I really don't see anything wrong with Amazon's response - they got a complaint, checked on it, and it violated their terms of service. Remember that that wikileaks is hosting STOLEN US PROPERTY, and as much as it is fun to read about it, it was illegally obtained - if this were a pirated software site, we wouldn't blink twice if the DNS provider refused them service.
yeah - I switched my mom from Comcast to google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) when she couldn't get through to support - I wasn't near a computer at the time and I remembered that one off the top of my head.
That is semi-wrong - Mono has an offshoot called Moonlight that offers most of the functionality of 1-3 (3 is still in beta). The only thing really missing is DRM because Microsoft refuses to release the encryption info necessary to make it work, but they have contributed licensed codecs.
I also believe Microsoft has a vested interest in Moonlight succeeding on Linux, though saying why is probably dipping into NDA territory.
yes, and this is also not the first time - K.C. Munchkin and Snapper had the same problem, and Atari went after others, as well, but I remember several clones that survived - Gobbler, Puck Man and Super Puck Man, Snack Attack!, etc. There also were play-alikes with some gameplay changed like Microwave and Lock 'n' Chase.
I'm fairly certain the creator of super puck man got sued, however there doesn't seem to be much info on the intertubes since it pre-dates them. Reminded me of searching for info on the Super Pirates of Minneapolis (I know it was one of the first major software pirate rings busted by the FBI - I was trying to figure out if it was the first or if there were others).
I would expect this to get even lower now that browsers are offloading some of their duties to GPU (not sure about other browsers, but Chrome has done that since 7 [around October 2010]).
To be fair, a scripting language like Javascript would need to be compared to a scripting language on the PC - for instance, Microsoft BASIC (the older one - not compiled BASIC like what I believe Visual BASIC can do now - I don't use it so I don't keep up), and not compiled code hand tuned assembly language in critical sections of the code.
Warp failed less because of its own merits or demerits than because of Microsoft having every major PC supplier in the US (and probably elsewhere) tied to exclusive Microsoft only product deals in the early 1990s (you know, pretty much exactly like the Comcast TV, internet, and phone service which should be illegal, but the US is a terrible regulator of "regulated" monopolies).
In 1994, when Warp came out, if you wanted a computer it came with Microsoft Windows 3.11, and the only exception I know of that shipped with PC's was Compaq's in-house window manager (but they still had to ship Windows 3.11 with it, and it was an easy switch). Server PCs had to include Microsoft SQL Server, as well, and by the time PCs started to encroach in the server market Microsoft was forced to abandon exclusivity deals in order to not be broken up as a monopoly. I worked for a major computer manufacturer in 1994 and while I didn't see the exclusivity agreement, it was widely publicized that if Microsoft had a product for it, we had to sell their product and no other (applying to software only - I'm not sure if MS even had a hardware division at that time, but most manufacturers had their own brand of mice and supplied 3rd party modems).
I actually bought my first mac (and replaced it in 1999 with a B&W G3 haven't bought one since) in 1994 because I was disgusted with this industry practice and my inability to find a PC that shipped with PC/GEOS (my preferred PC OS after GEM), or Slackware (my preferred OS at the time). The only bad was lack of a UNIX-like, but I got that with Yellow Dog Linux and SuSE a few years later (I got SuSE in early beta and YDL in release). For a long time I ran Linux and macOS concurrently (mac-on-Linux), but switched to full mac with MacOS X.0 (or what should have been called MacOS X beta).
True, but it ran like the original mac, which is to say it ran one program at a time in different windows and could application switch between them. Macs didn't have multitasking until 1987 (as I recall the Lisa had cooperative multitasking - the mac hardware couldn't handle it). I don't think Windows had any OS that did true multitasking until Windows 95 (but I'm not sure about PC/GEOS - they entered the market when MS was offering massive discounts on anti-competitive exclusivity and bundling agreements and were more-or-less forced out of the market that way).
Well they certainly use scientific method to prove or disprove myths. I had a massive argument with a gamemaster for Traveller about explosive decompression - I said it just wouldn't happen with a small hole like a gunshot hole (simply because the hole isn't big enough), he said it would. This guy was working on a doctorate in physics - and mythbusters proved him wrong - too bad it was 10 years too late.
Well some companies pick fights with them while collaborating in other areas - I know, and I've dealt with their 6 month hardware delays and red tape because they didn't want to sell to competitors (incidentally, they sold hardware to our contractors in India during this time, so they really didn't delay us with their wallowing).
I have worked for direct competitors that got killed in the market, however - Control Data Systems and EDS - both of which had similar downward spirals of spinning off profitable divisions to infuse them with cash to sustain the rest of the company. In EDS's case, they bought my company, took the excess cash, and spun us off. They also technically fired me (and everyone else they spun off), so yes, I have hard feelings - hope HP handles their employees better.
In what hell does it say "Blue was the color of the eyes of our savior Jesus Christ," anyway?
I was raised by parents that dragged me to Church 3x a week and have never heard that, nor do I recall it anywhere in my 3-4 read-throughs of the Bible (New [American] Standard, Revised Standard, King James, and Young's Literal Translation), though I've seen the white idealized Jesus paintings with brown hair and blue eyes, and he was most likely middle-eastern or black and brown eyed. There are no descriptions of Jesus in any book, AFAIK, even in apocrypha texts so the guy could be reborn and living next door to you and you'd never know.
true for that one, but how about memory leaks? Hard to tell with that one without running a leak detector, but I'm pretty sure the game shouldn't be consuming 4GB like it was for me after running for 6 hours.
The 8 and 16 bit era had a LOT less code to test, and much simpler gameplay. Still, I remember bugs, even on AAA titles - for instance, in Wizardry, having the Bishop identify item 0 gave you massive amounts of exp (incidentally I was one of the people that found this bug, but probably not the only one - knowledge of it spread mostly through word of mouth and BBS's) - the bug is noted in the wiki text.
A public beta is an effort to stress test and find bugs that got through quality testing. No Bethesda game that I know of has ever had a public beta - they use release 1 as the public beta.
My real problem with Bethesda is the inexcusable bugs that were not found - Save games not working would be a showstopper to me (and I've seen it). The memory leaks are inexcusable, as well (I had FO3: New Vegas consuming 4GB of RAM before it crashed - I have 6GB available). Another spot that isn't so severe, but still blatant is you can jump into a tiny room with only some machinery in the tunnel below the basement (on the left as you head toward the Ghoul rockets - I don't remember the building name) and you fall through the wall and respawn at the start of the level. The original Fallout games were buggy, as well, but only a few, like the disappearing car in FO2, were as severe.
I had hopes for this game because it was done by some of the original Fallout team, but it still plays a lot like FO3, which I didn't particularly like, and has annoying quirks inherited from that game - like when I attack the Powder Dusters with the NCR and the dusters hate me, why does stealing from them still give me bad karma?
No - R rated movies are enforced at the store level and are pretty much untouchable legally because they are classified as art and video games are not. The store enforcement is about 40% for R and Unrated movies, while video games are currently around 80%. A decade ago, I could understand legislation like this - enforcement was more like 11%.
The silly thing is that when I watched my 7 year old nephew play GTA3 briefly, he mainly did what he was supposed to do if he were a regular person- obey traffic lights, not hit people or cars, etc. Note that he was not supposed to be playing the game - his babysitter was playing it and she had gone to the bathroom and he took over and we just happened to return at that moment. Fortunately his mom didn't realize what game was being played or she would have had a fit and a half (his dad is much less reactive).
Re:I wish I had time to study Lisp, but...
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
Well I'm quite a bit older than you both and didn't care for Lisp or Scheme, but I admit, I'm biased - I had Scheme for introduction to data structures in my final year of college because I transferred schools and my data structures class was rolled into a series of programming classes in my first school and it didn't count as a data structures class in my new school. I'd previously had Lisp in an AI class (at school 1), so I audited out of the first class, but they wouldn't let me audit out of the second, so I sat through the most boring and easy class I ever took.
I disliked lisp in my AI class for a different reason - WAY too many parenthesis. Yes, it is the easiest language to do recursion in, but when you're counting 40-80 parenthesis to find a balance error, you start to go nuts (it was worse before I discovered the % feature of vi, which was really the only viable text editor at the time because emacs took 20 minutes to start up on that school's ancient 1kHz 6 processor minicomputer that was shared by 300+ students, and pico wasn't robust enough).
The other reason I disliked Lisp was that was the same year I discovered true object oriented programming - Smalltalk and objective-C on NeXT cubes. After the horror that is C++ which I had learned a couple of years prior, I couldn't believe how much cleaner they were (and that was before try-catch blocks and templates... C++ is a mess - a powerful mess, but still a mess).
Each iteration of id Tech always tended to be designed for the game being made and not as a flexible engine, so basically anything that used it was more of an extension of the game id put out (which is to say, a shooter). I've only seen the open source code, but generally id's engines are much cleaner and easier to use than, say, Gamebryo, but Gamebryo has a lot more flexibility (and is a frightening mass of buggy code from when I used it, but that was before it was called Gamebryo, so I'm not sure where it stands today... judging by Oblivion/Fallout/etc, it is still a mess). I have not had any meaningful time to look at Unreal Engine code so I don't know where that one stands, but from word of mouth I'd heard it was a lot cleaner than Gamebryo, but not quite as feature-rich (again, that was a few years ago - Unreal may have caught up).
Definitely a possibility - in 1929 (one year after the film) a company importing and installing Siemens hearing aids in the US forked off Sonotone to develop their own hearing aids (and the Sonotones looked a LOT like cell phones), so it seems a no-brainer to assume they were importing them prior to 1928 when the film was shot.
well, they didn't advertise the prequel part heavily, and didn't tie Battlestar Galactica into the name (e.g. Battlestar Galactica: Caprica) - it is more like a spinoff that way, and few spinoffs have had success.
I've always had problems getting into Stargate: anything just because I saw Stargate the movie and didn't care that much for it (Buffy the Vampire Slayer syndrome... and how can you do Buffy without Pee Wee? Most Buffy fans that I know don't even know there was a movie).
And no, I can't imagine Dollhouse as a prequel to anything - that show had it all - wooden acting, poor dialog, and bad writing. The actors that played Topher and Igor were the only ones that seemed to have acting competence. I've seen porn with better acting, writing, and dialog, and considering that I've seen a handful of pornos (part of my pre-degree job was quality testing video cassettes - everything from Disney to hardcore porn - seriously - and it may sound fun [at times it was], but pay was crap and some of the movies were just disgusting [sodomy and S&M is just not for me]), and to me that was a gigantic red flag. FireFly was MUCH better, but I think the "western in space" concept was a huge turn-off to many would-be fans - people that watch westerns don't watch sci-fi and vice versa.
Still, in a serial, the head writer needs to have some idea of what the story arc is and how it will end. Imagine The Prisoner or Lost without something to tie them together at the end. The problem with serials is they tend to lose audiences over time, which is why there are few true serials and most are episodic with serial themes (Chuck is a good example of this).
not to mention they changed the time slot and day, had almost no advertising about when the series would restart, etc.
I'm so-so on the story - I think they spent far too much time on the terrorist plot and religious aspects and not enough on pretty much anything else. Still, I like it better than most other shows on syfy - Sanctuary is a cookie-cutter monster show, Haven a cheaply made Steven King knockoff, and Stargate whatever I got bored of years ago (and gave the series several chances). Most of their other shows I gave a one episode chance to and gave up (at least the three mentioned before have mediocre to good acting - some of their shows are terrible).
I think the bottom line is what killed it, though - it costs too much for what it takes in.
yep - seen the same myself. The problem isn't Linux itself, as it is rare that all of the clients hang or fail, but the app they use definitely is buggy. From what I could see, they reset it from a panel with just a few buttons (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse), so the repair operation of pushing a reset button may be their only choice.
That and only XBox360 does DX9 (specificially 9.0C). PS3 uses OpenGL ES 2.0 library for the most part, with lots of hacks. If they drive the market, don't expect DX11 or later to be adopted until the next gen of consoles come out.
I'm really excited about physics integration, as most of the stuff I've worked on recently have required passing physics information between hardware and software (in textures). For instance, cloth and hair both need physics to behave realistically.
The real problem with Objective-C IMO is Apple is dictating its direction library-wise (or "extensions" as GNUstep calls them), and thus other platforms are always a step behind macs.
That said, most of these "extensions" really only apply to new GUI and system features and not general coding, so if you don't care about GUI stuff, you probably are fine. On the other hand, we already had a perfectly good cross platform gui-based object oriented language - Smalltalk - and it failed for the most part. The slowness of message passing always seems to be the killer of true OOPs, which is why kernels (like... any written in an OOP language) bolt on ways to bypass it, even if they are otherwise truly OOP.
I would say convoluted toward the middle, with some extremes. The characters varied and were shown with various character traits and flaws. Some were basically heroic, others dubiously so, others not at all as long as the ends justified the means. Avoiding spoilers, Rorschach is interesting in that he is morally the "good" character, as he is unwilling to sway from his morals at the end, but his methods aren't necessarily good (he is essentially a film noir detective character). The villain had good intentions but his solution to the problem is anti-heroic. Other characters were willing to look the other way in the end, even though they had intended to find and stop the villain.
The Comedian from that one always reminds me of the spoof on him though.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't see anything wrong with Amazon's response - they got a complaint, checked on it, and it violated their terms of service. Remember that that wikileaks is hosting STOLEN US PROPERTY, and as much as it is fun to read about it, it was illegally obtained - if this were a pirated software site, we wouldn't blink twice if the DNS provider refused them service.
yeah - I switched my mom from Comcast to google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) when she couldn't get through to support - I wasn't near a computer at the time and I remembered that one off the top of my head.
That is semi-wrong - Mono has an offshoot called Moonlight that offers most of the functionality of 1-3 (3 is still in beta). The only thing really missing is DRM because Microsoft refuses to release the encryption info necessary to make it work, but they have contributed licensed codecs.
I also believe Microsoft has a vested interest in Moonlight succeeding on Linux, though saying why is probably dipping into NDA territory.
yes, and this is also not the first time - K.C. Munchkin and Snapper had the same problem, and Atari went after others, as well, but I remember several clones that survived - Gobbler, Puck Man and Super Puck Man, Snack Attack!, etc. There also were play-alikes with some gameplay changed like Microwave and Lock 'n' Chase.
I'm fairly certain the creator of super puck man got sued, however there doesn't seem to be much info on the intertubes since it pre-dates them. Reminded me of searching for info on the Super Pirates of Minneapolis (I know it was one of the first major software pirate rings busted by the FBI - I was trying to figure out if it was the first or if there were others).
I would expect this to get even lower now that browsers are offloading some of their duties to GPU (not sure about other browsers, but Chrome has done that since 7 [around October 2010]).
To be fair, a scripting language like Javascript would need to be compared to a scripting language on the PC - for instance, Microsoft BASIC (the older one - not compiled BASIC like what I believe Visual BASIC can do now - I don't use it so I don't keep up), and not compiled code hand tuned assembly language in critical sections of the code.
Warp failed less because of its own merits or demerits than because of Microsoft having every major PC supplier in the US (and probably elsewhere) tied to exclusive Microsoft only product deals in the early 1990s (you know, pretty much exactly like the Comcast TV, internet, and phone service which should be illegal, but the US is a terrible regulator of "regulated" monopolies).
In 1994, when Warp came out, if you wanted a computer it came with Microsoft Windows 3.11, and the only exception I know of that shipped with PC's was Compaq's in-house window manager (but they still had to ship Windows 3.11 with it, and it was an easy switch). Server PCs had to include Microsoft SQL Server, as well, and by the time PCs started to encroach in the server market Microsoft was forced to abandon exclusivity deals in order to not be broken up as a monopoly. I worked for a major computer manufacturer in 1994 and while I didn't see the exclusivity agreement, it was widely publicized that if Microsoft had a product for it, we had to sell their product and no other (applying to software only - I'm not sure if MS even had a hardware division at that time, but most manufacturers had their own brand of mice and supplied 3rd party modems).
I actually bought my first mac (and replaced it in 1999 with a B&W G3 haven't bought one since) in 1994 because I was disgusted with this industry practice and my inability to find a PC that shipped with PC/GEOS (my preferred PC OS after GEM), or Slackware (my preferred OS at the time). The only bad was lack of a UNIX-like, but I got that with Yellow Dog Linux and SuSE a few years later (I got SuSE in early beta and YDL in release). For a long time I ran Linux and macOS concurrently (mac-on-Linux), but switched to full mac with MacOS X.0 (or what should have been called MacOS X beta).
True, but it ran like the original mac, which is to say it ran one program at a time in different windows and could application switch between them. Macs didn't have multitasking until 1987 (as I recall the Lisa had cooperative multitasking - the mac hardware couldn't handle it). I don't think Windows had any OS that did true multitasking until Windows 95 (but I'm not sure about PC/GEOS - they entered the market when MS was offering massive discounts on anti-competitive exclusivity and bundling agreements and were more-or-less forced out of the market that way).
Well they certainly use scientific method to prove or disprove myths. I had a massive argument with a gamemaster for Traveller about explosive decompression - I said it just wouldn't happen with a small hole like a gunshot hole (simply because the hole isn't big enough), he said it would. This guy was working on a doctorate in physics - and mythbusters proved him wrong - too bad it was 10 years too late.
Well some companies pick fights with them while collaborating in other areas - I know, and I've dealt with their 6 month hardware delays and red tape because they didn't want to sell to competitors (incidentally, they sold hardware to our contractors in India during this time, so they really didn't delay us with their wallowing).
I have worked for direct competitors that got killed in the market, however - Control Data Systems and EDS - both of which had similar downward spirals of spinning off profitable divisions to infuse them with cash to sustain the rest of the company. In EDS's case, they bought my company, took the excess cash, and spun us off. They also technically fired me (and everyone else they spun off), so yes, I have hard feelings - hope HP handles their employees better.
In what hell does it say "Blue was the color of the eyes of our savior Jesus Christ," anyway?
I was raised by parents that dragged me to Church 3x a week and have never heard that, nor do I recall it anywhere in my 3-4 read-throughs of the Bible (New [American] Standard, Revised Standard, King James, and Young's Literal Translation), though I've seen the white idealized Jesus paintings with brown hair and blue eyes, and he was most likely middle-eastern or black and brown eyed. There are no descriptions of Jesus in any book, AFAIK, even in apocrypha texts so the guy could be reborn and living next door to you and you'd never know.
true for that one, but how about memory leaks? Hard to tell with that one without running a leak detector, but I'm pretty sure the game shouldn't be consuming 4GB like it was for me after running for 6 hours.
The 8 and 16 bit era had a LOT less code to test, and much simpler gameplay. Still, I remember bugs, even on AAA titles - for instance, in Wizardry, having the Bishop identify item 0 gave you massive amounts of exp (incidentally I was one of the people that found this bug, but probably not the only one - knowledge of it spread mostly through word of mouth and BBS's) - the bug is noted in the wiki text.
A public beta is an effort to stress test and find bugs that got through quality testing. No Bethesda game that I know of has ever had a public beta - they use release 1 as the public beta.
My real problem with Bethesda is the inexcusable bugs that were not found - Save games not working would be a showstopper to me (and I've seen it). The memory leaks are inexcusable, as well (I had FO3: New Vegas consuming 4GB of RAM before it crashed - I have 6GB available). Another spot that isn't so severe, but still blatant is you can jump into a tiny room with only some machinery in the tunnel below the basement (on the left as you head toward the Ghoul rockets - I don't remember the building name) and you fall through the wall and respawn at the start of the level. The original Fallout games were buggy, as well, but only a few, like the disappearing car in FO2, were as severe.
I had hopes for this game because it was done by some of the original Fallout team, but it still plays a lot like FO3, which I didn't particularly like, and has annoying quirks inherited from that game - like when I attack the Powder Dusters with the NCR and the dusters hate me, why does stealing from them still give me bad karma?
No - R rated movies are enforced at the store level and are pretty much untouchable legally because they are classified as art and video games are not. The store enforcement is about 40% for R and Unrated movies, while video games are currently around 80%. A decade ago, I could understand legislation like this - enforcement was more like 11%.
The silly thing is that when I watched my 7 year old nephew play GTA3 briefly, he mainly did what he was supposed to do if he were a regular person- obey traffic lights, not hit people or cars, etc. Note that he was not supposed to be playing the game - his babysitter was playing it and she had gone to the bathroom and he took over and we just happened to return at that moment. Fortunately his mom didn't realize what game was being played or she would have had a fit and a half (his dad is much less reactive).
Well I'm quite a bit older than you both and didn't care for Lisp or Scheme, but I admit, I'm biased - I had Scheme for introduction to data structures in my final year of college because I transferred schools and my data structures class was rolled into a series of programming classes in my first school and it didn't count as a data structures class in my new school. I'd previously had Lisp in an AI class (at school 1), so I audited out of the first class, but they wouldn't let me audit out of the second, so I sat through the most boring and easy class I ever took.
I disliked lisp in my AI class for a different reason - WAY too many parenthesis. Yes, it is the easiest language to do recursion in, but when you're counting 40-80 parenthesis to find a balance error, you start to go nuts (it was worse before I discovered the % feature of vi, which was really the only viable text editor at the time because emacs took 20 minutes to start up on that school's ancient 1kHz 6 processor minicomputer that was shared by 300+ students, and pico wasn't robust enough).
The other reason I disliked Lisp was that was the same year I discovered true object oriented programming - Smalltalk and objective-C on NeXT cubes. After the horror that is C++ which I had learned a couple of years prior, I couldn't believe how much cleaner they were (and that was before try-catch blocks and templates... C++ is a mess - a powerful mess, but still a mess).
Each iteration of id Tech always tended to be designed for the game being made and not as a flexible engine, so basically anything that used it was more of an extension of the game id put out (which is to say, a shooter). I've only seen the open source code, but generally id's engines are much cleaner and easier to use than, say, Gamebryo, but Gamebryo has a lot more flexibility (and is a frightening mass of buggy code from when I used it, but that was before it was called Gamebryo, so I'm not sure where it stands today... judging by Oblivion/Fallout/etc, it is still a mess). I have not had any meaningful time to look at Unreal Engine code so I don't know where that one stands, but from word of mouth I'd heard it was a lot cleaner than Gamebryo, but not quite as feature-rich (again, that was a few years ago - Unreal may have caught up).
international avoirdupois pound is set to exactly 0.45359237 kilograms... or is it? I guess that's why the US cares if the kilogram loses weight.
Definitely a possibility - in 1929 (one year after the film) a company importing and installing Siemens hearing aids in the US forked off Sonotone to develop their own hearing aids (and the Sonotones looked a LOT like cell phones), so it seems a no-brainer to assume they were importing them prior to 1928 when the film was shot.
well, they didn't advertise the prequel part heavily, and didn't tie Battlestar Galactica into the name (e.g. Battlestar Galactica: Caprica) - it is more like a spinoff that way, and few spinoffs have had success.
I've always had problems getting into Stargate: anything just because I saw Stargate the movie and didn't care that much for it (Buffy the Vampire Slayer syndrome... and how can you do Buffy without Pee Wee? Most Buffy fans that I know don't even know there was a movie).
And no, I can't imagine Dollhouse as a prequel to anything - that show had it all - wooden acting, poor dialog, and bad writing. The actors that played Topher and Igor were the only ones that seemed to have acting competence. I've seen porn with better acting, writing, and dialog, and considering that I've seen a handful of pornos (part of my pre-degree job was quality testing video cassettes - everything from Disney to hardcore porn - seriously - and it may sound fun [at times it was], but pay was crap and some of the movies were just disgusting [sodomy and S&M is just not for me]), and to me that was a gigantic red flag. FireFly was MUCH better, but I think the "western in space" concept was a huge turn-off to many would-be fans - people that watch westerns don't watch sci-fi and vice versa.
Still, in a serial, the head writer needs to have some idea of what the story arc is and how it will end. Imagine The Prisoner or Lost without something to tie them together at the end. The problem with serials is they tend to lose audiences over time, which is why there are few true serials and most are episodic with serial themes (Chuck is a good example of this).
not to mention they changed the time slot and day, had almost no advertising about when the series would restart, etc.
I'm so-so on the story - I think they spent far too much time on the terrorist plot and religious aspects and not enough on pretty much anything else. Still, I like it better than most other shows on syfy - Sanctuary is a cookie-cutter monster show, Haven a cheaply made Steven King knockoff, and Stargate whatever I got bored of years ago (and gave the series several chances). Most of their other shows I gave a one episode chance to and gave up (at least the three mentioned before have mediocre to good acting - some of their shows are terrible).
I think the bottom line is what killed it, though - it costs too much for what it takes in.
yep - seen the same myself. The problem isn't Linux itself, as it is rare that all of the clients hang or fail, but the app they use definitely is buggy. From what I could see, they reset it from a panel with just a few buttons (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse), so the repair operation of pushing a reset button may be their only choice.
That and only XBox360 does DX9 (specificially 9.0C). PS3 uses OpenGL ES 2.0 library for the most part, with lots of hacks. If they drive the market, don't expect DX11 or later to be adopted until the next gen of consoles come out.
I'm really excited about physics integration, as most of the stuff I've worked on recently have required passing physics information between hardware and software (in textures). For instance, cloth and hair both need physics to behave realistically.
The real problem with Objective-C IMO is Apple is dictating its direction library-wise (or "extensions" as GNUstep calls them), and thus other platforms are always a step behind macs.
That said, most of these "extensions" really only apply to new GUI and system features and not general coding, so if you don't care about GUI stuff, you probably are fine. On the other hand, we already had a perfectly good cross platform gui-based object oriented language - Smalltalk - and it failed for the most part. The slowness of message passing always seems to be the killer of true OOPs, which is why kernels (like... any written in an OOP language) bolt on ways to bypass it, even if they are otherwise truly OOP.
I would say convoluted toward the middle, with some extremes. The characters varied and were shown with various character traits and flaws. Some were basically heroic, others dubiously so, others not at all as long as the ends justified the means. Avoiding spoilers, Rorschach is interesting in that he is morally the "good" character, as he is unwilling to sway from his morals at the end, but his methods aren't necessarily good (he is essentially a film noir detective character). The villain had good intentions but his solution to the problem is anti-heroic. Other characters were willing to look the other way in the end, even though they had intended to find and stop the villain.
The Comedian from that one always reminds me of the spoof on him though.