You have perhaps not considered the possibility that the plan is actually to lobby for the new DMCA exemption guidelines for this year to include language which prohibits people from circumventing their new protection. They could ask for this under the grounds that it's necessary to protect the cultural "treasure" that is the national press.
As usual, I got ahead of myself... "they either need to do some colossally big marketing of the idea of independence"... or they need to retail a healthy retail presence.. "or they run the risk of falling behind".
The visibility of their product is what sells it, not just the cheaper price point than Sony's offering or their "household name" factor.
To most people, "Microsoft" is what you call Word/Outlook/Excel. "My Microsoft is broken," they'll tell you, then go off to drink a coffee with a name more complicated than "Word."
If Microsoft wishes to retain credibility as a console manufacturer, they either need to do some colossally big marketing of the idea of independence from physical media or they run the risk of falling behind on game sales - the bread and butter of the console gaming market.
Plus, come Christmas time, what is Grandma Mildred going to buy for the kids? A plastic card that they can use via the XBox's digital distribution system tied to mom and dad's credit card which the children or the parents would have to redeem for the nebulous concept of "Points" that the children can then decide how to distribute between the various XBLA offerings? Hell no, she's going to buy them "Wii Carnival Games" or some random racing or sports game for the PS3.
This is not to say that it's impossible to escape from the concept of retail software, only that they need to come up with an effective marketing tool to get people to start thinking of gaming as something that happens on the Internet, not in the home on the box plugged into the TV.
Maybe I'm cranky and old, but I never found the pause-able real-time squad combat to be fun, not even in Baldur's Gate.
I particularly did not like that the UFO trilogy dumped the destructible environments which allowed for nonlinear solutions to storming the maps. Or that they dumbed down the resource management and base design components of the game, meaning you lose that sort of desperate resource management which was present in the original X-COM (losing funding not only when you fail, but also when you don't succeed enough to keep governments from signing pacts).
Finally, the lack of variety in the terrain and the fact that everything was flat (at least in the first one) just made the game fall flat when compared against X-COM.
I have to admit that on purely rational levels, iIf it wasn't billing itself as the true spiritual successor to X-COM and picking up where the designers of the original "Freedom Ridge" team left off, I probably wouldn't have been as disappointed with the new UFO games as I was, but they fail to live up to the standards of quality of the original games.
Of course, I considered X-COM Apocalypse to be a step backward as well, so YMMV.
Poured concrete with airtight steel storm shutters and a deeply buried foundation should be able to survive anything short of the actual atmosphere being torn off the planet, yes?
Better yet, the outer structure of the building is ablative and the labs and storage rooms themselves are anchored steel bunker construction with dedicated buried ventilation.
It doesn't take much imagination to make a building that can survive 300 mph winds. Lift is a problem, as is structural dilation or compression when the atmospheric pressure inside and out aren't equal. Keeping it on the ground isn't much of a problem with buried structure. They've been building concrete bunkers for 40 years that can survive a near miss with a 20kt nuke which generates a hypersonic pressure wave, so a simple tornado ought to be easy enough.
The real question is, "are they likely to build something that stable?"
The new UFO games are appalling and lack any kind of tactical depth to them... and nobody has had the cojones to try to tackle fully-destructable turn-based tactics in those games yet. They seem to have decided that having a realistic environment and actual decent control over your units is untterly unimportant and all that matters is scary aliens and big guns.
For me, that game epitomized the sandbox space game, seamlessly blending an action space shooter with a deeper RPG.
I'd love to see another one of those. If we're going the Star Control route, making a reboot of the series which was more like Star Control 2, a sort of hybrid of MoO and the original Star Control with that tasty 4x gameplay would rule.
X-Com indeed needs a reboot, but all that it'd take to get that is somebody throwing some money and some experienced developers at the Gollop brothers.
You're assuming we're not going to be in the surviving 5%. Considering a substantial ability to terraform and a relief from ethical concerns regarding GM food stocks (plants and animals) we've got a survivability as a species just under that of the cockroach.
It really isn't about quality. It's about obsolescence.
If you buy movies in disc form, and considering that you call DVD ripping a "must," I'm not going to assume you have any particular attachment to physical media, you want your materials to last. While it's true that the same VHS you buy in 1989 will play the content back in 2009, it loses durability, fidelity and replayability in time. Even buying a VCR these days is a bit tricky, and the quality of what you can get regardless of price is miserable.
A lot of the same movies I liked watching in 1989 periodically with friends I still like to watch, but if I had only ever bought them on VHS, they've probably snapped, degraded to fuzzy unwatchability so that even analog OTA signals were preferable, or just plain vanished over the years. So this necessitates buying the movies again. I could buy them on DVD (and in some cases already have), but the discs are vulnerable to scratching when moved (or lent to friends) and will degrade over time (albeit far more gradually than magnetic storage.)
When I buy a blu-ray disc, I'm paying more, but then I'm getting a higher resolution (I'm not too blind to tell the difference yet), usually some more extras, and an increased durability - the coating they put on those things is spectacular. I usually buy used rental blu-rays because they're usually in pristine quality but still have the hefty markdown that rental DVDs get and I don't care that much about the packaging condition.
Call it future proofing the newest additions to your collection - the blu-ray discs won't play forever because eventually they'll ditch the format in favor of something gratuitous - but at least they'll last as long as you are able to get players for them.
Those are probably the ads you're blocking with a plugin.
Although if you could figure out how to pack nitrogen fertilizer with hydrogen, it'd probably have some useful terraforming applications for reconditioning otherwise toxic soils...
DIY, at least in the US, has connotations in addition to its obvious meanings. The connotations are that of the everyman, with determination, a few good books, and good old elbow grease, building something that only "the big boys" can build, and getting useful output out of it.
When people talk about DIY, they're talking about something that the ubiquitous "yous" of the world can do, not something that a properly educated "you" + a multimillion dollar research facility with insanely expensive equipment can do. The most useful distinction between hobbyist science, academic research, and industrial science is the cost barrier to entry.
No point getting grouchy about semantics - semantics is useless when you're using terminology which is inherently nuanced - where the connotations are more valuable to perceiving their meaning than the literal translation.
These are assassination machines, and the only thing that has kept assassination at bay as a first-line political tactic is the certainty that the assassin will die or get caught, and therefore be traceable back to their handlers.
Nonsense. What stops assassination from being a matter of global policy is a sort of tacit mutual consent to not do it. When you order the assassination of a world leader, you make yourself vulnerable to the same thing. It's the same thing which kept nuclear weapons out of every war since the first one they were used in - the realization that you don't want to live in a world (and probably can't) in which that sort of thing becomes the Right Way To Do Things.
World Leaders (tm) don't want to be assassinated by Other World Leaders, so they don't order assassinations. It's the same sort of gentleman's agreement that kept people from just ordering the sniping of generals behind enemy lines - at least until guerrilla warfare became fashionable. War is still very much fought like a sport - you have mutually agreed-upon rules which state what you don't do, and people who break the rules get put down very quickly because they lose the protections which keep them safe behind their battle lines. We may be seeing a real break in those "gentlemanly" rules of engagement (of which the Geneva Conventions are just a few) for the first time in 150 or so years (since the Americans pioneered the grand idea of not marching down the center of a field getting shot up.)
I'd also like to point out that if only 2 or 3 countries in the world have the technology to build these "assassination machines," the funding to mass-produce them, the expertise to employ them, and the vehicles to deliver them, then tracing a robotic assassin will be actually much easier than tracing a normal meatspace assassin who at least has the option of employing a cyanide capsule in order to erase their backtrail.
What's wrong with being an average, ordinary person? Assholes like you have lowered that average to below what were the developmentally disabled students when I was in school.
I've seen the students at the freshman level at universities that your "education" is producing and I have this to say: do the human race a favor and stop trying to be a teacher. These students are lazy, have an enormous sense of self-entitlement, can't write a simple paper (using the same low criteria which freshmen have been held to for decades) and when they get pisspoor grades, complain that they're "really used to getting better grades" (yes, someone actually said that) and don't seem to care or understand when you tell them that to get better grades, they have to show some sign of having improved in the 4 months you've been making them write and giving them constructive criticism and instruction.
They then write snotty reviews in their teaching evaluations, call the teacher a horrible person on the various "rate your professor" sites, and continue performing below mediocre for the remainder of their C-college-student career until they sink to the bottom of the barrel in some LCD major.
Just to let you know, I'm not a college instructor, but I've done plenty of grading in a variety of subjects, and I've got to say, your teaching method doesn't work. These kids don't deserve self esteem - they're extremely intellectually lazy regardless of their potential (IQ, SAT scores, creativity, whatever metric you choose to weigh it by) - and we've got a word for that outside of education: stupid.
No Child Left Behind? Fuck that, some children NEED to be left behind to get the message that they might actually have to TRY to accomplish something once in a while. They certainly aren't going to get the message if you keep telling them it's OK to be average, all the while watching the average slide below international levels.
It's a great approach. It's one of those quasi-obvious AI schemes which people have been kicking around for years but typically haven't wanted to expend the CPU cycles on in major projects. I remember an article around 1997 wherein they asked game development studios to explain how games were going to change in the next couple of decades, and one of the chief topics that kept coming up was more natural AI (less rigidly rule-based) which could learn by observing outcomes. Modelling AI on military organization is fairly clever for the same reason that military organization (at least in battle) is clever - the individual soldier needs little autonomy or smarts, just so long as everybody further up the chain from them is at least incrementally smarter, if less capable in direct conflict.
The most notable use of a system like this in recent years has to be the Director in Left 4 Dead, which is an overarching control scheme which issues orders to the game world and the units in it. These units are free to do what they do best - navigate around the map and eat players without having to worry about strategy. The Director is free to select the paths by which the units will arrive without having to waste significant time on fine pathfinding, as the units themselves will do the bulk of the work.
I look forward to more games with heirarchical AI. I've written some basic tests of this exact sort before (basic "burds"-looking stuff) and the resulting behavior is extremely intuitive and ordered-looking.
Except unless your site just plain doesn't work at all in IE6, they'll have no problem with it looking ugly if they're still using IE6. They'll probably blame their "stupid computer" because it's slow and old.
If you put a polite notice up that their browser is too old and that Microsoft recommends that they update to IE7 or IE8, your site recommends Firefox, and provide links to all of them, IE6 usage on your site starts dwindling. In the year since the management of the large website I maintain put up that notice, IE6 users dropped by 33% (down to 11% of the total visits to the site).
People do respond to reason, just so long as your reasoning contains words they understand. There will always be people who either cannot update beyond IE6 (ancient version of Windows), aren't allowed to update beyond IE6 (corporate or academic environment), or just plain won't until Microsoft forces them to. These people are already resigned to having problems, with rare exception, because of the spectacular collection of trojans and toolbars and other such cruft the browser has acquired over the years (unless the IE6 installation is well-maintained).
Don't be too timid about progress because some people either can't or won't update. With sufficient pressure, a solution will happen.
That's not to say your sites shouldn't degrade gracefully when confronted with a browser which can't handle the new hotness, but that degrading gracefully to a page which ultimately is written to older web standards should be sufficient. These people with old IE6 clearly don't demand perfection, so don't sprain something trying to provide it when "good enough" works.
This is going to sound intentionally inflammatory - that's because it is. I'm tired of hearing the same tired complaints without any sort of logical foundation or any real argument presented at all. My intention is not to offend you and walk off with a smirk, but to offend you and have you walk off with doubts.
Why should we give equal rights to an animal just because it has a few human genes in it?
That's like giving a used condom the right to vote. The presence of human genetic material does not imbue some magical property on the animal or object which makes it suddenly one of God's Chosen Few (tm).
Luddite attitudes like that - people cowering in fear of accidentally doing something that they'd regret later - never accomplish anything of lasting value. The people who are praised throughout history are the ones who made a stir, whether they be Saints, scientists, or world leaders. As a species we admire the agents of change, even if we detest them. We may not approve of their actions, but we stand in awe of what they've accomplished.
If you as an individual are too frightened of a future in which people are touching the Magic Genome (tm) then there's a simple solution - don't take advantage of any of the fruits of current longevity research and die off before it becomes your problem. The rest of us will probably thank you - when you hold up progress in medical research because you have a moral problem with some guy diddling a mouse in a lab somewhere, you ensure that hundreds of people will die and thousands more will have a reduced quality of life due to the lack of the breakthroughs which may have helped them
They may not even be alive today. It may be somebody born tomorrow with a congenital defect who is the first beneficiary of this research. It might be your granddad or even yourself. Ethical treatment of test subjects is necessary, obviously, and we (the public) pay a higher price for research because of this need. But to suggest that the mere introduction of human tissue into a subject makes it eligible for equal human rights is magical thinking, and destructive to research.
Truly usable software does not require any amount of training, prior knowledge or particularly high levels of skill, realistically you shouldn't even need documentation.
A good way to understand usability is that with usable software it should be clear how to perform a specific task through nothing more than seeing the interface. If your application is entirely keyboard shortcut driven then, it fails badly at usability, unless there is clear information on screen at which point it is somewhat usable, but there is almost certainly a better way of doing it.
You, sir or madam, are correct.
I'd also like to add that a usable interface should build upon the skills that the user already has acquired and should behave in a fashion consistent with other tools in the same environment.
In other words, if you have a windows code environment, it should behave like Windows applications viz similar hotkeys, window behavior, etc.
To that extent, the value of software like vim or emacs holds up, as the user expects them to be as arcane and hard to learn because everything else on the commandline is. Holding them up as examples about how free software is not only equal in quality but also morally imperative, as the original troll claimed, is totally absurd however from a usability standpoint.
As much as I enjoy using bash for the things it's best at, you are showing the blind spot that irritates me most about open source evangelism and UNIX purism.
That is the mistaken 100 tools that do the same thing (and more) as one single specialized program are just as good as having a single program custom tailored to your tasks. With that sort of attitude, nobody would ever have written "make" in the first place, let alone all those automated tools to write makefiles.
For that matter, "bash" would never have been written because "sh" can already do most of the same stuff and commandline tools and cleverly written shell scripts can make up the functionality, right?
I think by now, if you're reading this at all, you're scowling and looking for something to disagree with.
The point is that sh and the dozens of powerful commandline GNU tools based on the great old stuff that was written for UNIX are still useful and relevant today, but they're not the only thing that is useful and relevant today. Sometimes you just want a single tool which does the job and gets out of your way with the least amount of effort. That doesn't make you stupid or lazy or childish, or everybody who's using bash right now needs to grow up.
If you have to spend 5 minutes writing a command with 12 pipes and output redirection through 13 programs which duplicate a functionality I get from a single checkbox in, say, Visual Studio, then you're not working efficiently. And merely because I choose to skip those steps does not mean I have no idea how to do them - I'm a professional UNIX system administrator as my day job.
The point is that although practice makes perfect, familiarity breeds contempt. When I get home to code on my own projects, I'd prefer not to have to write makefiles, build scripts, hand compile everything, edit out of a single window so I never forget to save anything, and constantly search for line numbers in a lousy no-syntax-highlighting no-code-completing circa 1980 text editor. I did that circa 1980, and I believe in progress.
Slashdot Mirror
You have perhaps not considered the possibility that the plan is actually to lobby for the new DMCA exemption guidelines for this year to include language which prohibits people from circumventing their new protection. They could ask for this under the grounds that it's necessary to protect the cultural "treasure" that is the national press.
As usual, I got ahead of myself... "they either need to do some colossally big marketing of the idea of independence"... or they need to retail a healthy retail presence.. "or they run the risk of falling behind".
The visibility of their product is what sells it, not just the cheaper price point than Sony's offering or their "household name" factor.
To most people, "Microsoft" is what you call Word/Outlook/Excel. "My Microsoft is broken," they'll tell you, then go off to drink a coffee with a name more complicated than "Word."
If Microsoft wishes to retain credibility as a console manufacturer, they either need to do some colossally big marketing of the idea of independence from physical media or they run the risk of falling behind on game sales - the bread and butter of the console gaming market.
Plus, come Christmas time, what is Grandma Mildred going to buy for the kids? A plastic card that they can use via the XBox's digital distribution system tied to mom and dad's credit card which the children or the parents would have to redeem for the nebulous concept of "Points" that the children can then decide how to distribute between the various XBLA offerings? Hell no, she's going to buy them "Wii Carnival Games" or some random racing or sports game for the PS3.
This is not to say that it's impossible to escape from the concept of retail software, only that they need to come up with an effective marketing tool to get people to start thinking of gaming as something that happens on the Internet, not in the home on the box plugged into the TV.
Maybe I'm cranky and old, but I never found the pause-able real-time squad combat to be fun, not even in Baldur's Gate.
I particularly did not like that the UFO trilogy dumped the destructible environments which allowed for nonlinear solutions to storming the maps. Or that they dumbed down the resource management and base design components of the game, meaning you lose that sort of desperate resource management which was present in the original X-COM (losing funding not only when you fail, but also when you don't succeed enough to keep governments from signing pacts).
Finally, the lack of variety in the terrain and the fact that everything was flat (at least in the first one) just made the game fall flat when compared against X-COM.
I have to admit that on purely rational levels, iIf it wasn't billing itself as the true spiritual successor to X-COM and picking up where the designers of the original "Freedom Ridge" team left off, I probably wouldn't have been as disappointed with the new UFO games as I was, but they fail to live up to the standards of quality of the original games.
Of course, I considered X-COM Apocalypse to be a step backward as well, so YMMV.
Poured concrete with airtight steel storm shutters and a deeply buried foundation should be able to survive anything short of the actual atmosphere being torn off the planet, yes?
Better yet, the outer structure of the building is ablative and the labs and storage rooms themselves are anchored steel bunker construction with dedicated buried ventilation.
It doesn't take much imagination to make a building that can survive 300 mph winds. Lift is a problem, as is structural dilation or compression when the atmospheric pressure inside and out aren't equal. Keeping it on the ground isn't much of a problem with buried structure. They've been building concrete bunkers for 40 years that can survive a near miss with a 20kt nuke which generates a hypersonic pressure wave, so a simple tornado ought to be easy enough.
The real question is, "are they likely to build something that stable?"
I revise my statement: apparently UFO: Extraterrestrials was well-built and performed admirably as a spiritual successor to the original UFO/X-Com.
The new UFO games are appalling and lack any kind of tactical depth to them... and nobody has had the cojones to try to tackle fully-destructable turn-based tactics in those games yet. They seem to have decided that having a realistic environment and actual decent control over your units is untterly unimportant and all that matters is scary aliens and big guns.
Starflight.
For me, that game epitomized the sandbox space game, seamlessly blending an action space shooter with a deeper RPG.
I'd love to see another one of those. If we're going the Star Control route, making a reboot of the series which was more like Star Control 2, a sort of hybrid of MoO and the original Star Control with that tasty 4x gameplay would rule.
X-Com indeed needs a reboot, but all that it'd take to get that is somebody throwing some money and some experienced developers at the Gollop brothers.
I know where I work I am drowning a deluge of people who never crack a book...
I commend you for your efforts in stamping out illiteracy.
You're assuming we're not going to be in the surviving 5%. Considering a substantial ability to terraform and a relief from ethical concerns regarding GM food stocks (plants and animals) we've got a survivability as a species just under that of the cockroach.
It really isn't about quality. It's about obsolescence.
If you buy movies in disc form, and considering that you call DVD ripping a "must," I'm not going to assume you have any particular attachment to physical media, you want your materials to last. While it's true that the same VHS you buy in 1989 will play the content back in 2009, it loses durability, fidelity and replayability in time. Even buying a VCR these days is a bit tricky, and the quality of what you can get regardless of price is miserable.
A lot of the same movies I liked watching in 1989 periodically with friends I still like to watch, but if I had only ever bought them on VHS, they've probably snapped, degraded to fuzzy unwatchability so that even analog OTA signals were preferable, or just plain vanished over the years. So this necessitates buying the movies again. I could buy them on DVD (and in some cases already have), but the discs are vulnerable to scratching when moved (or lent to friends) and will degrade over time (albeit far more gradually than magnetic storage.)
When I buy a blu-ray disc, I'm paying more, but then I'm getting a higher resolution (I'm not too blind to tell the difference yet), usually some more extras, and an increased durability - the coating they put on those things is spectacular. I usually buy used rental blu-rays because they're usually in pristine quality but still have the hefty markdown that rental DVDs get and I don't care that much about the packaging condition.
Call it future proofing the newest additions to your collection - the blu-ray discs won't play forever because eventually they'll ditch the format in favor of something gratuitous - but at least they'll last as long as you are able to get players for them.
That's a bit like stealing a horse everytime you're too lazy to walk instead of stealing a bicycle and keeping it.
Those are probably the ads you're blocking with a plugin.
Although if you could figure out how to pack nitrogen fertilizer with hydrogen, it'd probably have some useful terraforming applications for reconditioning otherwise toxic soils...
DIY, at least in the US, has connotations in addition to its obvious meanings. The connotations are that of the everyman, with determination, a few good books, and good old elbow grease, building something that only "the big boys" can build, and getting useful output out of it.
When people talk about DIY, they're talking about something that the ubiquitous "yous" of the world can do, not something that a properly educated "you" + a multimillion dollar research facility with insanely expensive equipment can do. The most useful distinction between hobbyist science, academic research, and industrial science is the cost barrier to entry.
No point getting grouchy about semantics - semantics is useless when you're using terminology which is inherently nuanced - where the connotations are more valuable to perceiving their meaning than the literal translation.
These are assassination machines, and the only thing that has kept assassination at bay as a first-line political tactic is the certainty that the assassin will die or get caught, and therefore be traceable back to their handlers.
Nonsense. What stops assassination from being a matter of global policy is a sort of tacit mutual consent to not do it. When you order the assassination of a world leader, you make yourself vulnerable to the same thing. It's the same thing which kept nuclear weapons out of every war since the first one they were used in - the realization that you don't want to live in a world (and probably can't) in which that sort of thing becomes the Right Way To Do Things.
World Leaders (tm) don't want to be assassinated by Other World Leaders, so they don't order assassinations. It's the same sort of gentleman's agreement that kept people from just ordering the sniping of generals behind enemy lines - at least until guerrilla warfare became fashionable. War is still very much fought like a sport - you have mutually agreed-upon rules which state what you don't do, and people who break the rules get put down very quickly because they lose the protections which keep them safe behind their battle lines. We may be seeing a real break in those "gentlemanly" rules of engagement (of which the Geneva Conventions are just a few) for the first time in 150 or so years (since the Americans pioneered the grand idea of not marching down the center of a field getting shot up.)
I'd also like to point out that if only 2 or 3 countries in the world have the technology to build these "assassination machines," the funding to mass-produce them, the expertise to employ them, and the vehicles to deliver them, then tracing a robotic assassin will be actually much easier than tracing a normal meatspace assassin who at least has the option of employing a cyanide capsule in order to erase their backtrail.
From the faucet of this industry pours dim waters.
What's wrong with being an average, ordinary person? Assholes like you have lowered that average to below what were the developmentally disabled students when I was in school.
I've seen the students at the freshman level at universities that your "education" is producing and I have this to say: do the human race a favor and stop trying to be a teacher. These students are lazy, have an enormous sense of self-entitlement, can't write a simple paper (using the same low criteria which freshmen have been held to for decades) and when they get pisspoor grades, complain that they're "really used to getting better grades" (yes, someone actually said that) and don't seem to care or understand when you tell them that to get better grades, they have to show some sign of having improved in the 4 months you've been making them write and giving them constructive criticism and instruction.
They then write snotty reviews in their teaching evaluations, call the teacher a horrible person on the various "rate your professor" sites, and continue performing below mediocre for the remainder of their C-college-student career until they sink to the bottom of the barrel in some LCD major.
Just to let you know, I'm not a college instructor, but I've done plenty of grading in a variety of subjects, and I've got to say, your teaching method doesn't work. These kids don't deserve self esteem - they're extremely intellectually lazy regardless of their potential (IQ, SAT scores, creativity, whatever metric you choose to weigh it by) - and we've got a word for that outside of education: stupid.
No Child Left Behind? Fuck that, some children NEED to be left behind to get the message that they might actually have to TRY to accomplish something once in a while. They certainly aren't going to get the message if you keep telling them it's OK to be average, all the while watching the average slide below international levels.
It's a great approach. It's one of those quasi-obvious AI schemes which people have been kicking around for years but typically haven't wanted to expend the CPU cycles on in major projects. I remember an article around 1997 wherein they asked game development studios to explain how games were going to change in the next couple of decades, and one of the chief topics that kept coming up was more natural AI (less rigidly rule-based) which could learn by observing outcomes. Modelling AI on military organization is fairly clever for the same reason that military organization (at least in battle) is clever - the individual soldier needs little autonomy or smarts, just so long as everybody further up the chain from them is at least incrementally smarter, if less capable in direct conflict.
The most notable use of a system like this in recent years has to be the Director in Left 4 Dead, which is an overarching control scheme which issues orders to the game world and the units in it. These units are free to do what they do best - navigate around the map and eat players without having to worry about strategy. The Director is free to select the paths by which the units will arrive without having to waste significant time on fine pathfinding, as the units themselves will do the bulk of the work.
I look forward to more games with heirarchical AI. I've written some basic tests of this exact sort before (basic "burds"-looking stuff) and the resulting behavior is extremely intuitive and ordered-looking.
Except unless your site just plain doesn't work at all in IE6, they'll have no problem with it looking ugly if they're still using IE6. They'll probably blame their "stupid computer" because it's slow and old.
If you put a polite notice up that their browser is too old and that Microsoft recommends that they update to IE7 or IE8, your site recommends Firefox, and provide links to all of them, IE6 usage on your site starts dwindling. In the year since the management of the large website I maintain put up that notice, IE6 users dropped by 33% (down to 11% of the total visits to the site).
People do respond to reason, just so long as your reasoning contains words they understand. There will always be people who either cannot update beyond IE6 (ancient version of Windows), aren't allowed to update beyond IE6 (corporate or academic environment), or just plain won't until Microsoft forces them to. These people are already resigned to having problems, with rare exception, because of the spectacular collection of trojans and toolbars and other such cruft the browser has acquired over the years (unless the IE6 installation is well-maintained).
Don't be too timid about progress because some people either can't or won't update. With sufficient pressure, a solution will happen.
That's not to say your sites shouldn't degrade gracefully when confronted with a browser which can't handle the new hotness, but that degrading gracefully to a page which ultimately is written to older web standards should be sufficient. These people with old IE6 clearly don't demand perfection, so don't sprain something trying to provide it when "good enough" works.
This is going to sound intentionally inflammatory - that's because it is. I'm tired of hearing the same tired complaints without any sort of logical foundation or any real argument presented at all. My intention is not to offend you and walk off with a smirk, but to offend you and have you walk off with doubts.
Why should we give equal rights to an animal just because it has a few human genes in it?
That's like giving a used condom the right to vote. The presence of human genetic material does not imbue some magical property on the animal or object which makes it suddenly one of God's Chosen Few (tm).
Luddite attitudes like that - people cowering in fear of accidentally doing something that they'd regret later - never accomplish anything of lasting value. The people who are praised throughout history are the ones who made a stir, whether they be Saints, scientists, or world leaders. As a species we admire the agents of change, even if we detest them. We may not approve of their actions, but we stand in awe of what they've accomplished.
If you as an individual are too frightened of a future in which people are touching the Magic Genome (tm) then there's a simple solution - don't take advantage of any of the fruits of current longevity research and die off before it becomes your problem. The rest of us will probably thank you - when you hold up progress in medical research because you have a moral problem with some guy diddling a mouse in a lab somewhere, you ensure that hundreds of people will die and thousands more will have a reduced quality of life due to the lack of the breakthroughs which may have helped them
They may not even be alive today. It may be somebody born tomorrow with a congenital defect who is the first beneficiary of this research. It might be your granddad or even yourself. Ethical treatment of test subjects is necessary, obviously, and we (the public) pay a higher price for research because of this need. But to suggest that the mere introduction of human tissue into a subject makes it eligible for equal human rights is magical thinking, and destructive to research.
This is what happens when I rephrase something then forget to proofread it afterward.
Eventually I'll learn.
Aw yes, sorry, I forgot that it's customary in the younger generation to stop reading at the headline.
Might be being too literal about the word "version" given the source.
Truly usable software does not require any amount of training, prior knowledge or particularly high levels of skill, realistically you shouldn't even need documentation.
A good way to understand usability is that with usable software it should be clear how to perform a specific task through nothing more than seeing the interface. If your application is entirely keyboard shortcut driven then, it fails badly at usability, unless there is clear information on screen at which point it is somewhat usable, but there is almost certainly a better way of doing it.
You, sir or madam, are correct.
I'd also like to add that a usable interface should build upon the skills that the user already has acquired and should behave in a fashion consistent with other tools in the same environment.
In other words, if you have a windows code environment, it should behave like Windows applications viz similar hotkeys, window behavior, etc.
To that extent, the value of software like vim or emacs holds up, as the user expects them to be as arcane and hard to learn because everything else on the commandline is. Holding them up as examples about how free software is not only equal in quality but also morally imperative, as the original troll claimed, is totally absurd however from a usability standpoint.
As much as I enjoy using bash for the things it's best at, you are showing the blind spot that irritates me most about open source evangelism and UNIX purism.
That is the mistaken 100 tools that do the same thing (and more) as one single specialized program are just as good as having a single program custom tailored to your tasks. With that sort of attitude, nobody would ever have written "make" in the first place, let alone all those automated tools to write makefiles.
For that matter, "bash" would never have been written because "sh" can already do most of the same stuff and commandline tools and cleverly written shell scripts can make up the functionality, right?
I think by now, if you're reading this at all, you're scowling and looking for something to disagree with.
The point is that sh and the dozens of powerful commandline GNU tools based on the great old stuff that was written for UNIX are still useful and relevant today, but they're not the only thing that is useful and relevant today. Sometimes you just want a single tool which does the job and gets out of your way with the least amount of effort. That doesn't make you stupid or lazy or childish, or everybody who's using bash right now needs to grow up.
If you have to spend 5 minutes writing a command with 12 pipes and output redirection through 13 programs which duplicate a functionality I get from a single checkbox in, say, Visual Studio, then you're not working efficiently. And merely because I choose to skip those steps does not mean I have no idea how to do them - I'm a professional UNIX system administrator as my day job.
The point is that although practice makes perfect, familiarity breeds contempt. When I get home to code on my own projects, I'd prefer not to have to write makefiles, build scripts, hand compile everything, edit out of a single window so I never forget to save anything, and constantly search for line numbers in a lousy no-syntax-highlighting no-code-completing circa 1980 text editor. I did that circa 1980, and I believe in progress.