Solaris admin.
Flame away kids.
I mean, look at what all that high-level coding nonsense is causing! Look what it's being used for!
I say go ahead [RI|MP]AA! sue Kerningham & Richie! That will put a cap on all the terrorrists that hog our internet downloading child porn!
Or maybe we can sue the IETF for giving us IPv4?
Pah. Sueing the guy who invented torrent. I doubt even americans will go that low.
'nuff said
I saw some comments here saying Gigabit Ethernet is enough. There's nothing we can do with 10GbE.
;-)
/whatever to access a UNIX fileserver on the other, we'd all be able to rig up a very nifty setup, and use the combined speed of all our harddrives at home.
I beg to differ. Sit tight.
Here's an idea for you geeks that for some reason nobody is busy doing yet.
Quite a few IT people I know run some form of Linux or BSD server at home, doing a variety of stuff from fileserver to firewall to mail/DNS server etc., though on their desktops they run 2K or XP for reasons such as gaming, simplicity, wife, and so forth.
Here's the idea. Pool all your harddrives at home on the Linux/BSD box, configure a software RAID-5, share it using samba and network-boot all the 2K/XP machines at home from this network-attached storage. Using Gig ethernet of course.
What do you get? Every box gets a system drive "Drive C" that can go at 100MBytes/sec. RAID-5 redundancy for all your machines at home. Harddrives, which generate heat and noise are no longer in your computers.
The benefits are enormous.
There's a small con though - you won't be able to drag your computer to a LAN-party (unless you drag the server too
Currently there is a shortage of one element though: Software that can boot Win2K/XP using PXE from a fileserver. Such software exists in the commercial world and is made by a french company called Qualystem, which doesn't sell it in less than 1-server+25-client licenses, which costs a whopping 2750Euro. They show zero interest in smaller clients. A second product, Venturcom BXP, does the same but falls short as it has a dedicated server that only runs on 2K/XP/2K3 - no BSD/Linux with SAMBA for you.
If someone in the open-source community were to pick this glove up and write a small driver that emulates a harddisk for 2K/XP on one side (the kind you throw in for a RAID controller by pressing F6 when installing windows), and uses SMB
We'd also realize that Gigabit Ethernet is not enough, as a cheap 4-modern-ATA-drive RAID5 setup (which effectively streams enough data to store on 3 of them, one of the four being used to store parity info at any given moment) writes at 40MByte/Sec x 3 = 120MByte/Sec, and reads at 60MByte/Sec x 3 = 180MByte/Sec.
The Gigabit Ethernet _will_ pose a bottleneck.
If we add more drives, the bandwidth requirement broadens.
There's also the small issue of the PCI bus, your server must have its ethernet off the PCI bus, like in Intel's 875 chipset, nVidia's nForce 250 or on a PCI-Express card. Otherwise the IDE and GB will choke each other on the too-narrow PCI bus.
Anyway. once people start doing this, 1000BaseT is back to where 100BaseTX has been for 5 years - choking. I say - Bring on 10GbE!
What you say is, of course, the documented course events took, and the more likely one to have actually happened.
The way grandparent post told it is the way this incident is recited by mothers to thier children around the fireplace in the Israeli Air Force.
I know because I served there.
That is... if there were fireplaces.
Of course in the IAF, this one gets told in a slightly different manner.
The way it's told, MD were called in to see the aircraft after it landed. Their engineers came, inspected the aircraft, photographed, took measurements, went back to do some wind-tunnel tests, called back after several weeks and concluded:
It cannot fly.
1. I played and finished Ultima 9.
2. Yes, it was buggy.
3. I never complained about bugs. I make it a havit not to, unless the game is completely unplayable. U9 was bugged, but not to the point where it caused me to stop playing.
About Troika, I'll add a few words:
An RPG game of the class we're discussing here (the "OUTSTANDING" class, as opposed to the slightly lower "IF ONLY THE GAME HAD ___" class and the even lower "YET ANOTHER" class) needs to score well on ALL "KEY elements", and then it can score on whatever optional elements it likes. If it misses even one of the KEY elements - it's out of the OUTSTANDING league.
I gave long consideration to these criteria, and I strongly believe they are the makers or breakers of a legendary game.
The key elements I can think of (and a simple almost boolean opinion of the contenders for top-league I played in the last decade) are:
1. [ Game Balance ] (U7: pass, U9: pass, Gothic1&2: pass, FO1/2: pass, Morrowind: fail, Arcanum: fail miserably)
2. [ Atmosphere / Immersiveness ] (U7: pass, U9: pass, Gothic1&2: pass, FO1/2: pass, Morrowind: fail miserably, Arcanum: pass)
3. [ Large Illinear World ] (U7: pass remarkably, U9: fail, Gothic1&2: pass, FO1/2: pass, Morrowind: pass remarkably, Arcanum: pass)
I may have missed an element, but everything else I can currently think of (surprisingly including PLOT) is nice-to-have. U7 and Arcanum had shitty plots, and it didn't even scratch their credibility as contenders for the OUTSTANDING league. Take care to make the distinction between the plot and the immersiveness/atmosphere. It's the latter that counts.
So here you see that in my definition of top-league, I played 5 games (U7, FO1&2, Gothic 1&2) that squeezed in that top league. The rest dropped out.
In fact, you could use the same criteria to categorize top-league for other types of games as well. "Lancers" for instance. Privateer 2 scored on'em all as well. Freelancer failed on the Balance due to a small and stupid design decision.
Of course you could argue there are legendary games that didn't have an illinear game world but still became legendary - but I stick with my three criteria. Even star control II became legendary for the simple reason it scored on all three.
Finally, if any devs are reading this, read what I wrote. Then live by it if you want to be the maker of legendary games.
I'll pick that one up. I once wrote in my journal the following:
:-)
"Elder Scrolls3: Morrowind made a shot at a humongous world. They did manage to get that right. But they went astray. There was no Garriot. No Lord British. There was no atmosphere. It was just an endless [beautiful] world of immensely over-recycled content, unbalanced gameplay, flat-as-a-plank characters and utterly boring [and endless] fed-ex quests that required spending too much of the game time on travel. The company who made it just wasn't Origin, it lacked a guide. And the game was a flop."
The parent post pretty much pointed the same way. The vastness aspect was wonderful, but if you compare the uniqueness and style of Fallout 2 or Baldur's Gate quests to those of Morrowind, Morrowind has no soul. Not the towns, not the characters, not the quests. It's all somehow "flat and lifeless".
The second bad thing about morrowind is balance. Once you have a weapon that can paralyze, you're through the game. Even with difficulty cranked up to the full 200%. About 60% through the game ther e is practically no item in the known Morrowind universe that can outperform what you already have. Treasures become meaningless.
Unbalanced with easily-achieved godhood is the magic ingredient for a shitty game, for the simple reason it stops being fun to play.
The third bad thing about morrowind is the immense amount of recycled graphics.
You find a pirate cave. Cool. Then you find a Skeleton/Undead cave. Cool. Then you find a mine. Cool.
Then you find roughly 100 more of each of the above 3, that feature NO uniqueness, NO carefully hidden goodies or easter eggs, No unique artwork, and basically differn only insofar as mildly different interior decoration and "micro-level design". (i.e. same rooms but put together in a slightly different way).
To make this even more annoying, you need to manually keep track of which you cleared and which you haven't.
To sum up, I think they need more than "polish" to make FO3 a good game. I think they need to overcome some very untrivial hurdles in game design. Having however seen them make something of the Morrowind caliber, I do believe they're fully capable of it.
So it does in the end amount to whether they'll go with what they already did or try and take that step forward.
Go Bethesda!
Probbably half the /. crowd, myself among them, worked in support, YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
Do some good - tell them about darl@sco.com
And if you can add a sig with HTML, Feel free to throw this little charm in as well:
<A HREF="http://www.thescogroup.com/">litigious bastards</A>
First off, thanks for the insight, and no, I'm not offended.
In fact I pretty much share your view of how sad this GSS as you call it is, and was fully aware of it at the time I wrote the above as well.
It's Interesting. I'm sorta trying to figure out what it is that makes my funhaving tick.
My personal opinion - I like the sense of accomplishment, and I get it when I did something hard. I guess the gold star is a way of the devs saying "we knew someone would get to this hard-to-get-to point", and I guess I like games which know I exist in spite of the onslaught of Joe 'Casual' Gamers in recent years.
Maybe I'm just trying to prove to myself I haven't turned Joe 'Casual' myself.
Yep. You're right. I'm sad.
So... when is Hitman 4 hitting the shelves?
1. I'm well aware of the AI-reverts-to-normal-level-after-loading-bug and played it patched to 1.1
:-)
2. I DID play the game with my own rules. I never killed anything human. and I only clobbered people who had stuff I wanted and there was no other way of getting it off them.
The problem with playing it with your own rules is that it's utterly unrewarding. No different from, say, completing Thief without ever using the Strafe Left button. Whoopee!
As for the rules thing - I strongly disagree with your approach.
The reason is simple: I like a game to reward me.
If the devs don't know what rules you'll be playing by, they can't reward you.
Just HOW are you rewarded by not killing/KO'ing a single sould on a level? (simple answer: you aren't).
The reason I liked playing Hitman for SA rating is to get the rating and the unique weapon in the end.
The reason I liked spotting the really hard-to-find secrets in Deus-Ex is because of the charachter-enhancing goodies in them.
Damn, I remember when I was playing Baldur's Gate II a few years back, on the sub-quest of the Red Dragon where most courses led you to reaching some form of standoff with him, but given enough ingenuity and effort you could actually kill it. If you did, it clearly mentioned your achievement in your journal.
I know, it's reeks of infantile, but having the game acknowledge that you did something HARD is.. fun
Thief is an overmilked cow. Sorry, but it is. If Deadly Shadows was the first Thief installment you played, and you're completely oblivious of other fun things people put in other contemporary games (such as character buildup and improvement over time) and you're still too new to computer games to understand what "game balance" is and why (or whether) it's important, then hell yes, Thief is a great title.
But let me point out the following:
1. This is a third installment of the game. It boasts nothing new from the first two, except for a nicer physics engine and visual candy. This is good for a GOOD game, but BAD for a game that has a large amount of serious design problems. Read on.
2. Even on expert mode, the game is just too damn EASY. I'm not against giving the player options, I'm against all of them doing such a tremendously good job solving the problem. It renders proper choice of technique (read: require player to THINK) useless. You don't need to think which way is best to solve a problem. All of them are. Douse the torch, or sneak when the guard is on patrol, or clobber him and hide the body. Or head-shot him with a broadhead. Or flashbomb him and run past. It's not like he'll alert every other denizen of the map if you do. On a sidenote, the game is damn too forgiving.
3. The game does not reward excelence, meticulousness. Obtaining >90% of the loot doesn't require you to be attentive to small details so much as just be systematic.
4. It's ONE OF THE MOST REPETITIVE GAMES I HAVE EVER PLAYED. Probbably more than Doom 3 will be.
5. Character enhancement? Leveling? where?
6. AI - In Thief III everybody is a combination of Sherlock Holmes and a retarded cockroach. Someone will see an object, turn away, you grab it, he turns back, sees its not there, and he'll not raise the entire house. If you leave a door open however, he'll call a guard (which will come, peek in the shadows, find nothing and forget the entire thing).
Let's put this in contrast: Let's look at the Competition.
A. HITMAN series.
They too didn't change much for the last two installments. With them however, I consider it to be a GOOD point.
PRO: The game most definitely rewards excelence. On the "Expert" mode (i.e. Finishing all levels with "Silent Assassin") It's HARD (read: more challenging and less boring). Technique choice is critical in many situations to do a clean job. Not every technique is good for every situation. This is so not only because [some] hitman weapons make significantly more noise and ruckus, but also because of proper level design.
CON: While level-up doesn't exist in Hitman, you do get better weapons and are allowed to stash them and later take them with you on missions, but only if you wish to replay the missions a second time after you completed the first time with the default weapons. I did however find the "side-goal" of bringing a weapon back each mission to enrich my stash quite fun.
PRO: Excelent level design.
CON: You only notice how excelent the level design is if you play hardcore and attempt Silent Assassin. The casual player can just easily barge through, and the levels are untolerably easy.
PRO: (I don't believe I'm saying this but after a bit of thought I'm firmly resolved on this):
You can't save more than X times per level.
Usually I stress this is a cheap, sorry and pathetic way for devs to artificially extend the amount of playing hours a game contains.
I'm making an exception here. In Hitman the ability to make only so many saves forces you into taking care and doing things right, and generates suspence. I LOVED IT. Really.
B. Deus-Ex. (1, not 2!).
Deus-Ex was NOT a sneaking game. It could be though. It was a successful combination of about 4 types of games, of which sneaking was a major one.
If we only look at aspects of it that are present in sneaking-only games, we find excelent level design (which you could replay 3 times and find new stuff you haven't found before each time you play it) and very good rewarding of attentivene
All you need is two things - something to spin up the CD before shooting it, that would provide for much greater stability - a CD-ROM drive would be a nice place to start, and a mechanism to disconnect a spinning disk from the clamp and give it a solid shove forward along some track or rail.
Once you have something that shoots, you can go the extra mile, evolve it into something along the lines of a CD gatling and make yourself one of these and post us some pictures of the result. (Yes, I know, the projectiles in the picture are not CD's, but you have to admit there is a resemblance, and think of all the money you'd make selling it on thinkgeek)
Simple electric-powered motors answer that criteria you just posed. And they're exactly what's being considered to power the SE.
Agreed, however I think you're missing the important point here.
The ENTRY PRICE you pay for a sitcom is a few bucks a month and 45 minutes a week.
The entry price you pay for an MMO is a few bucks a month and an inconceivably disproportionate amount of time a week. It's the latter element that more and more people realize as the real price of an MMO, and are consequently unwilling to pay it.
That's why quite a few people I know who played MMO's for a while just quit (and I doubt if they'll be coming back). Most modern MMOs highly reward people who literally live in them, and "punish" those who elect to spend "only" a few weekly hours. Use the decaying housing regime in UO as an example to that.
Another point - "older" MMO's are now provided free of charge on the net. UO 1st-gen servers and the like. Think of how OpenOffice affects the sales of MS-Office97-level suites, or how free Linux distros affect the sales of circa-98 desktop OS's.
That doesn't help bring in money to the producers of new games. And there's no corporate market out shopping for MMO's.
You'd be hard-pressed to convince me to invest in an MMO business opportunity, be I a CEO of a VC firm, CEO of microsoft (I fully understand MS's rationale to jam out of this market), or just a guy with a stock portfolio looking for places to stick my money in. (currently, the last being my case).
Excelent point, too bad I don't have any mod points today :-(
I'd like to take your insight a few steps further though. Specifically the bit about us being able to invest our time&money (and hence pay for) multiple single-experience titles (like movies or single-player games) but no more than a select few ongoing experiences like TV-series or MMO's, and even that we take a break from or completely quit once we don't have the time to shell out.
What that amounts to is that the MMO industry is significantly smaller, market-cap-wise, than the single-player industry. Given the market forces have time to do their thing, the MMO industry will find itself with budgets that compared to single-player games is much like a TV-series budget compared to a hollywood movie budget.
But can games we'd want to play be made for significantly smaller budgets? I guess we'd be able to answer that in a couple of years, by simply checking if anyone is still making these titles or not.
My personal opinion though is that any kind of product that requires:
A. A huge public to use it in order to break even and start generating profit
and
B. Immense investment in time from its subscribers
(Much more than the weekly 45 minutes we need to watch a TV series) - something people, especially the kinds with obligations, or families and kids, or ways of using that time to make money will not reluctantly give away.
and an optional:
C. Applies to a very limited public (which is computer-literate enough to actually get as far as finding out that MMOs exist and what they are)
and
D. Is in an industry with immense competition and huge corporations that can afford to lose tens if not hundreds of millions on the entire project.
Making an MMO thus has slim chances if any of generating money and is a bad bad bad business idea.
If EA had any financial brains (which they do but seem to be all clustered around the sports-game table, whereas their mothers-in-law seem to be running the CRPG/Adventure side of things), they'd re-hire Richard Gariott, give him a stash of money to buy a 3D engine that can handle a huge continuous map like Morrowind and tell him to go make a game with it. And not interfere or ax it until it's in retail. But hey, what do YOU expect from a mother-in-law?
But hey, that's just my 2 worn-out cents of frustrated rant.
DVD-R sales skyrocketed and everyone all of a sudden wound up getting a writer - the moment the blank price (usually calculated on a per-megabyte basis, though some people put VERY little bytes on each disk and therefore calculate the per-disk price) dropped below that of the departing CD-R technology.
In my little corner of the world no other DVD*R, DVD/R or DVD^R was adopted. Why? because the blanks cost significantly more than el-cheapo DVD-R's.
DVD-9 DL may already be there on the market, even the blanks may already be there, but if they don't compete in price with DVD-R, they may as well not be there.
And same goes for blu-ray.
- "Show me da money!"
You want me to show you da moeny? Show us cheap blanks, I show you da money.