If you're a coder who uses .NET, I recently came across some new neat tools by ItJustWorks. The four tools are:

• IJW Profiler for .NET & Java
• Corfu Text Editor
• IJW Framework
• IL to Native Compiler

There's a worthwhile This American Life episode about 419 scammers (Act I just past the intro).

Quite interesting (and I must admit it's a more than a little amusing). It begs the question: Do 419 scammer scammers take their anti-scamming too far?

A developer posted a brief blog outlining the libraries that Google Chrome uses. Since it's open source, you can see how many (and which) libraries they chose to use. Interesting stuff if you want to get an idea of what is needed to start an open source browser like Chrome. Another blog talks about the security implications of this.

Artists like the eloquent poet Kid Rock are taking a stand against iTunes as they continue to see album sales fall while their hit singles skyrocket in sales on the popular music distribution application. He will be joining Jay-Z in not putting his latest album up for sale on iTunes. I guess Kid's fans were either sending him a message he didn't want to hear or it's just not fair to give consumers a choice. Either way, the world will mourn the loss of Kid's music on iTunes. </sarcasm>

This won't significantly affect most of you, but we have been working on some meta mod changes. The most user visible change is that the UI we used to use was thrown out, and instead we are using one based on the firehose. Subscribers will see it when they go to the old metamod link although users can see it by going to this version of those hose

The first real change is that we've changed the meanings of the UI around. The old system is 'Fair' and 'Unfair' and the new system is '+' and '-'. The meanings are subtly different. You are no longer rating individual 'Insightful' or 'Troll' or whatever... you are now stating basically "Is this comment good or bad for you". Personally, since I find very few Score:5 funny comments to be actually really funny (and not just cliche memes) I '-' most of them. You are encouraged to be harsh if you don't actually think something is insightful or funny, call it such. The system encourages more of what you + and less of what you -.

You are also welcome now to do more than 10 m2 per day... however we internally have diminishing returns after 10, so you can do more, but they start to matter less and less.

There will undoubtedly be bugs so feel free to email me or vroom at slashdot if you find them. Probably next week or so we'll move this out to everyone, so your assistance is appreciated.

I wrote a journal entry two years back. I had recently bought Oblivion and had spent 10 hours try to get it to simply run, and the post basically outlined how PC games require far too much effort from the user to simply run, let alone become playable. This post can be regarded as a followup.

I ended up liking Oblivion, so much so that I bought the Game of the Year edition for the PS3. The graphics were a lot better, and there were no control issues or installation worries. Then I ran into the, effectively show stopping, PS3 Vampire Cure Bug, after probably 50+ hours of play. Bethesda apparently have no intention of ever patching or fixing this bug. I can safely say that if I had know that this bug was present, I would never have bough the game.

As I see it, PC game makers like Bethesda, simply are not going to make it in the current generation of games. Show stopping bugs with no official efferot to patch them might be acceptable in PC gaming, but console gaming has historically had a much higher standard when it comes to major bugs and glitches. Even in the days of the PS2, if a game crashed, it was quite a shock, and a major black mark on your opinion of the game. Show stopping bugs with no workaround, are to my memory completely unheard of.

Say what you will, but up until effectively two years ago, the first version of your console game was going to be the last. Companies had no recourse whatsoever apart from a total recall if they needed to change so much as one bit in the game binary. Under those conditions, a very high level of quality was sought and in fact was achieved in the vast majority of cases. Console gamers have spent the last 20+ years playing games that largely did not crash, did not glitch(obtusely), and did not have show stopping bugs. PC gamers have spent the last 20+ years trying, and failing, to get games not to do any of these things.

My point is that console gamers have come to expect a certain level of quality and professionalism, and console game makers have responded accordingly. PC gamers have come to expect patches, hotfixes and workarounds, and PC game makers have become complacent when it comes to errors, and contemptuous towards their users. This does not bode well for "establishment" PC game makers trying to break into the console market. I believe they are, one by one, doomed to fail in this regard.

Unreal Tournament 3 crashes all over the place on PS3. Oblivion:GOTY has character which when spoken to display "I HAVE NO GREETING" default errors. Call of Duty 4's level and art design is aesthetically appalling. The best titles PC gaming has to offer typically end up a second or third rate titles when it comes to console gaming. A lot of this has to do with control schemes. RTS titles and games like the Sims are fundamentally unsuited to a console controller. But it also has to do with the overall quality of PC titles which when compared to console titles, simply don't meet the grade.

It works both ways. Titles among the best that console gaming has to offer typically do not fare well when ported to PCs. Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid 2, Halo. However, this is likely due to control and framerate issues, and with PC gamepads becoming more common(Xbox 360 pad plug and play in Windows), and graphics cards improving, these issues alleviated somewhat.

However, PC games makers have a much larger step to overcome if they want to break the console market. They need to overcome a culture of complacency. A culture that allows games to be released that will not work without a patch. The culture that allows a game to be shipped with known bugs still present. The culture that thinks graphics improvement means simply increasing texture rates and bloom and has no time for aesthetic design. The culture that essentially holds technical metrics in awe and game players in contempt. It is a culture driven in large part by the backing of PC hardware manufacturers and not the feedback of gamers.

I was looking forward to Fallout 3. But I will no longer be buying it when it arrives. I have been burned quite badly by Bethesda already, and I have no reason to believe that they will change their ways. It's a similar situation with many PC gamer companies. They are steeped in a culture that simply will not work in the console world. I expect many to simply stop releasing console ports in the years ahead, as it becomes clear that console gamers will not tolerate half finished or unsupported products.

There's something to be said for PC gaming. But professionalism among PC game makers is not it.

Well, for subscribers only this week at least. We have a half dozen minor bugs left in the TODO list, but if you are a paying subscriber you can test it out. It works best if you are using the keybindings to navigate. Pressing 'f' takes you to the next unread comment respecting thread order... so you can press that over and over again.

We also added a thing to 'collapse comments after reading' which I think I might turn of as a default setting soon. This is only usable for subscribers atm as well. But basically, as you navigate through a discussion, it collapses the comments you've read after you move on. This makes it really easy to navigate large discussions without having to scroll over 150 comments you've already read.

we're aware of a number of annoying bugs, but hopefully most of them will be squashed by Pudge for this weeks code refresh. If things are stable, we hope to roll this out for everyone rsn.

also my baby cut his first tooth yesterday. My furniture will never be ungnawed upon again.

How robust is your religion? Have all the boundary cases been tested and thought out or does it have more holes and contradictions than the USSR's Penal System? Well, the Vatican is shoring up some questionable parts of Catholicism in regards to those pesky extraterrestrials that may or may not exist. In fact, some major theologians are speculating that each sentient creature would need its own Jesus Christ to save them from certain doom while others claim that it was a one shot deal for everybody. Still others speculate that there could be an alien race that never committed sin. Guess the movies have it wrong. A recent Vatican Newsletter proclaims: "The extraterrestrial is my brother."

Alright, on an early Friday morning, this live performance brought a genuine smile to my lips.

From the lyrics:

Kill Dash Nine!

So as we've been migrating the system from the tired old D1 to the exciting and awesome new D2 a number of complaints have come up. I'm going to talk about a couple of them here because I'm really looking for feedback on THESE issues. Please only talk about these points or I will mod you offtopic or troll or something.

The issue is about the use of Flat/Threaded/Nested modes. D2 cleanly replaces both threaded and nested modes- you effectively get nested mode by bringing the 2 sliders together. And threaded mode is vastly more flexible because you can choose the level at which comments are abbreviated or displayed in full text. So users of those modes should be set (obviously there are other reasons not to use D2, I'm just talking about the layouts here tho)

What's left is flat mode, which has a number of sort options. Now flat mode is used by roughly 4% of our active population. When i think about flat mode, I think about 2 reasons you would have to use it:

1. I hate indenting and whitespace. I want a big vertical column now this isn't my bag, but I can understand it and even consider supporting it in D2. I think you sacrifice legibility, but this is a personal preference. It also would be easy to support in D2. Hell, you could probably do it in a greasemonkey script no problem.
2. It's easier to remember your place in flat mode This to me is the only reason to use flat mode- you can reload your page an hour later, find the last comment you read, and pick up where you left off.

Now I Would think that the only reason to use flat mode is #2... except that only a couple hundred Slashdot readers have the 'ignore threads' sort order enabled. So either they don't understand what they are doing, or #1 above is the real reason that they use flat mode.

So in a nutshell, the question I am asking in this journal is 'Why do you use flatmode?' Is it cosmetic? To more easily keep your place in a discussion? Something I'm just missing? We have plans to implement a read/unread state retention for discussions, so maybe would you migrate to a threaded view if that function exists? Or is it purely aesthetic... an irrational hatred of scrollbars and whitespace? :)

The reason this matters is that simply formatting the page flatly is easy. Probably a simple greasemonkey hack or maybe a few lines of CSS. But re-implementing the alternate sort is gonna take some work. And I'm ok with that... except that the logs say that nobody actually USES that sort... they ONLY are using flat mode for the cosmetic reasons.

Speak out! Stay on-topic or you WILL be moderated down.

In-Place Posting is now live for all logged in users. Hopefully there are no surprises. We've found a number of very tiny bugs, but nothing show stopping. We'll leave the link up to the 'classic' reply form for a few weeks. Next week anonymous coward will get the new posting form... hopefully there are no surprises with that.

A few new keybindings aren't documented yet... v (end) t (top) [] change upper threshold and ,. change bottom threshold. Also 'r' opens the new reply box, m opens the mod total thingee.

The only major complaint so far is that the design changes consume a lot more whitespace. I have mixed feelings on the subject, but am aiming to strike a balance. We noticed 2 very clear places where the whitespace is excessive and hopefully that will be fixed RSN. But on the other hand, making deep threads visually clear, and drawing some attention to the 'reply' buttons is beneficial to everyone, so bare with us as we work to strike some sort of balance.

There's a tiny graphic depicting the time line of Unix. I found it interesting as I've never realized the sheer volume of incarnations of Unix until now.

Discussion2 rolls on... the most recent addition to the system is in-place comment posting. Essentially, little dynamic ajaxy slideout boxes to post directly within the thread, without going to a stand-alone page. This is great because you don't have to lose your place within the thread to post.

this functionality is currently only available to paid subscribers, and several hundred of them have tested it out already. We still need to make it look pretty and add a few minor things (like the CAPTCHA for anonymous posting) but it's almost done.

Also worth noting is that logged in users can click on the 'Score' field of comments to view the moderation information on the comment. This information was previously not visible within D2, unless you navigated outside the d2 system (opening a comment in a new window did it). I doubt most people really care about this info, but it's available.

We also have one (perhaps minor) thing to get in... right now if you visit a comment directly via a CID link you can navigate within that thread, but navigating 'up' the comment hierarchy results in a new page, and a new discussion... this makes context a pain to maintain. So pudge is going to change that page to display the parent posts in an abbreviated format. This will mean that you can climb back up the thread easily, even if you entered the forum via a link deep into a thread.

A few minor items left on the todo list (keybindings for threshold changes... maybe press 'r' to open the reply slideout from the current comment, and a bunch of small design issues to make the threads a little more visually clear and easily navigatable) and we're ready to call D2 finished.

We have no plans to remove D1, so those of you who hate D2 are welcome to stay on the old system, but obviously new moderation tools and whatever else we think of will be attached to D2, not D1, so you've been warned ;)

Half a week ago I was lucky enough to have a friend who works at Best Buy hook me up with a Wii. I've been playing Smash Bros fairly obsessively but it's not like Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies obsessive. Why is this?

I found an interesting article about Sega claiming the Wii has been inappropriately written off as being not for 'hardcore' gamers. So I would like to ask Slashdot if they, as members of a gaming community, feel that the Wii is inaccessible because it doesn't offer the time consuming grind of achievements (like the XBox 360) or even the endless single player RPG (like the PS3)? Is it seen as a system purely for the 'casual gamer' and not someone who wants to dump a whole Saturday into progress? Is it's popularity based on this image? I remember the backbreaking days I put into Gauntlet & Bionic Commando, has Nintendo forgotten the games that require hours and hours of practice and finesse? Is this a side effect of the occasionally glitchy and not too precise wiimote?

As a regular reader of Slashdot, I am often amazed at the litigation that artists--especially musicians--have to deal with. The lawyer profession is almost almost a pox upon their kind. When it should not be, lawyers should be working with musicians to protect what is theirs. And the abuses, mistreatment, scamming & lying they face from their managers, labels, publishers & contracts makes it a wonder to me that any artist makes a living at all!

A friend in college introduced me to the works of Mikhail Bulgakov after which I immediately read and fell in love with his most famous work, The Master and Margarita . Spurred by that I read Heart of a Dog yet could find no other novels at any of the used bookstores. Bulgakov was a Ukrainian born Russian novelist and playwright who suffered suppression and torment by the Soviets. Oddly enough, he found favor from Stalin which was possibly the only thing that kept him from a much worse fate. So he is a rare gem that was allowed to write novels & plays which he wrote with furious satire against those manipulating his life and existence.

Recently in 2007 Andrew Bromfield translated A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel) for Penguing Classics and I found it at a Border's Books of all places! I have found that I can order translations of several other of his works but for now I would like to discuss A Dead Man's Memoir as I feel it pertains more and more to present day America than it does the historical Soviet Union.

The books main character, Sergei Maksudov, is a failed novelist. This is Bulgakov's satire of himself. Maksudov is not a great legal expert and meets a man through a friend who will publish one of his manuscripts in a literary magazine. But after he sells the rights (for very meager sums) to publish it to this man, nothing is ever published. What really happened in Bulgakov's life when he did this was a man named Zakhar Kagansky traveled to Europe with the ill conceived contract and posed as Bulgakov's legal advisor! He spent fifteen years collecting royalties on Bulgakov's plays & novels!

So instead, Maksudov turns to writing plays. He makes the mistake of signing a contract with a theater interested in producing his play. But he at once realizes that they are not so interested in producing it as they are turning it into something ... more acceptable or merely just more to their likings. His author friend--a man trained and broken already by these types--explains to him that he should have agreed to everything and then simply never done it. This is what it takes to progress as an artist.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when he faces the entire board (including their leader and the very manipulative Ivan Vasilievich) of that theater and comes to a very harsh realization:

So used and manipulated leaves Maksudov a mental wreck and wretchedly jaded. Bulgakov opens chapter 14 talking about Moscow and a stain he has on his clothing, perhaps drawing parallels to the people he deals with daily there:

So true of the tricks and contracts that artists find themselves in. Ever wonder why The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is once again Prince? Contract dispute! And I'm sure he had some of the best lawyers working for him and reading over that document before he signed it! How much longer before that stain is back?!

Fortunately, his play is eventually produced as the theater is under criticism for not being contemporary or independent (which is in its name). From that point on, every horror story ever told of a book or play being produced into a movie or stage is realized by our hero. Aside from massive ego complexes, critics mad with jealousy & bad acting instructions, he has to deal with his contemporary play being directed by an older, more esteemed man who wants to censor and edit the play. Bulgakov's real life hardships were no different as directors and theater managers tried desperately to cleanse his plays of any political satire or criticisms--especially of the current government!

This drives him to nearly complete sanity. At night he practices lying to Vasilievich and dealing with him so that his play will be produced without censorship. He comes to this harsh realization:

A harsh realization that you are dealing with these kind of people, an even harsher realization when you realize that you've become one of them. Now a nearly a raving lunatic who has taken to talking to himself, he depends entirely on living at the theater where his play is being produced. It is the only thing that keeps him going--to know that his story might be told to people to provide them enjoyment and to hear it and recognize with the characters.

However, the production goes very slowly and the director (Vasilievich) is taking entire days to force the actors and actresses to perform strange acting rituals that are supposed to make them better actors. While the play does not progress at all! By this time, Maksudov & Bulgakov have become cut down and unsure of themselves, the lunatic says to himself near the end of the book:

How many times do you think that a musician, actor, writer, painter or graphics artist has been instructed not to do something? How many albums do you think come out these days with the intensity of the sound on the CD mastered so that it is all the way up all the time? How many artists are allowed to keep the sound that made them famous in their small towns? How many movies are made that lack a formulaic sure fire success model for today's theaters? Are we not living in a society where what is 'art' is defined by those with the funds to publish it?

If you don't read A Dead Man's Memoir, at least recognize that to be an artist of any kind today doesn't mean starvation necessarily but instead torment, manipulation and in the worse cases being stripped of your dignity & sanity.