Well, I think part of the problem is all the different distros. Closed-source developers need to pick which distros they want to support, which means that they're targeting only a small portion of the Linux market. It's a difficult issue; you can't just standardize Linux distributions. Part of the strength of linux is that there are lots of different distributions with lots of different aims.
I don't know... I'm a leech off of open-source software. Not really by choice so much as, I doubt I have anything good to contribute. I could probably offer opinions on how I want software to work, but various projects usually don't seem to want to hear from users about what users want. There's an attitude of "if you want it done, do it!" I'm not a programmer, though, so yeah, I'm a leech.
However, FOSS is working great for me. We use LAMP server extensively, and I like running Linux on my desktop. I have a Powerbook, and OSX draws on OSS pretty extensively (though, yes, I understand it's got pleny of closed-source pieces, but even Safari, for example, wouldn't exist without the people working on the Konqueror). Anyway, so my point is, it seems to be working great without ME contributing.
I think that's one problem with OSS development-- the relationship with the users. If users just use the software, some yahoo on the project will complain that they're benfitting without contributing. If the non-technical users want to contributing my offering feedback, some other yahoo complains that, "Why are you asking us to fix something we don't care about?! If you want that, fix it yourself!" Most of us, however, simply aren't programmers. What do you want us to do?
Additionally, this is an extremely obvious case. It was announced on nation-wide television, on a popular show, that false changes were going to be entered. It's no great feat that Wikipedia editors were able to find the errors quickly and correct them.
What people find troublesome about using the Wikipedia for a source of information is not that they believe editors are incapable of correcting obvious vandalism after it's called to their attention. The question is, how many errors are going unnoticed? Also, how can you, as a reader, recognize smaller errors?
The Wikipedia is a terrific source of information, but shouldn't be used as a "reliable source", since (among other reasons) basically anyone can change anything whenever they want.
I would go further than to say, "That's really all there is to it." IT pros are a strange beast, and executives should realize that "trustworthiness" is the most vital quality you should be looking for when you hire an IT pro of any kind.
Here's the real issue: Whatever security you put in place, it will be put in place by some IT personnel-- and right there you have a paradox. Putting security in place to protect data from your IT people assumes both:
you don't trust your data to your IT people, because you're putting the security in; and
you do trust your data to your IT people, because if they were really malicious, they could sabotage the security systems they're putting in place, leaving a back-door for themselves
In the end, whoever is hiring a desktop tech or network admin is usually less technical than the person being hired. The executive wanting to secure the data knows less about security than the tech they're talking about protecting the data from. It's a catch-22 and it doesn't work-- at some point you need to trust your IT people. If you can't, fire them and hire someone you can trust.
Well, I also think that it takes a little refinement before tech is really genuinely useful for most people. With cell phones, you needed a large coverage area, decent reception, small-ish phones, and reasonable prices. iPods didn't really take off until the iTMS had a large catalog. DVDs didn't take off until there were a large number of DVDs which took advantage of the improved audio/video quality of DVD.
I wasn't claiming that nobody owned DVD players because they were outrageously priced. I just didn't know anyone who owned one. As far as I can recall, in 1998, the DVD section in Blockbuster and Best Buy were still small sub-sections of their video section. You had a much larger selection of tapes, especially because a lot of old stuff hadn't been transfered over yet. The attitude of a lot of people I knew was, "I already have a VCR, so why spend $200 on a new player? Just so I can spend another $20 per movie I own to replace my collection?"
In 1999, I knew people in Hollywood (actually in the biz) who didn't own DVD players. I'm not sure I'd call you an early adopter, but there's a big lag between when new technology like that is released and when they're truly common-place. Sometimes it's regional.
iPods, for example. They were released when, 2001? I bought my first in the summer of 2002, and it was the first on I'd seen in real life. It was a real novelty where I was, near Washington DC. Months later, I moved to New York, and they were all over the place. Within a year, it became a novelty to go on the subway without seeing some kid with white headphones in his ear. Still, it's only been within the past six months that the phenomenon has been noted by my friends elsewhere in the US. I know someone who lives in Tennessee, and until a year and a half ago, I was the only person he knew with an iPod.
Cell phones had quite a lag. I knew someone with a car phone in 1982. When I got my cell in 2001, I was the first of my friends at the time to own one. A few short years later, and now it's to the point where little kids are getting their own cell phones.
Actually "effect" and "affect" can both be either a verb or a noun. This is off-topic, of course, but these words are geniunely confusing. The way we use 'affect' as a verb sometimes seems to have more to with the noun 'effect' than either the verb 'effect' has to do with the noun 'effect' or the verb 'affect' has to do with the noun 'affect'. However, they aren't really connected linguistically (at least as far as I'm aware).
In fact, you can effect an effect, affect an affect, effect an affect, or affect and effect. It's all a bit strange, so I don't blame people for getting them mixed up.
These days, there are actually resellers who will pre-install your Mac to dual-boot into Windows. But yes, the first obvious joke that jumped into my head when I read the headline that Microsoft wants to beautify computers was:
Step 1: replace your ugly Dell with Apple hardware running Windows
Step 2: replace your ugly copy of Windows with Apple OSX
That, of course, lead me to wonder if I might be able to sneak in some joke about "Step 3: ????, Step 4: Profit". Seriously, though, Windows is ugly. The default Windows XP Blue Luna theme has got to be the ugliest DE interface, far below Gnome and KDE. They've improved it a bit in Vista, I can't help but feel like Microsoft is trying to make their interface a cross between OSX and Gnome, which I guess is funny because Gnome feels to me like a cross between MacOS classic and Windows.
It's not that they've forgotten their business model, but that it's become outdated, specifically because of their success. When you have 95% of the market, you have no place to go but down. Offering users greater choice and freedom won't help you grow, but it only makes it easy for people to use something else.
And that's the great inversion of this whole story, is that by being successful, Microsoft has forced itself into a corner where it needs to be anti-competitive in order to keep their market. At the same time, Apple and Sun are more and more becoming hardware companies and working with the OSS community. 20 years ago, who would have thought that Apple Macintoshes would be running a form of Unix on an Intel platform, or that Sun and Novel would be dealing so heavily in open source software? Who would have thought that IBM would have abandoned the PC market entirely? But everyone is just doing what they need to in order to survive.
Yeah, thinkpads were pretty ugly but also mighty fine, which was the cause of their popularity with geeks. They're just plain black boxes, but I swear, some of those models, I'd be willing to jump up and down on them with little fear of breaking anything.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but my experience was the same as the OP. DVDs existed for a long time, but only a small percentage of people actually went out and bought DVD players. In fact, I remember DVD players really kicking off for the mass-audience around 2001-2002, and everyone I knew who bought their first DVD player at that time also bought The Matrix as their first DVD.
I'm not sure I knew anyone who owned a DVD player in 1998.
I'm inclined to agree that this isn't the users fault. However, like I said, if saving the user profile and install disks isn't good enough, someone did the wrong thing. Very often, it is the vendors fault. However, there are users who, no matter how many times you tell them, they won't store their personal files in their own profile. I've known Mac users and Windows users who, in spite of all my advice, insist on putting personal files in the dumbest places-- in the root directory or their Applications/Program Files. Those users are simply doing the wrong thing.
I also agree that Microsoft has screwed up by not making this easier. I agree with every one of your points. However, I don't agree that my suggestions are impossible for non-geeks to achieve.
My "ideal" backup solution is actually easily achieveable in OSX (though in Windows, less so). Buy a nice big external hard drive. When you've installed everything you want and configured what you want on your internal hardive, download a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner, and clone your hard drive to the external hard drive, thereby making it a full-bootable copy of OSX. Next, use carbon copy cloner to create an image file of your desired configuration. I've taught some pretty non-technical users how to do all this.
If you ever need to restore, you boot from your external hard drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your image back to your internal drive. It's really pretty simple.
Now, once a week or so, connect your external hard drive and drag your entire home folder to that drive. As long as you've been storing all your files in there, you've just backed up everything you need to. Burning to DVD is a little trickier because you'll probably need to span disks, but if you don't want to manage that manually, you can buy a little backup program to help you.
And that's it. Of course, most users simply haven't learned (or been taught) how to use their computer properly, but that's not entirely the vendor's fault either. Even the non-savvy should be able to buy an external hard drive, and drag and drop their home folder, if someone would just show them how.
Regardless, my early point remains: full system backup are generally not necessary. As long as users have learned to keep their important files in their profile, keeping install disks and backing up user profiles is sufficient. Imaging the system will help save time, but a pre-built restore disk is more trouble than it's worth. Users need an imagine system that's easy to manage, so that they can keep their restore-point up-to-date as their system changes.
Anyway, all of this is extremely off-topic. What's slightly more on topic, however, is that Microsoft has made the "imaging" portion of my backup strategy difficult, though their poor hardware detection scheme and their piracy prevention schemes. Plus, you generally need to buy expensive 3rd party applications, or else use another OS to do the imaging. They've made it so it's difficult for even an experienced user to back things up appropriately.
You're right, the configuration has a value, but that often is usually relatively small in comparison to the value of documents themselves. Sometimes, the configuration is, in fact, the problem.
Also, if everyone is doing what they're supposed to, you should only need two things to get a system back the way it's supposed to be:
Original install disks
Your home directory (in Windows, your folder in "Documents and Settings")
To the extent that this is not true, someone is doing something wrong, be it Microsoft, some software developer, or the user. It's true that any one given problem should be able to be solved without wiping and starting over, but if you walk in blind to a situation to a desktop that's generally buggy and unstable, sometimes a system-wipe is the best solution, and users should be ready for that. However, if the entire profile is backed up, all sorts of things (including color schemes, icon placement on the desktop, desktop wallpaper, etc) are saved. In Windows 2K, I've moved just the profile to a new machine, and the user didn't know the difference.
My ideal backup solution, on any platform, is this:
keep all original disks and documentation so that you can reinstall your system from scratch, if need be
after an initial clean install of all necessary applications, and after configuration, make an image of that machine that can be reapplied whenever you want
backup the user's home directory to an external hard drive on a regular basis
backup the user's home directory to DVD once in a while (maybe a couple times a year), and store an archive.
Actually, I like everything about this idea except for the words "targeted" and "advertising".
Seriously, if the offer is that someone can data-mine everything on my PC and send me lots of pop-ups, spam, and flash banners, then no thanks. If computers are really cheap enough to make this business model viable, then I'd just as soon buy the really extra-cheap computer myself anyway (if it's cheap, why not?), which means the business model still wouldn't be viable.
I know it sounds like a troll, but I installed a Windows Vista beta, added 500 MB of of user files, and installed TrendMicro. I let it run for a week, without doing anything, and I had 17 GB used on my hard drive. I just checked again, and now I have 21 GB. I guess there's something funny going on, but I'm not making this up.
I don't think that's really what I was talking about. In the example of deleting shortcuts, Microsoft puts an icon on your desktop, but it's really in some other user's desktop. You can't remove it without administrator privileges (an item on your own desktop), but you can add/remove other things without privileges, even though there's no difference between these items from the users point of view. If you are an admin, you can remove it, but it removes that icon from every other user's desktop as well. From a UI design standpoint, it seems to me that this is a dumb way to handle things, but it's how MS sets things up by default.
Obviously these things evolved from somewhere, but as with many Microsoft UI designs, it's neither cohesive nor sensible.
I'm no expert here, but, what? I would think that a HAL (Hardware abstraction layer), would help in creating a univseral image for many systems, since the hardware is abstracted out.
You'd also think the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) would offer users some genuine advantage, but alas...
Taking the power of this choice from the states is just one more way that we're seeing a homogenization of states that, IMO, benefits only the majority.
It seems you've hit on the big issue regarding the electoral college, and then not talked about it. When I hit your sentence about benefitting only the majority, I started wondering, how many people would read that and think, "what's wrong with that?"
This seems to me to be the fundimental dividing line between those who are in favor of dismantling the Electoral College and those who are against. The question is, is it good enough that government goes with "the will of the people", i.e. the majority, or do we believe that it's important to give minority factions a disproportionately large sway in order to combat the "tyranny of the masses".
Re:Doom III Engine Doom II the Game
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
Really? I know people raved about the Quake games for their engines' graphics and multiplayer capabilities, but I never thought I was in the minority for considering the games themselves sub-par. The character models are pretty ugly, the level design, weapons, and gameplay are uninspired. They're the epitome of the FPS rehash-- a soldier with a choice of pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and rocket launcher runs through a maze and fights demons-- and that's it. No story, no innovation (except in the engine itself), nothing interesting whatsoever.
I actually thought Doom3 was fairly solid, but again, didn't really break any new ground or do anything very interesting. It took the classic FPS rehash formula and added in some of the old Half Life innovations, which have pretty much become part of the standard FPS rehash anyway.
Now, I understand some people around here are really about the multiplayer, in which case it's mostly about the engine and weapon balance. On that score, id may be a fine company. But even in multiplayer, I haven't thought id was exceptional in any way, and definitely lacked in level design.
The issue isn't whether there's some little flaw somewhere that would allow a hacker to get through. The point is, Microsoft's way of designing these things doesn't make a lot of sense, and considering they have a whole company's worth of experts working on it, you'd think they could do better.
Re:Doom III Engine Doom II the Game
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
I've been saying it for years: id is not a video game company, it's a video game engine company. That's what they really produce and make money from. The actual games they produce are usually not very good as games, but they're excellent tech demos for really good engines.
Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the more valuable it is. So if five million people link to a white supremacist site, that means there's valuable content there, right?
I guess the question would be, valuable to whom and for what? If five million people link to a white supremacist site, maybe the FBI would find that to be a valuable site to investigate?
What is needed is a personal page-ranking system -- a central repository where people can rate websites based on factors that matter (ease of use, content, etc.), kind of like the Zagat guide to web sites. It's not enough to blindly search for any site that links to the data I want; I need it to link to site that have the data I want and have it a useful/easy-to-find format.
The problem there, I think, is how to you stop that from being manipulated? No matter how ranks are derived, the serious question is, how do you keep dishonest sites from artificially inflating their rank?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think part of the problem is all the different distros. Closed-source developers need to pick which distros they want to support, which means that they're targeting only a small portion of the Linux market. It's a difficult issue; you can't just standardize Linux distributions. Part of the strength of linux is that there are lots of different distributions with lots of different aims.
I don't know... I'm a leech off of open-source software. Not really by choice so much as, I doubt I have anything good to contribute. I could probably offer opinions on how I want software to work, but various projects usually don't seem to want to hear from users about what users want. There's an attitude of "if you want it done, do it!" I'm not a programmer, though, so yeah, I'm a leech.
However, FOSS is working great for me. We use LAMP server extensively, and I like running Linux on my desktop. I have a Powerbook, and OSX draws on OSS pretty extensively (though, yes, I understand it's got pleny of closed-source pieces, but even Safari, for example, wouldn't exist without the people working on the Konqueror). Anyway, so my point is, it seems to be working great without ME contributing.
I think that's one problem with OSS development-- the relationship with the users. If users just use the software, some yahoo on the project will complain that they're benfitting without contributing. If the non-technical users want to contributing my offering feedback, some other yahoo complains that, "Why are you asking us to fix something we don't care about?! If you want that, fix it yourself!" Most of us, however, simply aren't programmers. What do you want us to do?
Additionally, this is an extremely obvious case. It was announced on nation-wide television, on a popular show, that false changes were going to be entered. It's no great feat that Wikipedia editors were able to find the errors quickly and correct them.
What people find troublesome about using the Wikipedia for a source of information is not that they believe editors are incapable of correcting obvious vandalism after it's called to their attention. The question is, how many errors are going unnoticed? Also, how can you, as a reader, recognize smaller errors?
The Wikipedia is a terrific source of information, but shouldn't be used as a "reliable source", since (among other reasons) basically anyone can change anything whenever they want.
I would go further than to say, "That's really all there is to it." IT pros are a strange beast, and executives should realize that "trustworthiness" is the most vital quality you should be looking for when you hire an IT pro of any kind.
Here's the real issue: Whatever security you put in place, it will be put in place by some IT personnel-- and right there you have a paradox. Putting security in place to protect data from your IT people assumes both:
In the end, whoever is hiring a desktop tech or network admin is usually less technical than the person being hired. The executive wanting to secure the data knows less about security than the tech they're talking about protecting the data from. It's a catch-22 and it doesn't work-- at some point you need to trust your IT people. If you can't, fire them and hire someone you can trust.
Well, I also think that it takes a little refinement before tech is really genuinely useful for most people. With cell phones, you needed a large coverage area, decent reception, small-ish phones, and reasonable prices. iPods didn't really take off until the iTMS had a large catalog. DVDs didn't take off until there were a large number of DVDs which took advantage of the improved audio/video quality of DVD.
In 1999, I knew people in Hollywood (actually in the biz) who didn't own DVD players. I'm not sure I'd call you an early adopter, but there's a big lag between when new technology like that is released and when they're truly common-place. Sometimes it's regional.
iPods, for example. They were released when, 2001? I bought my first in the summer of 2002, and it was the first on I'd seen in real life. It was a real novelty where I was, near Washington DC. Months later, I moved to New York, and they were all over the place. Within a year, it became a novelty to go on the subway without seeing some kid with white headphones in his ear. Still, it's only been within the past six months that the phenomenon has been noted by my friends elsewhere in the US. I know someone who lives in Tennessee, and until a year and a half ago, I was the only person he knew with an iPod.
Cell phones had quite a lag. I knew someone with a car phone in 1982. When I got my cell in 2001, I was the first of my friends at the time to own one. A few short years later, and now it's to the point where little kids are getting their own cell phones.
Actually "effect" and "affect" can both be either a verb or a noun. This is off-topic, of course, but these words are geniunely confusing. The way we use 'affect' as a verb sometimes seems to have more to with the noun 'effect' than either the verb 'effect' has to do with the noun 'effect' or the verb 'affect' has to do with the noun 'affect'. However, they aren't really connected linguistically (at least as far as I'm aware).
In fact, you can effect an effect, affect an affect, effect an affect, or affect and effect. It's all a bit strange, so I don't blame people for getting them mixed up.
These days, there are actually resellers who will pre-install your Mac to dual-boot into Windows. But yes, the first obvious joke that jumped into my head when I read the headline that Microsoft wants to beautify computers was:
That, of course, lead me to wonder if I might be able to sneak in some joke about "Step 3: ????, Step 4: Profit". Seriously, though, Windows is ugly. The default Windows XP Blue Luna theme has got to be the ugliest DE interface, far below Gnome and KDE. They've improved it a bit in Vista, I can't help but feel like Microsoft is trying to make their interface a cross between OSX and Gnome, which I guess is funny because Gnome feels to me like a cross between MacOS classic and Windows.
It's not that they've forgotten their business model, but that it's become outdated, specifically because of their success. When you have 95% of the market, you have no place to go but down. Offering users greater choice and freedom won't help you grow, but it only makes it easy for people to use something else.
And that's the great inversion of this whole story, is that by being successful, Microsoft has forced itself into a corner where it needs to be anti-competitive in order to keep their market. At the same time, Apple and Sun are more and more becoming hardware companies and working with the OSS community. 20 years ago, who would have thought that Apple Macintoshes would be running a form of Unix on an Intel platform, or that Sun and Novel would be dealing so heavily in open source software? Who would have thought that IBM would have abandoned the PC market entirely? But everyone is just doing what they need to in order to survive.
Yeah, thinkpads were pretty ugly but also mighty fine, which was the cause of their popularity with geeks. They're just plain black boxes, but I swear, some of those models, I'd be willing to jump up and down on them with little fear of breaking anything.
I was sure you were going to link to this one.
I'm not sure I knew anyone who owned a DVD player in 1998.
I'm inclined to agree that this isn't the users fault. However, like I said, if saving the user profile and install disks isn't good enough, someone did the wrong thing. Very often, it is the vendors fault. However, there are users who, no matter how many times you tell them, they won't store their personal files in their own profile. I've known Mac users and Windows users who, in spite of all my advice, insist on putting personal files in the dumbest places-- in the root directory or their Applications/Program Files. Those users are simply doing the wrong thing.
I also agree that Microsoft has screwed up by not making this easier. I agree with every one of your points. However, I don't agree that my suggestions are impossible for non-geeks to achieve.
My "ideal" backup solution is actually easily achieveable in OSX (though in Windows, less so). Buy a nice big external hard drive. When you've installed everything you want and configured what you want on your internal hardive, download a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner, and clone your hard drive to the external hard drive, thereby making it a full-bootable copy of OSX. Next, use carbon copy cloner to create an image file of your desired configuration. I've taught some pretty non-technical users how to do all this.
If you ever need to restore, you boot from your external hard drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your image back to your internal drive. It's really pretty simple.
Now, once a week or so, connect your external hard drive and drag your entire home folder to that drive. As long as you've been storing all your files in there, you've just backed up everything you need to. Burning to DVD is a little trickier because you'll probably need to span disks, but if you don't want to manage that manually, you can buy a little backup program to help you.
And that's it. Of course, most users simply haven't learned (or been taught) how to use their computer properly, but that's not entirely the vendor's fault either. Even the non-savvy should be able to buy an external hard drive, and drag and drop their home folder, if someone would just show them how.
Regardless, my early point remains: full system backup are generally not necessary. As long as users have learned to keep their important files in their profile, keeping install disks and backing up user profiles is sufficient. Imaging the system will help save time, but a pre-built restore disk is more trouble than it's worth. Users need an imagine system that's easy to manage, so that they can keep their restore-point up-to-date as their system changes.
Anyway, all of this is extremely off-topic. What's slightly more on topic, however, is that Microsoft has made the "imaging" portion of my backup strategy difficult, though their poor hardware detection scheme and their piracy prevention schemes. Plus, you generally need to buy expensive 3rd party applications, or else use another OS to do the imaging. They've made it so it's difficult for even an experienced user to back things up appropriately.
You're right, the configuration has a value, but that often is usually relatively small in comparison to the value of documents themselves. Sometimes, the configuration is, in fact, the problem.
Also, if everyone is doing what they're supposed to, you should only need two things to get a system back the way it's supposed to be:
To the extent that this is not true, someone is doing something wrong, be it Microsoft, some software developer, or the user. It's true that any one given problem should be able to be solved without wiping and starting over, but if you walk in blind to a situation to a desktop that's generally buggy and unstable, sometimes a system-wipe is the best solution, and users should be ready for that. However, if the entire profile is backed up, all sorts of things (including color schemes, icon placement on the desktop, desktop wallpaper, etc) are saved. In Windows 2K, I've moved just the profile to a new machine, and the user didn't know the difference.
My ideal backup solution, on any platform, is this:
n00b? Am I the only person for whom "AOE" means "Aces Over Europe"
Actually, I like everything about this idea except for the words "targeted" and "advertising".
Seriously, if the offer is that someone can data-mine everything on my PC and send me lots of pop-ups, spam, and flash banners, then no thanks. If computers are really cheap enough to make this business model viable, then I'd just as soon buy the really extra-cheap computer myself anyway (if it's cheap, why not?), which means the business model still wouldn't be viable.
I know it sounds like a troll, but I installed a Windows Vista beta, added 500 MB of of user files, and installed TrendMicro. I let it run for a week, without doing anything, and I had 17 GB used on my hard drive. I just checked again, and now I have 21 GB. I guess there's something funny going on, but I'm not making this up.
Obviously these things evolved from somewhere, but as with many Microsoft UI designs, it's neither cohesive nor sensible.
I'm no expert here, but, what? I would think that a HAL (Hardware abstraction layer), would help in creating a univseral image for many systems, since the hardware is abstracted out.
You'd also think the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) would offer users some genuine advantage, but alas...
Taking the power of this choice from the states is just one more way that we're seeing a homogenization of states that, IMO, benefits only the majority.
It seems you've hit on the big issue regarding the electoral college, and then not talked about it. When I hit your sentence about benefitting only the majority, I started wondering, how many people would read that and think, "what's wrong with that?"
This seems to me to be the fundimental dividing line between those who are in favor of dismantling the Electoral College and those who are against. The question is, is it good enough that government goes with "the will of the people", i.e. the majority, or do we believe that it's important to give minority factions a disproportionately large sway in order to combat the "tyranny of the masses".
Are you John Ramero?
I actually thought Doom3 was fairly solid, but again, didn't really break any new ground or do anything very interesting. It took the classic FPS rehash formula and added in some of the old Half Life innovations, which have pretty much become part of the standard FPS rehash anyway.
Now, I understand some people around here are really about the multiplayer, in which case it's mostly about the engine and weapon balance. On that score, id may be a fine company. But even in multiplayer, I haven't thought id was exceptional in any way, and definitely lacked in level design.
The issue isn't whether there's some little flaw somewhere that would allow a hacker to get through. The point is, Microsoft's way of designing these things doesn't make a lot of sense, and considering they have a whole company's worth of experts working on it, you'd think they could do better.
I've been saying it for years: id is not a video game company, it's a video game engine company. That's what they really produce and make money from. The actual games they produce are usually not very good as games, but they're excellent tech demos for really good engines.
Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the more valuable it is. So if five million people link to a white supremacist site, that means there's valuable content there, right?
I guess the question would be, valuable to whom and for what? If five million people link to a white supremacist site, maybe the FBI would find that to be a valuable site to investigate?
What is needed is a personal page-ranking system -- a central repository where people can rate websites based on factors that matter (ease of use, content, etc.), kind of like the Zagat guide to web sites. It's not enough to blindly search for any site that links to the data I want; I need it to link to site that have the data I want and have it a useful/easy-to-find format.
The problem there, I think, is how to you stop that from being manipulated? No matter how ranks are derived, the serious question is, how do you keep dishonest sites from artificially inflating their rank?