Ideally, what happens is the "surface sensing" technology plots the coffee spill. Then when you wipe it up, it leaves a little stain on the background. Sure, you can clean that up too, but with desktop memory, you could press one button and all the coffee/red wine rings reappear, the spill marks and everything else.
A coffee table with a stain memory -- think of the uses.
I'm always fascinated by the different uses people put to software, and perpetually annoyed by the assumptions some designers have in how I'm going to use stuff as well.
There's a sound reason why you don't want the engineers directly talking to the customers, at least outside of highly specific cases. Engineers are valuable assets, and the time spent talking to customers is the least of the worries. More bothersome is what happens if the engineer actually hears what s/he thinks is a good idea. I dunno about you guys, but for me, a "good idea" coding-wise is one that involves an interesting solution, or does something really cool, or otherwise sierra hotel. Heck, I might run off and spend two weeks on it. So someone -- a producer, say -- has to act as a filter and determine what is worth doing, and what isn't.
Of course, this also means that the boss in charge doesn't always have a clear notion of what's important to anybody. In fact, they usually don't.
But back to the point: designs often make bad assumptions about their demographics, often because A) They misconstrue their target demographic and B) they overrely on focus groups.
Take Microsoft Office: has anyone ever looked in detail at the crap that's in there? There's all kinds of junk for "generic business settings". Guess what? Most of Microsoft Office usage doesn't occur in Generic Business Settings, and when it does, the business users are neither sufficiently educated nor interested to use all those features. Themes? Who writes a word document with themes? But, well, the target demographic of businessfolk says "we want to be able to do all these business-things", and so now you have a good two dozen themes for Microsoft Word, along with auto-bulleting, numbering, and every other way to add meaning to the structureless drivel that pollutes our businessspace.
It's not that hard: A) Figure out what people want, technically and emotionally. B) Make it simple C) Make it pretty.
But A) seems a mystery to most software designers. Then again, so does the opposite sex.
Yeah, that reminds me. Last summer I had to buy a ticket at an Italian railway station. I could have used the robodispensers, but this required a little fancy maneuvering the automated machines didn't have. So I wait in line, give my request. The guy gets halfway through entering it, and the system crashes hard. He waits two minutes, hits reset and sure enough, the OS/2 Warp logo graces the screen. He ends up issuing me a ticket identical to what the robodispensers were giving, i.e., not solving the specific issue I wanted solved.
Now, Italian trains are, relative to the rest of europe, cheap, but I wonder if ditching OS/2 wouldn't improve stability and flexibility.
Bah. ACtually, the only way FOSS is gonna fly is by (forced) adoption by many large-scale consumers (aka Governments). Right now, you have a company that satisfies 50% of requirements (most of the time) selling to organizations around the world. Everybody puts their money in, and gets a tool that *sorta* works well enough. Only when large organizations start to see an advantage in having FOSS developers on the payroll -- to improve and to adopt what's already out there -- are you gonna see widescale adoption. FOSS can't be fueled for long by supermotivated hobbyists living in their parents' basement. At some point, you need professionals to work on it, and those shelling out the billions of dollars for software are more likely to pay their bills than those raking it in.
BTW, "the major operating system without any technical glitches and security issues" made me chuckle.
What about encryption? Sure, you can claim that the proprietary nature of Skype's software makes us unable to know how effective its encryption really is, or if Ebay has already given the US the "keys", but it's still better than demonstrably in the clear.
NASA as a research center vs. pretty space thing
on
NASA Science Under Attack
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What's going on can be seen in the "refocus on space exploration" mentioned in the article. Relatively speaking, the most expensive part of NASA is manned space exploration, and it is economically the least efficient way to find out about the world around us. Human trips to the Moon and to Mars can tell us plenty of things about those planets that unmanned spacecraft cannot. But they're also hugely expensive, and a lot of that money goes to the massive engineering effort needed to bring the mission about -- read, a lot of money goes into the hands of a few private firms that are on good terms with the Bush administration.
On the other hand, "scientific research" at NASA is a problem. Here we have a prominent government research facility that does all kinds of research: research that requires large teams, or specialized equipment, or a permanent base beyond what the worlds' research universities can supply. And, unfortunately, much of the information it puts out, particularly in the sublunar spheres, tends to be either insignificant in terms of Lockheed Martin's participation, or contrary to the government's stated policy on environmental issues or the imminent second coming of Christ.
This administration has exercised tighter control over the bureaucratic aspects of government than any other in recent memory -- just look at what's happening in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. The one constant has been the apparent demand for "Good News" that corroborates and does not falsify the central administration's gospel. Is it any surprise they'd go after NASA as well?
Well, that's why NASA's going to MArs -- more money for the Big Contractors, an impressive project, and no pesky climate guys to second-guess the administration.
er...there are plenty of "whites only" organizations both in WoW and in the US society at large. There are also groups implicitly or explicitly limited by country, age, political leaning or any other number of factors. But this is dumbass:
"We have determined that advertising sexual orientation is not appropriate for the high fantasy setting of the World of Warcraft and is therefore not permitted"
According to the letter of the statement, advertising a heterosexual orientation is also not appropriate, but clearly that's not what's meant.
And yeah, "high fantasy setting" and "sexual orientation" are completely inimical. I've never heard of any porn featuring "hot girl-on-girl action" in a "high fantasy setting". I suppose the rules are different when they involve real lesbians engaged in something like real fantasy life than fake lesbians in fantasy real life. Makes sense. After all, you gotta be straight to play the role of a gay cowboy.
In any case, while I understand the point of trying to change attitudes in a homophobic chatroom-with-spells like WoW, a gay clan could do more good in one of those PvP environments. Imagine the fun when the conservative parents find their nine-year-old bitching that he got totally pwn3d by a bunch of homos who ganked him, then repeatedly ass-raped him as he tried to spawn.
Wait a minute, how would anyone be able to tell the difference between that situation and what's happening now?
Well, a music reviewer specializing in the heavy stuff can listen to a dozen speedcore bands in a row without getting annoyed. How many fighting games can you handle before annoyance sets in? How about racing games? If you find one racing game you really like, what do you say about the other clones out there?
Deadlines and the rest, sure; but when video games are being made with a minimum of 20 hours content (with cheats on, and in full walk-through mode), and reviewers are expected to analyze them at a pace with the movie people, something's gotta give.
Dude -- the shuttle is super-safe. No car or widespread-use airliner comes close to its record in all-cause fatalities per mile travelled. Conservative, back-of-the-envelope calcs give it something like 1 death every 300 million miles. that's like saying one in evey 3500 cars will be involved in a fatality.
You mean, like the "Three minutes of downloading" it takes when I get one of those popups that says "WARNING YOUR SYSTEM HAS SPYWARE"? I mean, I installed that, and the cool screensaver with the puppies it came with; now my system's so slow I can't even get on the front page of a slashdot discussion.
Books have been written on sheets of dried, mashed plants for about five millennia. Paper is a cheap, relatively durable and versatile technology. Sony's new Reader will not spell the end of that long history, but it could be the opening of an interesting new chapter.
Well, depends on what you call a book. And frankly, I prefer the ones written on treated animal skins. It's a personal preference thing.
Anyway, DRM or not, the big problem I have with Sony (and the other, with the cooler-looking, fancier device) is that they seem to think I want to buy this thing so I can buy more things.
I've got tons of files -- my own docs, a bunch of.pdfs, and the like -- that I can see being useful in a handy format; I'd love to have a device like that to store a small reference library. Books are cool and they already work pretty well. When you've got something revolutionary, play to its strengths.
If you sell me something I can put two bookshelves of texts I consult regularly on, and maybe throw in some nonsense on birdwatching, I'll probably buy it.
If you make something that lets me read the Da Vinci Code for the same price as the paperback, plus $400, and doesn't let me give the work to a friend (a friend I don't like too much, given the choice of fiction), then forget it.
Oh yeah, battery life isn't just the screen, it's the processor too.
Was gonna write something painful, but I'll keep it short.
1. Cutscenes are a favorite critic whipping-boy. Nobody likes them in theory. Well, except for the ones we like.
2. Big problem with video games is the underlying amateur attitude. You give developers huge teams and big budgets, and they get to the cutscene or the fancy camera angles and they ignore the fact that cinema is its own art, with its own rules. Frankly, I don't have a problem with a cutscene, or a part of a game with cinematic elements, if it's done right. An example of this would be the distinction between description and narration. Consider a Covert Ops mission or a social dinner party. Both of these involve a bit of "setting the stage": The FRAGO, The invitation, the layout of the swank uptown digs, the brothel where General Manfredsohn's mistress works. A cutscene is a fine way to show these elements (provided you can skip through it if you've seen it already). Or anything that involves boring, repetitive action. After I've made the drug score, I'm not going to mind a montage of driving around town, delivering it to my boys with Curtis Mayfield in the background.
But as it stands, it seems that many of these games get it backwards, and use cinematics for the narrative, and leave to the player the boring stuff better spent in montages. When they do get the purpose right, there's no guarantee they'll follow the basic conventions of direction, which are necessary for describing space in a coherent fashion. Instead we get gee-whiz camera angles, flyin gcameras and superzooms.
Back in the good ol' days, the Macintosh had notorious security problems. Its habit of "opening" every floppy you stuck in the drive gave it a built-in vector for transmission. Later, with the disastrous port of Word 6.0 to the Macintosh, the Mac was ideal for Macro viruses (.dots masquerading as.docs): they spread just like on the PCs, except that many Mac users were trained (as, alas Windows users are now) not to recognize the distinction between data files and executables, let alone the distinctions among data file types. In addition, the excellent AppleTalk network software made it so easy to share hard drive contents that, once a Word macro got on one Macintosh, it spread to all the others. Heck, back in the day, I remember when network-connected Macintoshes were dubbed "Hackintoshes" and were the vector of choice for, uh, "penetration testing."
You'll recognize that these security weaknesses often come about by the fact that Macintoshes have historically been ahead of PCs in implementation of new technologies and interfaces. Just because a machine blocks many of the common vectors of today doesn't mean it's immune from the unknown. Being on the leading edge has its price. You can't claim to have a supercomputer in a plastic box and have no problems with viruses.
Besides, with the latest generation of security problems, criminal intent has replaced simple malice. What better target for a group of identity thieves than the demographic of Mac users? Come on, if anything is gonna save Mac's market share it's that people are willing to pay a premium for style and simplicity. Mac showed the way for widescale adoption of the PC has a home appliance by playing to the average user's ignorance of how a computer works; Windows has made great strides in this direction, but Apple still has the rep. What better target for your phishing/identity theft/ddos racket than someone who has disposable income, does not know much about computers, and thinks they're immune from such attacks?
As for Linux and Open Source, I'm a big fan of the F/OSS movement, but there seem to be a few misconceptions that get bandied around as fact. For example, when people think F/OSS, they think of code-obsessed geeks working for free in their parents' basement. The best F/OSS projects involve people who are employed specifically to work on them. Another myth, however, is this "many eyes make light work" notion of security. Any project needs coherent centralized direction (some forks are better than others). That means it needs a filtration system for the centralized direction to determine what needs to be done, and to assign people to do it. The more inclusive the filtration system, the more centralized resources get used on community handling, and the less on improving the code base. You can argue that the results are fairly good, but the same is true of Microsoft in the last year or so.
The real way to security, as the Mac people will point out, is a secure design coupled with a flexible and rapid support system. Macs may have the most secure design, but support of their platforms in plugging security holes, or even supporting products more than a year old, has not been stellar: anyone remember that Macintosh wireless spoofing vulnerability from a few years back? For that matter, anyone know anybody who still uses OS X 10.1? Linux, just because it's open and the holes are patched quickly, doesn't by that reason have a super-secure design. There are plenty of reasons why you can prefer your OS to Windows, and there's no disputing that historically, Microsoft seems to have made every "bad choice" regarding security in Windows (and Office) imaginable. But just because Microsoft sucks doesn't make your platform safe. Ignorance and pride are a dangerous combination.
For the record, I've had a PC for over 13 years, and the only infection I ever caught was a Word Macro from a Mac -- and that was easily recognized and disposed with.
"Corrupt" is perhaps not the right word. Imperfect. For all images and vestiges of God are imperfect with respect to the divine exemplar. One can reason back from the image to get some idea of God, but never the full thing.
I'm sorry, what was the question?
Oh yeah, well, TFA claims that there's no evidence whatsoever that it corrupts Norton Ghost images, and that Symantec has refused to provide any. So maybe it is like determining the existence of God: it could be the case that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images, but until someone posts some evidence, you'll have to take that on faith from Symantec.
Heh. Just set up a website for people convinced a particular piece of hardware is possessed by the devil. Invite them to send it in, and the bad karma associated with the device will go away.
When you make your second million, drop me a postcard.
You mean Microsoft didn't include the features they easily could have, but which someone might argue would cut into their Windows XP Media Center Edition/Xbox 360 Media Center upgrade market?
You know, I appreciate [H]ard OCP's recent attempts at journalistic integrity, which has resulted in some curious editorializing. For example:
Normally, we have arrangements with computer manufacturers marketing departments that allow us to purchase systems they offer anonymously, and then RMA the computers after the review is written and published. Currently, we do not have a similar agreement in place with Dell. Nevertheless, we felt it was important to take a look at what the largest manufacturer in North America offers during the holiday season when many people decide what gifts to get their family and friends, so we purchased this computer from Dell.
Aside from the curiosity that they have someone listed as a "Grammatical (sic) and Spelling Editor -- whose duties evidently do not extend to punctuation (should be: manufacturers'), this passage translates as: "normally, we only review stuff we can get for free -- we paid for this one." I don't have a problem with the practice of reviewing Hardware from the retail perspective: indeed, for similar reasons and about the same time, Tom's Hardware has taken the same step. What's worrisome is the curious mix of the "Consumer Reports" style with an allusion to a failed negotiation with Dell's Marketing Department. Well, okay, maybe not an allusion: it is conceivable that nobody at [H]ard OCP tried to contact "the largest manufacturer in North America" for a "review copy" deal. It is conceivable, but not likely.
So at the start of the review, the editors tell us that Dell "won't play ball", and they probably spent around $3000 in taxes and restocking fees. The review that follows, of course, will not reflect these facts.
And the review that follows is a beauty: tearing into Dell for all those awful bundling practices they negotiate with third parties to bring the price down further, for not including a recovery diskette, then charging $11 for an OS CD, and having crappy customer support. Oh yeah, the system is unstable as Hell because, after running their "torture test" on the original setup -- with all the crap running., it crashed at the 24 hour mark. system restore.
Then, at the end of the article, the editor steps in with the reason for all this:
Another Point of View
Editor's Note: The Dell XPS 400 stands in stark contrast to the other large, international OEM we have dealt with: Gateway.
The Gateway FX400XL, like the XPS 400, is a system from a large and highly publicized OEM of personal computers, and it is aimed squarely at gamers and enthusiasts. However, unlike the Gateway FX400XL, our Dell XPS 400 was crippled with debilitating bloatware that severely impacted our enjoyment of the system. The Gateway FX400XL had some value added software that treaded near or in the realm of bloatware, but it certainly didn't stop us from installing games or enjoy playing them.
For those of you that missed it, the Review in question evaluates a system a couple notches up in the performance category (but, one assumes, since Gateway's marketing dept. played ball, the journalistic budget didn't factor in). But even hardware differences aside, methodologically the two cases aren't comparable. As far as bloatware goes, the Gateway shipped not only with McAfee's antivirus (which the Dell review repeatedly cites as a nuisance and a cause of instability), but also Norton and BigFix. The drivers were not 3 months out of date like at Dell, but 8 months (to which the reviewer says: "Big deal? Not really" and proudly states he installed the latest driver immediately -- instead of, like the Dell review, going to try out games he knew wouldn't work). The Gateway had tons of toolbars and installed bloat. What did the reviewer do?:
First Boot: First Shutdown
I took the liberty of going into msconfig and looked at the startup list. Obviously, there's a lot of programs
... Or the "society page" folks: games pubs need access to a group that in turn needs them. There are strong financial pressures for folks to be buddy-buddy. And the journalists will argue that the Sports and Entertainment audience demands and even expects the journos to be in cahoots with their subject. After all, who reads the sports pages? Sports fans! They don't want an impartial assessment of anything. They want opinionated bits of blather by moronic columnists coupled with "behind the scenes" peaks at the lives and games of their favorite stars.
Same for games journalism, they will argue.
The result? Uh -- don't read the reviews uncritically. Don't trust previews to show you anything. Don't whinge about the hierarchy at E3. For that matter, don't pay attention to any of the coverage of E3 or any other media circus.
But real journalism? not from these guys. There's too much money at stake, and since nobody seems to bu these publications, someone has to pay for them.
Ten years ago, if I had known there were people rich and foolish enough to shell out huge sums prototypes, beta and final roms, crap that never got released, and so on, I'd be a wealthy man today.
Actually, if I'd known about it then, I would have been extra vigilant in destroying every proto-cart I came across.
You fools you! Some games and game machines were never meant to be! Don't go tampering with forces you cannot understand!
Slashdot Mirror
Ideally, what happens is the "surface sensing" technology plots the coffee spill. Then when you wipe it up, it leaves a little stain on the background. Sure, you can clean that up too, but with desktop memory, you could press one button and all the coffee/red wine rings reappear, the spill marks and everything else.
A coffee table with a stain memory -- think of the uses.
errr....
Hey, don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
maybe for the same reason we vote for those who would enslave us?
I'm always fascinated by the different uses people put to software, and perpetually annoyed by the assumptions some designers have in how I'm going to use stuff as well.
There's a sound reason why you don't want the engineers directly talking to the customers, at least outside of highly specific cases. Engineers are valuable assets, and the time spent talking to customers is the least of the worries. More bothersome is what happens if the engineer actually hears what s/he thinks is a good idea. I dunno about you guys, but for me, a "good idea" coding-wise is one that involves an interesting solution, or does something really cool, or otherwise sierra hotel. Heck, I might run off and spend two weeks on it. So someone -- a producer, say -- has to act as a filter and determine what is worth doing, and what isn't.
Of course, this also means that the boss in charge doesn't always have a clear notion of what's important to anybody. In fact, they usually don't.
But back to the point: designs often make bad assumptions about their demographics, often because A) They misconstrue their target demographic and B) they overrely on focus groups.
Take Microsoft Office: has anyone ever looked in detail at the crap that's in there? There's all kinds of junk for "generic business settings". Guess what? Most of Microsoft Office usage doesn't occur in Generic Business Settings, and when it does, the business users are neither sufficiently educated nor interested to use all those features. Themes? Who writes a word document with themes? But, well, the target demographic of businessfolk says "we want to be able to do all these business-things", and so now you have a good two dozen themes for Microsoft Word, along with auto-bulleting, numbering, and every other way to add meaning to the structureless drivel that pollutes our businessspace.
It's not that hard:
A) Figure out what people want, technically and emotionally.
B) Make it simple
C) Make it pretty.
But A) seems a mystery to most software designers. Then again, so does the opposite sex.
Yeah, that reminds me. Last summer I had to buy a ticket at an Italian railway station. I could have used the robodispensers, but this required a little fancy maneuvering the automated machines didn't have. So I wait in line, give my request. The guy gets halfway through entering it, and the system crashes hard. He waits two minutes, hits reset and sure enough, the OS/2 Warp logo graces the screen. He ends up issuing me a ticket identical to what the robodispensers were giving, i.e., not solving the specific issue I wanted solved.
Now, Italian trains are, relative to the rest of europe, cheap, but I wonder if ditching OS/2 wouldn't improve stability and flexibility.
Bah. ACtually, the only way FOSS is gonna fly is by (forced) adoption by many large-scale consumers (aka Governments). Right now, you have a company that satisfies 50% of requirements (most of the time) selling to organizations around the world. Everybody puts their money in, and gets a tool that *sorta* works well enough. Only when large organizations start to see an advantage in having FOSS developers on the payroll -- to improve and to adopt what's already out there -- are you gonna see widescale adoption. FOSS can't be fueled for long by supermotivated hobbyists living in their parents' basement. At some point, you need professionals to work on it, and those shelling out the billions of dollars for software are more likely to pay their bills than those raking it in.
BTW, "the major operating system without any technical glitches and security issues" made me chuckle.
What about encryption? Sure, you can claim that the proprietary nature of Skype's software makes us unable to know how effective its encryption really is, or if Ebay has already given the US the "keys", but it's still better than demonstrably in the clear.
What's going on can be seen in the "refocus on space exploration" mentioned in the article. Relatively speaking, the most expensive part of NASA is manned space exploration, and it is economically the least efficient way to find out about the world around us. Human trips to the Moon and to Mars can tell us plenty of things about those planets that unmanned spacecraft cannot. But they're also hugely expensive, and a lot of that money goes to the massive engineering effort needed to bring the mission about -- read, a lot of money goes into the hands of a few private firms that are on good terms with the Bush administration.
On the other hand, "scientific research" at NASA is a problem. Here we have a prominent government research facility that does all kinds of research: research that requires large teams, or specialized equipment, or a permanent base beyond what the worlds' research universities can supply. And, unfortunately, much of the information it puts out, particularly in the sublunar spheres, tends to be either insignificant in terms of Lockheed Martin's participation, or contrary to the government's stated policy on environmental issues or the imminent second coming of Christ.
This administration has exercised tighter control over the bureaucratic aspects of government than any other in recent memory -- just look at what's happening in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. The one constant has been the apparent demand for "Good News" that corroborates and does not falsify the central administration's gospel. Is it any surprise they'd go after NASA as well?
Well, that's why NASA's going to MArs -- more money for the Big Contractors, an impressive project, and no pesky climate guys to second-guess the administration.
According to the letter of the statement, advertising a heterosexual orientation is also not appropriate, but clearly that's not what's meant.
And yeah, "high fantasy setting" and "sexual orientation" are completely inimical. I've never heard of any porn featuring "hot girl-on-girl action" in a "high fantasy setting". I suppose the rules are different when they involve real lesbians engaged in something like real fantasy life than fake lesbians in fantasy real life. Makes sense. After all, you gotta be straight to play the role of a gay cowboy.
In any case, while I understand the point of trying to change attitudes in a homophobic chatroom-with-spells like WoW, a gay clan could do more good in one of those PvP environments. Imagine the fun when the conservative parents find their nine-year-old bitching that he got totally pwn3d by a bunch of homos who ganked him, then repeatedly ass-raped him as he tried to spawn.
Wait a minute, how would anyone be able to tell the difference between that situation and what's happening now?
I'm confused.
Well, a music reviewer specializing in the heavy stuff can listen to a dozen speedcore bands in a row without getting annoyed. How many fighting games can you handle before annoyance sets in? How about racing games? If you find one racing game you really like, what do you say about the other clones out there?
Deadlines and the rest, sure; but when video games are being made with a minimum of 20 hours content (with cheats on, and in full walk-through mode), and reviewers are expected to analyze them at a pace with the movie people, something's gotta give.
Dude -- the shuttle is super-safe. No car or widespread-use airliner comes close to its record in all-cause fatalities per mile travelled. Conservative, back-of-the-envelope calcs give it something like 1 death every 300 million miles. that's like saying one in evey 3500 cars will be involved in a fatality.
You mean, like the "Three minutes of downloading" it takes when I get one of those popups that says "WARNING YOUR SYSTEM HAS SPYWARE"? I mean, I installed that, and the cool screensaver with the puppies it came with; now my system's so slow I can't even get on the front page of a slashdot discussion.
Well, depends on what you call a book. And frankly, I prefer the ones written on treated animal skins. It's a personal preference thing.
Anyway, DRM or not, the big problem I have with Sony (and the other, with the cooler-looking, fancier device) is that they seem to think I want to buy this thing so I can buy more things.
I've got tons of files -- my own docs, a bunch of
If you sell me something I can put two bookshelves of texts I consult regularly on, and maybe throw in some nonsense on birdwatching, I'll probably buy it.
If you make something that lets me read the Da Vinci Code for the same price as the paperback, plus $400, and doesn't let me give the work to a friend (a friend I don't like too much, given the choice of fiction), then forget it.
Oh yeah, battery life isn't just the screen, it's the processor too.
Was gonna write something painful, but I'll keep it short.
1. Cutscenes are a favorite critic whipping-boy. Nobody likes them in theory. Well, except for the ones we like.
2. Big problem with video games is the underlying amateur attitude. You give developers huge teams and big budgets, and they get to the cutscene or the fancy camera angles and they ignore the fact that cinema is its own art, with its own rules. Frankly, I don't have a problem with a cutscene, or a part of a game with cinematic elements, if it's done right. An example of this would be the distinction between description and narration. Consider a Covert Ops mission or a social dinner party. Both of these involve a bit of "setting the stage": The FRAGO, The invitation, the layout of the swank uptown digs, the brothel where General Manfredsohn's mistress works. A cutscene is a fine way to show these elements (provided you can skip through it if you've seen it already). Or anything that involves boring, repetitive action. After I've made the drug score, I'm not going to mind a montage of driving around town, delivering it to my boys with Curtis Mayfield in the background.
But as it stands, it seems that many of these games get it backwards, and use cinematics for the narrative, and leave to the player the boring stuff better spent in montages. When they do get the purpose right, there's no guarantee they'll follow the basic conventions of direction, which are necessary for describing space in a coherent fashion. Instead we get gee-whiz camera angles, flyin gcameras and superzooms.
Grow Up.
Nonsense. That's the EU money train. where do I sign up for some corporate Baksheesh with Euronationalistic undertones?!
Back in the good ol' days, the Macintosh had notorious security problems. Its habit of "opening" every floppy you stuck in the drive gave it a built-in vector for transmission. Later, with the disastrous port of Word 6.0 to the Macintosh, the Mac was ideal for Macro viruses (.dots masquerading as .docs): they spread just like on the PCs, except that many Mac users were trained (as, alas Windows users are now) not to recognize the distinction between data files and executables, let alone the distinctions among data file types. In addition, the excellent AppleTalk network software made it so easy to share hard drive contents that, once a Word macro got on one Macintosh, it spread to all the others. Heck, back in the day, I remember when network-connected Macintoshes were dubbed "Hackintoshes" and were the vector of choice for, uh, "penetration testing."
You'll recognize that these security weaknesses often come about by the fact that Macintoshes have historically been ahead of PCs in implementation of new technologies and interfaces. Just because a machine blocks many of the common vectors of today doesn't mean it's immune from the unknown. Being on the leading edge has its price. You can't claim to have a supercomputer in a plastic box and have no problems with viruses.
Besides, with the latest generation of security problems, criminal intent has replaced simple malice. What better target for a group of identity thieves than the demographic of Mac users? Come on, if anything is gonna save Mac's market share it's that people are willing to pay a premium for style and simplicity. Mac showed the way for widescale adoption of the PC has a home appliance by playing to the average user's ignorance of how a computer works; Windows has made great strides in this direction, but Apple still has the rep. What better target for your phishing/identity theft/ddos racket than someone who has disposable income, does not know much about computers, and thinks they're immune from such attacks?
As for Linux and Open Source, I'm a big fan of the F/OSS movement, but there seem to be a few misconceptions that get bandied around as fact. For example, when people think F/OSS, they think of code-obsessed geeks working for free in their parents' basement. The best F/OSS projects involve people who are employed specifically to work on them. Another myth, however, is this "many eyes make light work" notion of security. Any project needs coherent centralized direction (some forks are better than others). That means it needs a filtration system for the centralized direction to determine what needs to be done, and to assign people to do it. The more inclusive the filtration system, the more centralized resources get used on community handling, and the less on improving the code base. You can argue that the results are fairly good, but the same is true of Microsoft in the last year or so.
The real way to security, as the Mac people will point out, is a secure design coupled with a flexible and rapid support system. Macs may have the most secure design, but support of their platforms in plugging security holes, or even supporting products more than a year old, has not been stellar: anyone remember that Macintosh wireless spoofing vulnerability from a few years back? For that matter, anyone know anybody who still uses OS X 10.1? Linux, just because it's open and the holes are patched quickly, doesn't by that reason have a super-secure design. There are plenty of reasons why you can prefer your OS to Windows, and there's no disputing that historically, Microsoft seems to have made every "bad choice" regarding security in Windows (and Office) imaginable. But just because Microsoft sucks doesn't make your platform safe. Ignorance and pride are a dangerous combination.
For the record, I've had a PC for over 13 years, and the only infection I ever caught was a Word Macro from a Mac -- and that was easily recognized and disposed with.
"Corrupt" is perhaps not the right word. Imperfect. For all images and vestiges of God are imperfect with respect to the divine exemplar. One can reason back from the image to get some idea of God, but never the full thing.
I'm sorry, what was the question?
Oh yeah, well, TFA claims that there's no evidence whatsoever that it corrupts Norton Ghost images, and that Symantec has refused to provide any. So maybe it is like determining the existence of God: it could be the case that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images, but until someone posts some evidence, you'll have to take that on faith from Symantec.
Heh. Just set up a website for people convinced a particular piece of hardware is possessed by the devil. Invite them to send it in, and the bad karma associated with the device will go away.
When you make your second million, drop me a postcard.
Surprise!
You mean Microsoft didn't include the features they easily could have, but which someone might argue would cut into their Windows XP Media Center Edition/Xbox 360 Media Center upgrade market?
I'm shocked and stunned.
Wow. so where does the employees' juicy TIAA/CREF pension fund end up?
Thanks for your clarifications Brian and Chris.
Cheers!
Aside from the curiosity that they have someone listed as a "Grammatical (sic) and Spelling Editor -- whose duties evidently do not extend to punctuation (should be: manufacturers'), this passage translates as: "normally, we only review stuff we can get for free -- we paid for this one." I don't have a problem with the practice of reviewing Hardware from the retail perspective: indeed, for similar reasons and about the same time, Tom's Hardware has taken the same step. What's worrisome is the curious mix of the "Consumer Reports" style with an allusion to a failed negotiation with Dell's Marketing Department. Well, okay, maybe not an allusion: it is conceivable that nobody at [H]ard OCP tried to contact "the largest manufacturer in North America" for a "review copy" deal. It is conceivable, but not likely.
So at the start of the review, the editors tell us that Dell "won't play ball", and they probably spent around $3000 in taxes and restocking fees. The review that follows, of course, will not reflect these facts.
And the review that follows is a beauty: tearing into Dell for all those awful bundling practices they negotiate with third parties to bring the price down further, for not including a recovery diskette, then charging $11 for an OS CD, and having crappy customer support. Oh yeah, the system is unstable as Hell because, after running their "torture test" on the original setup -- with all the crap running., it crashed at the 24 hour mark. system restore.
Then, at the end of the article, the editor steps in with the reason for all this:
For those of you that missed it, the Review in question evaluates a system a couple notches up in the performance category (but, one assumes, since Gateway's marketing dept. played ball, the journalistic budget didn't factor in). But even hardware differences aside, methodologically the two cases aren't comparable. As far as bloatware goes, the Gateway shipped not only with McAfee's antivirus (which the Dell review repeatedly cites as a nuisance and a cause of instability), but also Norton and BigFix. The drivers were not 3 months out of date like at Dell, but 8 months (to which the reviewer says: "Big deal? Not really" and proudly states he installed the latest driver immediately -- instead of, like the Dell review, going to try out games he knew wouldn't work). The Gateway had tons of toolbars and installed bloat. What did the reviewer do?:
... Or the "society page" folks: games pubs need access to a group that in turn needs them. There are strong financial pressures for folks to be buddy-buddy. And the journalists will argue that the Sports and Entertainment audience demands and even expects the journos to be in cahoots with their subject. After all, who reads the sports pages? Sports fans! They don't want an impartial assessment of anything. They want opinionated bits of blather by moronic columnists coupled with "behind the scenes" peaks at the lives and games of their favorite stars.
Same for games journalism, they will argue.
The result? Uh -- don't read the reviews uncritically. Don't trust previews to show you anything. Don't whinge about the hierarchy at E3. For that matter, don't pay attention to any of the coverage of E3 or any other media circus.
But real journalism? not from these guys. There's too much money at stake, and since nobody seems to bu these publications, someone has to pay for them.
Ten years ago, if I had known there were people rich and foolish enough to shell out huge sums prototypes, beta and final roms, crap that never got released, and so on, I'd be a wealthy man today.
Actually, if I'd known about it then, I would have been extra vigilant in destroying every proto-cart I came across.
You fools you! Some games and game machines were never meant to be! Don't go tampering with forces you cannot understand!