There's an old story that hackers tell each other 'round the fire. Long time ago, when line-printers were being built, the engineers didn't have enough space for the hammerheads for a full typewriter set, and they had to decide to use upper- or lower-case letters. The engineers agreed that lowercase serif was best, because it was more readable than upper-case and had enough difference between letters to recognize mistakes faster. A manager stopped them, and said "no, we must use upper-case letters, because it would be disrespectful to output the name of our Lord Almighty in lower-case letters."

And interfaces since then have suffered because of one manager's insistence that religious observances are more important than useful function.

The article uses the word "hologram" over and over, and comparisons to Star Trek, but the PR video avoids the term 'hologram' and uses "projection" instead. Hologram technology is not used, and people expecting features found in any hologram (paralax viewing, different views from multiple simultaneous points) will be sorely disappointed.

If someone has created a new and useful car, don't call it "a street aeroplane just like the Wright Brothers!"

We've already had people get slapped for birdsong as copyrighted work. An acquaintance of mine is already wrestling with YouTube because he recorded classical music on his guitar, and he's getting slapped because someone else identified it as a copy of their recording, and YouTube has already jammed advertisements into his video to compensate the accuser, as if he already agreed to a plea-bargain.

Too many false positives, and it costs much less for the people who are already wealthy to make false claims than it does for private citizens to defend themselves against the false claims. This stinks to high heaven.

I am disappointed in this year's "Reader's Choice." It mentions "Gmail" as the best Linux app for instant messaging, "Google Docs" as the best Linux(?) app for collaboration, and the "reader's choice" for Linux games have been the same for the past eight years, despite eight years of new developments (Battle for Wesnoth? From 2003? When there's Warzone 2100, OpenTTD, 0 A.D., Heroes of Newerth, Minecraft, Braid, Darwinia, DEFCON, MegaGlest, Amnesia Dark Descent, Aquaria, Tiny & Big, OpenClonk, SpaceChem ... jeez.

I think the "Reader's" part of the "Reader's Choice" may be out-of-touch.

How many of you have forgotten? There have been three Doctor Who movies already.

Why all the butthurt? There's always been alternatives; if you do more with your login screen than "name/password", you can always replace what they gave you out of the box with something else.

moses@deunan:~$ apt-cache search x-display-manager
lightdm - Display Manager
lxdm - GUI login manager for LXDE
slim - desktop-independent graphical login manager for X11
wdm - WINGs Display Manager - an xdm replacement with a WindowMaker look
xdm - X display manager
gdm - GNOME Display Manager
kdm - KDE Display Manager for X11

Most people don't know that the movie version of "I Robot" didn't start that way. It was an entirely different screenplay, the studio got the rights to some of Asimov's short stories, and retrofitted pieces of the Susan Calvin stories onto a screenplay they already had.

That's why "I Robot" didn't seem like the story -- it was another story entirely, decorated with Asimovian merchandise.

If someone hasn't already mentioned it, AugReal pets are described faithfully in the children's cartoon show "Denn Coil".
Check it out.

So long as the game is "reduce the other team's score to 0," you're going to have these verbs:
  - reduce enemy's score
  - increase allies's score
The game is going to focus on these verbs with a very tight focus; the 'damage (per second)' and 'healer' roles. These are the only two that really matter, because the only way you can win is with enough uses of that first verb. Hell, you don't even need the second verb, just have a high enough score on your team that the other team can't possibly reduce it to 0 in time. This strategy used when attempting a "defeat the boss in less than X minutes" challenge -- just one verb, used over and over again.

There are two more roles that are emergent properties of this system (which means they will appear whether you plan for it or not):
  - improve allies's performance
  - impair enemy's performance
These are the 'buffer' and 'debuffer' roles. 'Tanks' from EverQuest, WoWarcraft and other DikuMUD-based MMOs fall into the 'debuffer' role because they force the computer-controlled enemies to chose an sub-optimal target for their "reduce enemy's score" actions. To be exact, their actions are going through the the tank as a bottleneck, so that allies can focus all their "increase allies's score" actions. If they can't be that bottleneck (such as dealing with a PvP team of opponents), the tank's debuffs are ineffective, and the enemy's ability to reduce your team's score is unimpaired.

If you want to get rid of this "four-part trinity" inherited from DikuMUDs, then you have to get rid of the hitpoints mechanic as the only means of resolving contests.

Ghod I HATED this argument at the IT department.

"We should obfuscate the machine's use so hackers won't see easy targets."

You have to be kidding me. Most of the attacks won't bother trying to decypher some elaborate naming scheme, or get HR records to find out who's the CFO -- they'll just carpet bomb the entire network, and exploit any vulnerabilities they find. Frankly, if you have a hacker who already has access to the HR records BEFORE they break in, you've got a bigger problem, like maybe an inside job.

Workstation -> username. So when someone's downloading streaming porn and it's clobbering your bandwidth, you know who it is immediately. When the workstation changes hands to a new user, you should re-image the machine anyways.

We had the "serial number, referenced to a database" method at three locations, and each time I'd find out that someone was rushed and didn't update the database (or updated the wrong database), and I'd have to spend an afternoon validating all the entries again. This only served to slow me down, and didn't slow down our break-ins at all (which were, by the way, autonomous viruses and worms, not humans who could comprehend hostnames no matter what info we put there).

However, I did find some value in not naming machines by their purpose -- we did have a virus breakout that looked for machines named 'mail','smtp' or 'mx' for possible spam relays.

("why so many virus problems in places where you work?" I hear you ask. "are you some kind of shit IT guy?" No, I'm an IT guy that deals with C*Os who feel they don't have to follow the rules, and I get punished when I impose the rules upon them, even if it's for ISO 9001 compliance. Makes me sick; welcome to Toronto.)