Honestly. I loved that game because it was so unique. It had such a light-hearted feel to the action and made the prince a very likeable character. The second two had the boring "dark tormented hero" theme I've seen a thousand times.
/seconded.
the hero of the recent games was, unfortunately, a one-dimensional sword/demonchain wielding piece of cardboard. while that was entertaining in some of the cutscenes, i'm sure "lololol, are they serious?" was not what the developers were going for.
the graphics do look pretty, but graphics and gameplay weren't really lacking in the most recent installments--just character design and storytelling.
is anyone else bothered by the fact that this "ZOMG RAM" video card uses the 4850 processor? so...second string processor, huge amounts of RAM...it's like they're *begging* to have the GPU be the bottleneck. this much memory would definitely be better used on a faster card.
don't get me wrong, the 4850 is a nice chip, but it seems a bit like hanging a diamond necklace on a small dog. nifty, if you're into that sort of thing, but ultimately just decorative.
surely one of the best and earliest gaming platforms. but don't forget the more casual originals, like:
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (1985)
to this day, one of the most fun and mildly educational games i played as a young one in the late 80s, and it was first released for the apple II. i still ended up playing it and other slightly-ridiculous "edutainment" titles in elementary and middle school on the IIe, even well into the heyday of the first godforsaken iMacs. for schools with limited access to new hardware, the apple II really seemed to have some enormous staying power and flexibility.
early PCs often get compared to contemporaneous gaming platforms, but personally, i didn't own a single gaming console until i was in my 20s--starting out with the apple II made me an avid pc gamer, and i'm wicked grateful for that.
it completely defeats the purpose of having tags if all the articles have the same tags. making the same joke over and over will kill it regardless of the way the joke is made.
of course,/. is living proof that this stops no one.
what about OSS?
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
what, a whole book review on software development, and not a single mention of open source? how did this make it onto slashdot?
OSS cracks aside, it would be nice to see if the book talks about that side of things at all; the impression i got from the review is that there's not much distinction drawn between software licensing and development models, and that it's all sorta lumped in together.
so if, as the book seems to suggest, software development were regulated more closely, who would be accountable, or audited, or whatever, for an OSS project with heavy community involvement that's seeing commercial applications? or with an OSS project that gets implemented as part of a for-profit piece of software?
i'm curious, because i have less than zero experience in how this stuff actually works, but it seems like it would be a weird situation. anyone have any insight?
i dunno about anyone else, but it seemed to me that the actual paper TFA refers to is a bit...unimpressive. now, IANA Molecular Genetecist, but i've read a fair amount about macro-evolutionary theories, particularly about speciation, and it seems that if you want to talk about the processes involved in evolution, you talk largely about distinctive, novel features, and you talk about adaptations. seems like the paper talks about...neither? that puts it in an odd space to discuss non-deterministic methods of genetic drift.
now, putting aside any jokes about worm vulvas, the original paper says this about the features they chose to focus on:
As a model, we used the nematode vulva, a highly conserved, essential organ maybe i'm just not deep enough into the specifics of the exact features they were looking for, but common sense indicates to me that if you pick an "essential" feature to study, you are going to be looking at a feature where selective pressures--whether they favor novelty or conservatism--are going to be extremely strong. wouldn't that predict the results they report, that the selected-for variations, being under heavy selective pressure, show a non-random bias?
i'm inclined to agree with anyone who says this isn't news, and for two reasons: 1) if i'm right (probably not) in thinking this study's choice of subject predicted its results, that's just bad science and 2) if i'm wrong, and this is just telling us that actual changes in an organism are primarily governed by selective pressures rather than the god Chaos, this adds NOTHING to the current popular understanding of evolution except another opaque and misleading news story.
personally, i'd like to see much more popular science writing on the mechanisms governing variation rather than the mechanisms of selection that pare that variation down into new features--each is one side of the natural selection coin, but it seems like selection gets all the attention.
as a "millenial" just starting out from college into IT, this article definitely hits on (or rather, somewhat near) an interesting dimension of my experience in the workforce. i'm confused, though, by the negative tone of TFA.
i'm currently working at a company where the turnover rate is rather incredibly high, with a huge percentage of temp/contract employees in the office (including myself). i am, modestly speaking, wicked overqualified for the phone-jockey work i'm doing now, and probably won't take any of the several relatively lucrative permanent positions i've been offered with the company.
thing is, i would have been perfectly happy to stick it out and rise in the company--as i'm sure many others would, too--if it weren't for one thing: the company is moving. they're relocating to a state where it's cheaper to operate, and probably dozens of younger techs like myself simply can't make that kind of shift. thus, half the office (most in that millenial age group) where i'm working has either fled, is fleeing, or will flee as the company relocates. turnover isn't a generational thing, it's just a result of this kind of fluidity in an industry, where everybody is outsourced to or contracted by somebody else at every level of the game.
that example aside, the fact remains that younger people in any industry are often in less secure/stable positions as far as their personal and professional lives, and have to hop between jobs, or have other commitments--like education--in ways that can interfere with keeping one job for a long time. an older worker is likely to be more settled and able to stay with one employer for a longer time. in IT, because there are so many opportunities available in the field. it's an employee's market, so job hopping is more easily do-able, and often even helps to build a diverse and attractive resume.
i'm sure the situation is rather different for people my age who come into the industry with jobs higher up the IT totem pole, where depth of experience means more than breadth, but down in the trenches i there's more to think about in terms of turnover among the young and fresh than just "the brats are spoiled".
i mean, yeah, we are spoiled, but we're not all verucca salt.
More of a feedback system. Of course, this needs to be carefully balanced, and should be communicated to the player reasonably well, ie, people start saying "hey, doesn't that look like that killer the guards are talking about?!" and other telltale signs. yeah, out of everything that was overhyped in this game, the "crowd" gameplay got blown the farthest out of proportion. i mean, that the crowds even semi-realistically react to you having murdered someone in front of them adds an interesting element to the gameplay, but there are so many ways that it could be improved.
take escaping from guards, for example. one of the most interesting observations that came out of conversations my friends and i had about the game was that altair would be covered head to toe in blood after every single fight. now i dunno about you, but most guards and pedestrians who see a hooded dude covered head to toe in blood tend to react in fairly predictable ways. this in turn suggests a simple game mechanic for escaping: find some new effing clothes. the rooftop hideouts could serve as stashes with clean digs stored away, providing a mildly believable way to shake recognition of your character--instead, they are "base" in some bloody, crusader-era version of tag.
i'm all for suspending my disbelief, and the game provides some fantastically entertaining and--at times--innovative gameplay, but there's nothing really groundbreaking about what the game did. here's hoping the sequels take this ball and run with it.
okay, i think i understand the point you're trying to make, but there's a weird logical leap happening in your post that kinda fogs things up.
that means that corporations can't go to court to get someone to stop staying something they don't like, because the court is a part of the government, and that would mean the government is abridging someone's free speech. free speech is about the government not--on its own initiative, and through its mandate to make and enforce laws--infringing on an individual's right to freely express him/herself. yes, by taking a matter of speech such as this to court, a corporation is involving the gov't, but one branch of the government is serving to essentially mediate a dispute between two parties in accordance with law, in a proceeding that's designed to protect the interests of both parties, no matter who is at fault.
i understand that what you're getting at is that the corporation is being heavy-handed by asking courts to enforce its side of the dispute against the individual, and given that a corporation has much vaster resources and ability to bring such legal action to bear, there is a huge, and probably profoundly unfair, power disparity here.
but.
it does not follow by any means that the government as a whole entity is stomping on anyone's right to free speech by being involved--granted, that's a matter of interpretation, but look at it this way. the courts exist as a brake on powerful organizations, to prevent C&D letter-like problems from being taken care of by henchmen in dark alleys. perhaps an extreme example, but that's the role the courts are meant to play.
That level of CoD4 felt a bit forced to me because of the conversation from your partner you're absolutely right. hell, the fact that they're talking at all stretches realism a bit too far for my tastes. i'm not saying the level is perfect, just that elements of it are extraordinarily well done. i think playing that level with the captain's tutorial voice-overs muted would be amazing--the hand signals are actually almost enough to explain what needs to be done at crucial moments, just as they would need to be in the field.
For multiplayer level designers, I'd take a very long look at Call of Duty 4. IMO, the CoD games are also worth taking a look at for single-player level design. they have their drawbacks--overly scripted and railed progression, nonsensical objective-linked enemy spawns, etc--but some of the moments that appear in these games are just brilliant. take the ghillies in the wind level in CoD4: it's a heavily scripted sniper mission, but it captures a sense of tension and realism that makes you believe that if you deviate in one detail, your character would indeed be dead. scripted and inflexible or not, that's an impressive gaming experience.
one of the things that makes the level work (and Valve does a bunch of this in HL, too) is believable and crucial interaction with your partner NPCs. important as the physical details of the environment are, unless the game is about the last dude on earth, other characters have a role as design elements. they contribute both to the feel of the game and to the flow of whatever story is being told.
The amount presented per song as damages are not just "to buy that song" as some have argued here, but the equivalent of buying the right to distribute that song. you are dead right in pointing out that this is about distribution infringement, not any kind of "using without paying" nonsense, and i'm glad somebody is finally drawing attention to the difference. fact is, a better comparison is a radio station, which pays something much closer to nine grand a song for the right to play it repeatedly and make money off it. IANAradiohost, but you get the idea.
boneheaded and venal as the RIAA's tactics and position here are, it's time to stop talking about the damages as if the media companies are just trying to make back the retail value lost when someone downloads instead of buys. this is about who has the right to make a song available for download, to whom, and at what price.
the real tragedy for me, and what strikes me as incredibly evil on the part of the media companies, is that most of the people they're targeting as copyright infringers (a) have no idea what it is they're being made to pay for, (b) had no intention to profit by it, and (c) individually made nowhere near the kind of negative impact on record company income that they're being made to pay for. IMO, the disparity between impact and punishment is what makes this whole business into extortion rather than fair legal action.
The bigger problem is that certain aspects of our modern technology allow young people these days do less to develop their minds than in past generations. no, the bigger problem is that a survey question like that one ignores generational differences in what people keep track of. the fact that i can't name as many relatives' birthdates as, say, my grandmother--or even my mother--says more about how i've been developing my brain, and more importantly, what types of information i keep track of. i can quote more random freaking tv shows, movies, and comics than my parents know existed, but that doesn't indicate any kind of developmental lethargy on their part.
the answer is in the question you ask, and Robertson's study is a case in point if i've ever seen one.
don't hate me for this, because i know exactly how bad the NJO series could be at times, but i suggest you pick them up again--selectively. much of NJO was terrible, but if you read the novels by a few of the authors, like Karen Traviss, Michael A. Stackpole, and Timothy Zahn, those authors manage to do interesting things with characters, at least, in the much later SW books.
the star wars EU may be just a huge fan-fiction community with a Lucas stamp of approval, but there are some gems to be had even in books written long after the proverbial shark has been jumped and the proverbial horse beaten to death.
Your experiences with Dell and their hardware applies to Windows boxes as well usually which is, actually, my point. yes, it's good for linux and probably for dell that this is happening. but frankly, i could give a damn what OS an OEM wants to put on their system, and neither--except for name recognition--does yer average user.
(granted, i don't care because if i want a switch i'll wipe it, and Joe Schmo doesn't care because in terms of user experience, it'll ideally end up being largely the same)
i'm not actually griping about the quality of OEM hardware and support simply because i'm picky and want better. there's a bigger problem here. i used to sell OEM systems retail, and i've seen enough of the consumer side of the PC market to get the sense that while PCs like Dells are, on the whole, a good thing, the average buyer has most likely been burned by one OEM or another, and if not by them then by retailers that understand less than the OEMs how to sell and support these products. if as so many pc owners gripe, "it doesn't effing WORK" on a hardware level, the experience of owning an OEM system can be a major obstacle to a lot of users either picking one up or spending enough time with one to develop more than rudimentary PC skills.
cheap PCs being an obstacle to opening up the world of computers to a non-initiate is simply not right. maybe, when it comes right down to it, it's a matter of public image for these OEMs rather than their actual track record, but a track record certainly helps.
all well and good, but linux or no, i still have serious reservations about buying a system from Dell.
the negative experiences i've had with dell are really not linked to the OS; they're all hardware issues and service issues related to the hardware. show me that they'll support linux equally on the software side *and* that they've stepped up their hardware support, and this will be a bit more interesting.
yeah, this is great news as far as the visibility of the linux community is concerned, but IMO, this changes very, very little about the pre-built PC market.
yeah, but think about how they changed the game in the first place: they completely ripped out this incredibly deep and complex character development system, and replaced it with a cartoony, glorified hack and slash approach.
my point isn't that repairing an MMO is impossible, just that in this case that fixing it is gonna require undoing the first major overhaul, not just tweaking/balancing it. and that's some major undoing.
yeah, but how would another dev house undo the murder already done on the gameplay by SOE? there's a huge amount of inertia behind the direction an MMO takes, and it'll take a complete redesign or, more optimistically, a new game to fix that.
disclaimer: not responsible for rumors and false hope.
the missing point in TFA, i think, is where these researchers are drawing their data from. one of the things that's a recurrent problem in charting/predicting linguistic evolutionary trends is what you base whatever new Model #234a you've come up with on. most researchers doing this kind of modeling work use one or a few of the existing databases of english language text, but the question to ask is where exactly this text is drawn from. some databases draw heavily on samples of textual english--books, magazines, websites, etc--to put together their information on forms and usage, simply because it's the easiest way to go.
for example: the problem with that kind of sampling, as most any linguist will probably tell you, is that while it gives you a bloody enormous body of coherent linguistic data to work with, textual language is 1) different in a bunch of important contextual ways from spoken language and 2) is not actually where linguistic innovation and change often happens. linguistic change is almost always a bottom up phenomenon; lower class influences upper class, spoken language is both a hotbed of innovation (think about street slang), and one of the most powerful influences in what actually becomes accepted as normal usage over time. so what happens in great frequency off of the radar of these databases of recorded text could be running counter to the trends they identified, or might even underline those trends and reinforce them.
i have no idea whether or not this study is actually drawing on text-only data, or what kind of sampling they used, but it sure would be helpful to know, yeah?
...didn't he note in the caption above this very photo that the screencap is from build 5381, and *not* from the Beta2 build he's writing the article about?
yeah, he did.
and he was pretty upfront about the earlier builds being crappy and unstable.
back on topic, that kind of port forwarding isn't really typically available to users in a university-type LAN. that kind of control is at the router, and most universities with network admins worth their salt have centralized routers set up for the whole university.
bittorrent on my campus, for example, is reduced to (maybe) a trickle because of the bandwidth restrictions and port blocking we have in place, but that's largely to prevent a heavily computerized student body from hogging precious bandwidth, not out of any piracy concerns.
that said, otherwise, the VPN thing seems like a good idea. i'll remember that for when i'm off-campus and back out in the wild.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly. I loved that game because it was so unique. It had such a light-hearted feel to the action and made the prince a very likeable character. The second two had the boring "dark tormented hero" theme I've seen a thousand times.
/seconded.
the hero of the recent games was, unfortunately, a one-dimensional sword/demonchain wielding piece of cardboard. while that was entertaining in some of the cutscenes, i'm sure "lololol, are they serious?" was not what the developers were going for.
the graphics do look pretty, but graphics and gameplay weren't really lacking in the most recent installments--just character design and storytelling.
is anyone else bothered by the fact that this "ZOMG RAM" video card uses the 4850 processor? so...second string processor, huge amounts of RAM...it's like they're *begging* to have the GPU be the bottleneck. this much memory would definitely be better used on a faster card.
don't get me wrong, the 4850 is a nice chip, but it seems a bit like hanging a diamond necklace on a small dog. nifty, if you're into that sort of thing, but ultimately just decorative.
silly me. i thought the flashy "install silverlight" prompt was the comic. imagine my surprise that there's another comic hidden behind that.
will microsoft's innovation never cease?
surely one of the best and earliest gaming platforms. but don't forget the more casual originals, like:
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (1985)
to this day, one of the most fun and mildly educational games i played as a young one in the late 80s, and it was first released for the apple II. i still ended up playing it and other slightly-ridiculous "edutainment" titles in elementary and middle school on the IIe, even well into the heyday of the first godforsaken iMacs. for schools with limited access to new hardware, the apple II really seemed to have some enormous staying power and flexibility.
early PCs often get compared to contemporaneous gaming platforms, but personally, i didn't own a single gaming console until i was in my 20s--starting out with the apple II made me an avid pc gamer, and i'm wicked grateful for that.
of course,
what, a whole book review on software development, and not a single mention of open source? how did this make it onto slashdot?
OSS cracks aside, it would be nice to see if the book talks about that side of things at all; the impression i got from the review is that there's not much distinction drawn between software licensing and development models, and that it's all sorta lumped in together.
so if, as the book seems to suggest, software development were regulated more closely, who would be accountable, or audited, or whatever, for an OSS project with heavy community involvement that's seeing commercial applications? or with an OSS project that gets implemented as part of a for-profit piece of software?
i'm curious, because i have less than zero experience in how this stuff actually works, but it seems like it would be a weird situation. anyone have any insight?
now, putting aside any jokes about worm vulvas, the original paper says this about the features they chose to focus on: As a model, we used the nematode vulva, a highly conserved, essential organ maybe i'm just not deep enough into the specifics of the exact features they were looking for, but common sense indicates to me that if you pick an "essential" feature to study, you are going to be looking at a feature where selective pressures--whether they favor novelty or conservatism--are going to be extremely strong. wouldn't that predict the results they report, that the selected-for variations, being under heavy selective pressure, show a non-random bias?
i'm inclined to agree with anyone who says this isn't news, and for two reasons:
1) if i'm right (probably not) in thinking this study's choice of subject predicted its results, that's just bad science
and 2) if i'm wrong, and this is just telling us that actual changes in an organism are primarily governed by selective pressures rather than the god Chaos, this adds NOTHING to the current popular understanding of evolution except another opaque and misleading news story.
personally, i'd like to see much more popular science writing on the mechanisms governing variation rather than the mechanisms of selection that pare that variation down into new features--each is one side of the natural selection coin, but it seems like selection gets all the attention.
as a "millenial" just starting out from college into IT, this article definitely hits on (or rather, somewhat near) an interesting dimension of my experience in the workforce. i'm confused, though, by the negative tone of TFA.
i'm currently working at a company where the turnover rate is rather incredibly high, with a huge percentage of temp/contract employees in the office (including myself). i am, modestly speaking, wicked overqualified for the phone-jockey work i'm doing now, and probably won't take any of the several relatively lucrative permanent positions i've been offered with the company.
thing is, i would have been perfectly happy to stick it out and rise in the company--as i'm sure many others would, too--if it weren't for one thing: the company is moving. they're relocating to a state where it's cheaper to operate, and probably dozens of younger techs like myself simply can't make that kind of shift. thus, half the office (most in that millenial age group) where i'm working has either fled, is fleeing, or will flee as the company relocates. turnover isn't a generational thing, it's just a result of this kind of fluidity in an industry, where everybody is outsourced to or contracted by somebody else at every level of the game.
that example aside, the fact remains that younger people in any industry are often in less secure/stable positions as far as their personal and professional lives, and have to hop between jobs, or have other commitments--like education--in ways that can interfere with keeping one job for a long time. an older worker is likely to be more settled and able to stay with one employer for a longer time. in IT, because there are so many opportunities available in the field. it's an employee's market, so job hopping is more easily do-able, and often even helps to build a diverse and attractive resume.
i'm sure the situation is rather different for people my age who come into the industry with jobs higher up the IT totem pole, where depth of experience means more than breadth, but down in the trenches i there's more to think about in terms of turnover among the young and fresh than just "the brats are spoiled".
i mean, yeah, we are spoiled, but we're not all verucca salt.
take escaping from guards, for example. one of the most interesting observations that came out of conversations my friends and i had about the game was that altair would be covered head to toe in blood after every single fight. now i dunno about you, but most guards and pedestrians who see a hooded dude covered head to toe in blood tend to react in fairly predictable ways. this in turn suggests a simple game mechanic for escaping: find some new effing clothes. the rooftop hideouts could serve as stashes with clean digs stored away, providing a mildly believable way to shake recognition of your character--instead, they are "base" in some bloody, crusader-era version of tag.
i'm all for suspending my disbelief, and the game provides some fantastically entertaining and--at times--innovative gameplay, but there's nothing really groundbreaking about what the game did. here's hoping the sequels take this ball and run with it.
i understand that what you're getting at is that the corporation is being heavy-handed by asking courts to enforce its side of the dispute against the individual, and given that a corporation has much vaster resources and ability to bring such legal action to bear, there is a huge, and probably profoundly unfair, power disparity here.
but.
it does not follow by any means that the government as a whole entity is stomping on anyone's right to free speech by being involved--granted, that's a matter of interpretation, but look at it this way. the courts exist as a brake on powerful organizations, to prevent C&D letter-like problems from being taken care of by henchmen in dark alleys. perhaps an extreme example, but that's the role the courts are meant to play.
one of the things that makes the level work (and Valve does a bunch of this in HL, too) is believable and crucial interaction with your partner NPCs. important as the physical details of the environment are, unless the game is about the last dude on earth, other characters have a role as design elements. they contribute both to the feel of the game and to the flow of whatever story is being told.
boneheaded and venal as the RIAA's tactics and position here are, it's time to stop talking about the damages as if the media companies are just trying to make back the retail value lost when someone downloads instead of buys. this is about who has the right to make a song available for download, to whom, and at what price.
the real tragedy for me, and what strikes me as incredibly evil on the part of the media companies, is that most of the people they're targeting as copyright infringers (a) have no idea what it is they're being made to pay for, (b) had no intention to profit by it, and (c) individually made nowhere near the kind of negative impact on record company income that they're being made to pay for. IMO, the disparity between impact and punishment is what makes this whole business into extortion rather than fair legal action.
not in small claims court.
from the wiki gods:
Trial by jury is seldom or never conducted in small claims courts; it is typically excluded by the statute establishing the court.
thus, judge judy = celebrity != referee
the answer is in the question you ask, and Robertson's study is a case in point if i've ever seen one.
don't hate me for this, because i know exactly how bad the NJO series could be at times, but i suggest you pick them up again--selectively. much of NJO was terrible, but if you read the novels by a few of the authors, like Karen Traviss, Michael A. Stackpole, and Timothy Zahn, those authors manage to do interesting things with characters, at least, in the much later SW books.
the star wars EU may be just a huge fan-fiction community with a Lucas stamp of approval, but there are some gems to be had even in books written long after the proverbial shark has been jumped and the proverbial horse beaten to death.
(granted, i don't care because if i want a switch i'll wipe it, and Joe Schmo doesn't care because in terms of user experience, it'll ideally end up being largely the same)
i'm not actually griping about the quality of OEM hardware and support simply because i'm picky and want better. there's a bigger problem here. i used to sell OEM systems retail, and i've seen enough of the consumer side of the PC market to get the sense that while PCs like Dells are, on the whole, a good thing, the average buyer has most likely been burned by one OEM or another, and if not by them then by retailers that understand less than the OEMs how to sell and support these products. if as so many pc owners gripe, "it doesn't effing WORK" on a hardware level, the experience of owning an OEM system can be a major obstacle to a lot of users either picking one up or spending enough time with one to develop more than rudimentary PC skills.
cheap PCs being an obstacle to opening up the world of computers to a non-initiate is simply not right. maybe, when it comes right down to it, it's a matter of public image for these OEMs rather than their actual track record, but a track record certainly helps.
all well and good, but linux or no, i still have serious reservations about buying a system from Dell.
the negative experiences i've had with dell are really not linked to the OS; they're all hardware issues and service issues related to the hardware. show me that they'll support linux equally on the software side *and* that they've stepped up their hardware support, and this will be a bit more interesting.
yeah, this is great news as far as the visibility of the linux community is concerned, but IMO, this changes very, very little about the pre-built PC market.
i'm still gonna build my next linux box.
yeah, but think about how they changed the game in the first place: they completely ripped out this incredibly deep and complex character development system, and replaced it with a cartoony, glorified hack and slash approach.
my point isn't that repairing an MMO is impossible, just that in this case that fixing it is gonna require undoing the first major overhaul, not just tweaking/balancing it. and that's some major undoing.
yeah, but how would another dev house undo the murder already done on the gameplay by SOE? there's a huge amount of inertia behind the direction an MMO takes, and it'll take a complete redesign or, more optimistically, a new game to fix that.
disclaimer: not responsible for rumors and false hope.
the missing point in TFA, i think, is where these researchers are drawing their data from. one of the things that's a recurrent problem in charting/predicting linguistic evolutionary trends is what you base whatever new Model #234a you've come up with on. most researchers doing this kind of modeling work use one or a few of the existing databases of english language text, but the question to ask is where exactly this text is drawn from. some databases draw heavily on samples of textual english--books, magazines, websites, etc--to put together their information on forms and usage, simply because it's the easiest way to go.
for example: the problem with that kind of sampling, as most any linguist will probably tell you, is that while it gives you a bloody enormous body of coherent linguistic data to work with, textual language is 1) different in a bunch of important contextual ways from spoken language and 2) is not actually where linguistic innovation and change often happens. linguistic change is almost always a bottom up phenomenon; lower class influences upper class, spoken language is both a hotbed of innovation (think about street slang), and one of the most powerful influences in what actually becomes accepted as normal usage over time. so what happens in great frequency off of the radar of these databases of recorded text could be running counter to the trends they identified, or might even underline those trends and reinforce them.
i have no idea whether or not this study is actually drawing on text-only data, or what kind of sampling they used, but it sure would be helpful to know, yeah?
...didn't he note in the caption above this very photo that the screencap is from build 5381, and *not* from the Beta2 build he's writing the article about?
yeah, he did.
and he was pretty upfront about the earlier builds being crappy and unstable.
back on topic, that kind of port forwarding isn't really typically available to users in a university-type LAN. that kind of control is at the router, and most universities with network admins worth their salt have centralized routers set up for the whole university.
bittorrent on my campus, for example, is reduced to (maybe) a trickle because of the bandwidth restrictions and port blocking we have in place, but that's largely to prevent a heavily computerized student body from hogging precious bandwidth, not out of any piracy concerns.
that said, otherwise, the VPN thing seems like a good idea. i'll remember that for when i'm off-campus and back out in the wild.