I kind of like the ability to play an RPG without having to be a cartographer. Also, you seem to be espousing one of the most annoying types of puzzle: one object opens up a completely-unrelated area. (The only kind more annoying is pixel-hunting.) And when you say stuff like "gamers today just don't have the patience for it" you sound like the worst nostalgia-infected grandpa ever.
The funny/ironic thing is that I'm actually engaged for the last couple weeks in playing through Wizardry 8, a game in the old CRPG tradition complete with the annoying puzzles that come with it. It even has the obligatory riddle with free-form answer you have to guess. (I wandered around the tree city for two hours before I realized you can pull a couple vines off the wall; there was nothing to visually set them apart from background art. At least Wiz 8 has an auto-mapper with note-taking features.)
Go back and play an older CRPG-type game with integral puzzles, and compare the experience to playing something like Mass Effect or Oblivion. I think you'll find the newer game is plain more fun than the older. And besides, if you really want puzzle games, there are something like 20 on Xbox Live Arcade right now this instant.
At least Dell gives you the actual Vista disk, not simply a "restore all the crap" disk like HP does. (To add insult to injury, you have to pay extra to get a disk at all! Foolish me assumed that if you're paying a bit extra, you get a clean OS disk. Live and learn.)
Anyway, the Inspiron 530 I bought with Vista Home came with virtually nothing crapware-wise. Just the Dell driver update utility, and Google Toolbar if you count that.
My HP tablet running Vista took at least 20 minutes to be usable the first time it booted. Wiped it, installed Vista again (from a Dell disk, ironically enough; Dell doesn't ship crapware), and suddenly it's a great little machine.
You can't blame Microsoft for the crapware HP puts on the machine, especially if you were one of those protesting when Microsoft tried to gain more control of the end-user experience.
That's unfair; Microsoft isn't responsible for the bloat-ware and crap put on the computer by HP. The problem is that they have no way to separate, in the minds of the consumer, "Vista" vs. "HP's crapware", since both are sold in the same box.
It's the exact same thing OS X does when you're changing system-wide settings or installing software. The only difference is that since Microsoft is Microsoft, when Microsoft does it it's a horrible un-usable mess, and when Apple does it it's an innovative new and well-designed security system.
That said, some computers have problems with UAC-- but those are the fault of third-party programs, written like crap, and now Vista itself. For example, I have a ton of older video games that require administrative permissions to run-- WHY!? It's a VIDEO GAME! Nothing a video game ever does can be considered "administrative" pretty much BY DEFINITION! But I'm smart enough to put the blame where it belongs: shitty video game programmers and move on.
Really, all UAC is doing is pointing out bugs that have existed in products since Windows 2000. (Any application that pops up a UAC prompt would have failed when run under Windows 2000 normal user account.)
The point is he uses the same tactic. He can't talk to the people he wants to talk to, so instead he annoys a whole bunch of other people who have no decision-making ability at all. There's a chance the Truth commercials are staged (I don't know for sure), but I know Michael Moore annoying the crap out of receptions and security guards is definitely for real.
If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn't the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
Another free software pundit with absolutely no clue how quality software is actually developed and tested. It would take more than 2 hours to work out the document to schedule the testing of the new formats, and that's if they hurried.
Apple has "Genius Bars," Best Buy has "Geek Squad" and a painted Volkswagen. It's just a cute little name for something that is, fundamentally, really boring.
and just the fact that Apple has something called "Genius Bars" for Mac users reinforces my commitment not to use Apple products.
"Damn those companies that offer technical support! I won't buy from any company that actually stands by their products after purchase, the bastards!"
People on Slashdot say weird stuff.
I admit that the problem is mine and not Apple's.
No kidding, wackjob.
It's just that everything about Apple's approach to marketing their products creeps me out and causes me to experience an anxious nausea whenever I come into contact with their products or with dedicated users of their products. It's hard to bask in the cultural phenomenon that is Apple when you're nauseous.
No kidding. This reminds me when those Truth ad people who go to some quiet neighborhood with a megaphone and make loud obnoxious asses of themselves in the middle of the night. Because one of the houses, supposedly, was owned by someone who made money from tobacco. Michael Moore uses this tactic all the time, also-- you can't talk to the CEO of the company, just harass their receptionist and security guys. Great thinking, there.
A computer game designer named "psychochild" probably isn't helping the cause much.:)
Also I'm not so sure about manga-- it didn't really pick up in popularity, stateside at least, until the Comics Code was long dead.
But in general I agree with you. I guess the real question is how do you communicate that games are not necessarily meant for children, any more-so than movies or books?
Don't assume because a law mandates something that it doesn't already exist.
I can't speak for the other consoles, but Microsoft's (Xbox and Xbox 360) have password-protected parental controls. On the Xbox 360, you can also password-protect each individual account and give each account on the system a different lockout rating. So your 6 year old can only play E games, but your 12 year old can play up to T if they want. (Of course, since most consoles aren't set up this way, I don't know how well that works in reality. But the tech is there.)
If you're further curious, read the NYCLU letter to NY Governor Patterson. They do an excellent job of explaining not only lay arguments for why this is a bad idea (major works of literature are equally violent) but point to several court cases that support their argument.
That's what always gets me. If a kid's playing GTA4, they're going to turn into a violent sicko killer monster! But if they're reading "American Psycho," suddenly they're oh wow so smart look at him read that adult book.
Uh... "American Psycho" would be rated NC-17 in any reasonable rating scheme. But books are immune, I suppose, to turning children into sicko killer monsters.
I'd like someone to take these pro-game censorship people to task on that point. CDs, movies, and games all require (at the least) parental advisory stickers if not a full gamut of ratings, and "American Psycho" is fine.
You mean a mandated tool. As in, parents don't simply exercise good parenting and choose a console model with the ability to lock out games (or actually monitor their kids, but we don't talk about that now do we?). Every console will be required to have the functionality to lock-out content at the consumer's cost.
The Xbox and Xbox 360 already have a password-protected game rating lockout feature. I don't have any of the other consoles, so I don't know if they are ahead of the game or if this is an industry standard already.
In any case, every TV has a V-chip, and perhaps 0.05% of those V-chips are actually turned on. It's a "feel-good" technology that, in reality, is never used.
Snow Crash lost me on about page 3, where it turns out the hero's name is actually "Hiro Protagonist."
I don't know what kind of art-house BS that is, but talk about breaking the fourth wall. I saw it through to the end, but the book seemed to be mostly just gross-out scenes (do we really need the detailed description of the piked police officer?), terrible puns ("maybe they'll listen to Reason"), and juvenile humor/stuff a 12-year-old would find cool. Oh, and it turns out that Hiro Protagonist is not only a pizza driver for the mob who owns the best and fastest car ever, but he single-handedly built an entire virtual environment, also he saves the entire world. And he's an expert sword fighter. And all that other BS.
It's a shame, because there are really some good ideas in there, but you have to get through a lot of crap to get to them, and then they're totally wasted.
I've yet to get Google Gears to actually provide offline access to my files while actually offline. (It works fine while online, but of course what would be the point?)
Does anybody else have the same experience? All I ever get after logging in is a "file listing" which is blank, as if I didn't even have files stored in Google Docs.
(Why does every line start with a +? It's unreadable. Is that someone's weird-ass quoting email client?)
If you want to take that position, that's fine. But that position is incompatible with having lots of drivers on Linux, full stop. Asking hardware developers to document every single bit of their hardware is a gateway to litigation for them; they'll get sued. Your wifi card maker does it? The FCC puts them out of business. ATI or NVidia does it? The software companies they've licensed from sues them to the stone-age.
You're welcome to think that only open source drivers are ok, but if you do, you'll never have a lot of drivers, and you need to simply accept that fact and stop complaining about it. No amount of Linux goodwill will get a company past, "not only are Linux drivers harder to make and maintain, but you'll get sued or fined too!"
In any case, I wish you'd said this right off the bat, as it indicates that you do not, in fact, want Linux to have more driver support. Much like anybody saying they oppose nuclear power is communicating to me that they aren't actually environmentalists.
1) using Windows drivers is not possible because they are not open source and they are not compatible with Linux license. It's also a bad idea to use close source drivers (that's exactly what I was talking about "fixing" linux by making it crappier, but in any case that's not possible because of license, changing Linux license is not possible either, nor desirable)
Yes, but that's only a problem because Linus and the Linux community feels it's a good idea to constantly change the driver API. If Linux stabilized this API, at least for each major version, this problem would disappear.
So while you're correct that license compatibility is current a problem, you're incorrect that it's caused by the hardware makers. It's a cultural problem in Linux itself that must change: compromise is required.
In any case, this also doesn't address the second possibility: creating a driver-creation framework that can compile drivers for Windows and Linux at the same time, with no additional effort required. This doesn't exist, and to the best of my knowledge isn't currently being developed.
Facebook, the largest social networking site in the US
Facebook is number 2 to MySpace still. It's growing much quicker, so it's likely to overtake in the next six months, but at the moment Facebook is not the largest social networking site in the US.
So getting back to the original issue: Linux could benefit from more "tough love" is clear to me that in instance is false claim because bitching about hardware support no matter how accurate and deserved is won't help improve Linux a bit, or you see this differently?
I think a lot, or most, Linux developers see hardware support as kind of a hopeless mission. Or, even worse, as an easily played "excuse card" when someone points out some other lacking in Linux.
That said, I agree that complaints won't help obtain additional hardware support, other than to work up a list of priorities. The problem can really only be solved by diplomacy and cleverness from the Linux community. Linux can't hope to have good driver support until they convince hardware makers that the incremental cost of Linux support is worth the investment. This can be done two ways:
1) Lower the incremental cost, which basically amounts to "allow Linux to run Windows drivers," or possibly, "make a new driver development tool that creates a driver for Windows and Linux at the same time." 2) Make the business case to the hardware developers. This isn't going to be easy until Linux has a larger installed base, but that's not to say it's impossible.
Frankly, though, I think most of the problem is cultural. Linux, right now, is a gigantic game is "pass the buck", where every complaint can be blamed on another party. There's no place where "the buck stops," and the Linux community has shouted down any attempt at making one.
(Remember Lindows/Linspire? A distro with the horrible gall to make a version of Linux with a legally-licensed DVD and MP3 player? Remember how the community treated them? That's the reaction you get when you take actual measurable steps to make Linux easier.)
Slashdot Mirror
I kind of like the ability to play an RPG without having to be a cartographer. Also, you seem to be espousing one of the most annoying types of puzzle: one object opens up a completely-unrelated area. (The only kind more annoying is pixel-hunting.) And when you say stuff like "gamers today just don't have the patience for it" you sound like the worst nostalgia-infected grandpa ever.
The funny/ironic thing is that I'm actually engaged for the last couple weeks in playing through Wizardry 8, a game in the old CRPG tradition complete with the annoying puzzles that come with it. It even has the obligatory riddle with free-form answer you have to guess. (I wandered around the tree city for two hours before I realized you can pull a couple vines off the wall; there was nothing to visually set them apart from background art. At least Wiz 8 has an auto-mapper with note-taking features.)
Go back and play an older CRPG-type game with integral puzzles, and compare the experience to playing something like Mass Effect or Oblivion. I think you'll find the newer game is plain more fun than the older. And besides, if you really want puzzle games, there are something like 20 on Xbox Live Arcade right now this instant.
people have
Java installed
in their browser?
what is this,
2001 or something?
At least Dell gives you the actual Vista disk, not simply a "restore all the crap" disk like HP does. (To add insult to injury, you have to pay extra to get a disk at all! Foolish me assumed that if you're paying a bit extra, you get a clean OS disk. Live and learn.)
Anyway, the Inspiron 530 I bought with Vista Home came with virtually nothing crapware-wise. Just the Dell driver update utility, and Google Toolbar if you count that.
It was probably an HP.
My HP tablet running Vista took at least 20 minutes to be usable the first time it booted. Wiped it, installed Vista again (from a Dell disk, ironically enough; Dell doesn't ship crapware), and suddenly it's a great little machine.
You can't blame Microsoft for the crapware HP puts on the machine, especially if you were one of those protesting when Microsoft tried to gain more control of the end-user experience.
That's unfair; Microsoft isn't responsible for the bloat-ware and crap put on the computer by HP. The problem is that they have no way to separate, in the minds of the consumer, "Vista" vs. "HP's crapware", since both are sold in the same box.
It's the exact same thing OS X does when you're changing system-wide settings or installing software. The only difference is that since Microsoft is Microsoft, when Microsoft does it it's a horrible un-usable mess, and when Apple does it it's an innovative new and well-designed security system.
That said, some computers have problems with UAC-- but those are the fault of third-party programs, written like crap, and now Vista itself. For example, I have a ton of older video games that require administrative permissions to run-- WHY!? It's a VIDEO GAME! Nothing a video game ever does can be considered "administrative" pretty much BY DEFINITION! But I'm smart enough to put the blame where it belongs: shitty video game programmers and move on.
Really, all UAC is doing is pointing out bugs that have existed in products since Windows 2000. (Any application that pops up a UAC prompt would have failed when run under Windows 2000 normal user account.)
The point is he uses the same tactic. He can't talk to the people he wants to talk to, so instead he annoys a whole bunch of other people who have no decision-making ability at all. There's a chance the Truth commercials are staged (I don't know for sure), but I know Michael Moore annoying the crap out of receptions and security guards is definitely for real.
If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn't the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
Another free software pundit with absolutely no clue how quality software is actually developed and tested. It would take more than 2 hours to work out the document to schedule the testing of the new formats, and that's if they hurried.
The first 10 minutes is the tire, the other 20 is spite.
Apple has "Genius Bars," Best Buy has "Geek Squad" and a painted Volkswagen. It's just a cute little name for something that is, fundamentally, really boring.
and just the fact that Apple has something called "Genius Bars" for Mac users reinforces my commitment not to use Apple products.
"Damn those companies that offer technical support! I won't buy from any company that actually stands by their products after purchase, the bastards!"
People on Slashdot say weird stuff.
I admit that the problem is mine and not Apple's.
No kidding, wackjob.
It's just that everything about Apple's approach to marketing their products creeps me out and causes me to experience an anxious nausea whenever I come into contact with their products or with dedicated users of their products. It's hard to bask in the cultural phenomenon that is Apple when you're nauseous.
Maybe you should see a doctor about that.
I don't get it. Didn't Tron 2 come out like 5 years ago? It was a video game, and a pretty decent one.
There are many tasks (and segments of the population) for which Linux is not better than Windows. So you haven't hit condition one there, yet.
No kidding. This reminds me when those Truth ad people who go to some quiet neighborhood with a megaphone and make loud obnoxious asses of themselves in the middle of the night. Because one of the houses, supposedly, was owned by someone who made money from tobacco. Michael Moore uses this tactic all the time, also-- you can't talk to the CEO of the company, just harass their receptionist and security guys. Great thinking, there.
A computer game designer named "psychochild" probably isn't helping the cause much. :)
Also I'm not so sure about manga-- it didn't really pick up in popularity, stateside at least, until the Comics Code was long dead.
But in general I agree with you. I guess the real question is how do you communicate that games are not necessarily meant for children, any more-so than movies or books?
Don't assume because a law mandates something that it doesn't already exist.
I can't speak for the other consoles, but Microsoft's (Xbox and Xbox 360) have password-protected parental controls. On the Xbox 360, you can also password-protect each individual account and give each account on the system a different lockout rating. So your 6 year old can only play E games, but your 12 year old can play up to T if they want. (Of course, since most consoles aren't set up this way, I don't know how well that works in reality. But the tech is there.)
If you're further curious, read the NYCLU letter to NY Governor Patterson. They do an excellent job of explaining not only lay arguments for why this is a bad idea (major works of literature are equally violent) but point to several court cases that support their argument.
That's what always gets me. If a kid's playing GTA4, they're going to turn into a violent sicko killer monster! But if they're reading "American Psycho," suddenly they're oh wow so smart look at him read that adult book.
Uh... "American Psycho" would be rated NC-17 in any reasonable rating scheme. But books are immune, I suppose, to turning children into sicko killer monsters.
I'd like someone to take these pro-game censorship people to task on that point. CDs, movies, and games all require (at the least) parental advisory stickers if not a full gamut of ratings, and "American Psycho" is fine.
You mean a mandated tool. As in, parents don't simply exercise good parenting and choose a console model with the ability to lock out games (or actually monitor their kids, but we don't talk about that now do we?). Every console will be required to have the functionality to lock-out content at the consumer's cost.
The Xbox and Xbox 360 already have a password-protected game rating lockout feature. I don't have any of the other consoles, so I don't know if they are ahead of the game or if this is an industry standard already.
In any case, every TV has a V-chip, and perhaps 0.05% of those V-chips are actually turned on. It's a "feel-good" technology that, in reality, is never used.
Snow Crash lost me on about page 3, where it turns out the hero's name is actually "Hiro Protagonist."
I don't know what kind of art-house BS that is, but talk about breaking the fourth wall. I saw it through to the end, but the book seemed to be mostly just gross-out scenes (do we really need the detailed description of the piked police officer?), terrible puns ("maybe they'll listen to Reason"), and juvenile humor/stuff a 12-year-old would find cool. Oh, and it turns out that Hiro Protagonist is not only a pizza driver for the mob who owns the best and fastest car ever, but he single-handedly built an entire virtual environment, also he saves the entire world. And he's an expert sword fighter. And all that other BS.
It's a shame, because there are really some good ideas in there, but you have to get through a lot of crap to get to them, and then they're totally wasted.
I've yet to get Google Gears to actually provide offline access to my files while actually offline. (It works fine while online, but of course what would be the point?)
Does anybody else have the same experience? All I ever get after logging in is a "file listing" which is blank, as if I didn't even have files stored in Google Docs.
Nothing gets done without compromise. If you're not willing to compromise, you're part of the problem and not part of the solution.
I had one like that too, where the developer replied with a useless work-around that doesn't address the bug: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382
It's the year 2008, what excuse is there for not knowing how menus are supposed to work? Seriously, they've only been perfected since, what, 1985.
Again, this brings me to my initial point "people who want to 'fix' Linux advocate for a worse Linux" for me a Linux with a fixed API this this argument: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/misc/2.6/stable-api-nonsense-2.6.10-rc2.patch
(Why does every line start with a +? It's unreadable. Is that someone's weird-ass quoting email client?)
If you want to take that position, that's fine. But that position is incompatible with having lots of drivers on Linux, full stop. Asking hardware developers to document every single bit of their hardware is a gateway to litigation for them; they'll get sued. Your wifi card maker does it? The FCC puts them out of business. ATI or NVidia does it? The software companies they've licensed from sues them to the stone-age.
You're welcome to think that only open source drivers are ok, but if you do, you'll never have a lot of drivers, and you need to simply accept that fact and stop complaining about it. No amount of Linux goodwill will get a company past, "not only are Linux drivers harder to make and maintain, but you'll get sued or fined too!"
In any case, I wish you'd said this right off the bat, as it indicates that you do not, in fact, want Linux to have more driver support. Much like anybody saying they oppose nuclear power is communicating to me that they aren't actually environmentalists.
1) using Windows drivers is not possible because they are not open source and they are not compatible with Linux license. It's also a bad idea to use close source drivers (that's exactly what I was talking about "fixing" linux by making it crappier, but in any case that's not possible because of license, changing Linux license is not possible either, nor desirable)
Yes, but that's only a problem because Linus and the Linux community feels it's a good idea to constantly change the driver API. If Linux stabilized this API, at least for each major version, this problem would disappear.
So while you're correct that license compatibility is current a problem, you're incorrect that it's caused by the hardware makers. It's a cultural problem in Linux itself that must change: compromise is required.
In any case, this also doesn't address the second possibility: creating a driver-creation framework that can compile drivers for Windows and Linux at the same time, with no additional effort required. This doesn't exist, and to the best of my knowledge isn't currently being developed.
Facebook, the largest social networking site in the US
Facebook is number 2 to MySpace still. It's growing much quicker, so it's likely to overtake in the next six months, but at the moment Facebook is not the largest social networking site in the US.
So getting back to the original issue: Linux could benefit from more "tough love" is clear to me that in instance is false claim because bitching about hardware support no matter how accurate and deserved is won't help improve Linux a bit, or you see this differently?
I think a lot, or most, Linux developers see hardware support as kind of a hopeless mission. Or, even worse, as an easily played "excuse card" when someone points out some other lacking in Linux.
That said, I agree that complaints won't help obtain additional hardware support, other than to work up a list of priorities. The problem can really only be solved by diplomacy and cleverness from the Linux community. Linux can't hope to have good driver support until they convince hardware makers that the incremental cost of Linux support is worth the investment. This can be done two ways:
1) Lower the incremental cost, which basically amounts to "allow Linux to run Windows drivers," or possibly, "make a new driver development tool that creates a driver for Windows and Linux at the same time."
2) Make the business case to the hardware developers. This isn't going to be easy until Linux has a larger installed base, but that's not to say it's impossible.
Frankly, though, I think most of the problem is cultural. Linux, right now, is a gigantic game is "pass the buck", where every complaint can be blamed on another party. There's no place where "the buck stops," and the Linux community has shouted down any attempt at making one.
(Remember Lindows/Linspire? A distro with the horrible gall to make a version of Linux with a legally-licensed DVD and MP3 player? Remember how the community treated them? That's the reaction you get when you take actual measurable steps to make Linux easier.)