Comment Re:Bullshit Headline (Score 1) 311
Keep your facts out of my rant!
Keep your facts out of my rant!
It makes perfect sense for it to be using something that a user's unprivileged application is incapable of intercepting and acting upon. Computers are so tiny and cheap these days, that I think a lot kids forget that we really did used to have multi-user systems (instead of everyone having their own smartphone). And in multi-user systems, users really DO write fake-login programs, in order to trick other users into giving up their passwords. Do you really think a typical teenage programmer can't write an XDM-lookalike program to trick you? MS was thinking of that, at the time, and they came up with a reasonably good countermeasure to the problem.
Don't like it? Ok. I'll admit it's ugly. But what's your better (or even just-as-good) idea? AFAICT rival platforms address the problem by ignoring it. And as we're kind of drifting into a single-user systems, maybe that even makes sense, but I'm not sure it made sense to ignore the problem ten or twenty years ago.
Bloody hell, there are/were so many reasons to either hate or mock Microsoft. And this? This is like going to job interview and being asked to list your faults. "I'm afraid I work too hard, sometimes to the detriment of my personal life. And I sometimes lose sight of my employer's desire to serve the community, instead getting bogged down with greedy concerns about increasing company revenue." Oh, Bill, you're so humble to admit this "mistake."
Apple Maps lacks the capacity to send anyone anywhere. What happened is that it made a stupid recommendation, as computers are apt to do, and as most people know computers are apt to do. And a small fraction of stupid/negligent/careless/malicious people blindly followed the recommendation, apparently unable to read signs or use common sense about whether or not to drive on runways.
If the airport people had been smart, then instead of putting up barriers (well, actually, maybe that's a good idea anyway, stupid maps or not) and "complaining to" Apple, they would have made fun of Apple and got an airport cop to profitably ticket all the stupid people who think it's ok to drive on airport runways.
The more I think of it, what we have here, is a way to mechanically catch the very worst/stupidest/most_negligent_and_dangerous drivers on the road. Cities ought to be making deals with Apple and Google to route morons into places where they'll prove to courts that they are incompetent drivers, and then we can have them removed from traffic, or at least their points will reflect the higher risks they pose and maybe their insurance rates will become more in line with the risks they choose, so everyone else can pay a little less. Everyone wins. I'm not sure it would even be entrapment, because most jurors would realize that the driver was stupid and negligent even before the city paid for the joke directions.
"R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer."
From Wikipedia:
According to an estimate of 2011 the population of the city was 32,036
Ummm, yeah. We're talking about an awfully small city, here. I doubt that there's much of a security threat. Kids joyriding might be the worst, and why bother with the airport when there are thousands of square miles to go off-roading just outside of town?
Personally, I think we'd be far, FAR better off if had a much more pluralistic, parliamentary structure instead of the false right-left dichomoty that has dominated American politics since the country was founded. We need flexibility in our governmental system, not some ossified, static monolith.
Imagine a world where every HTTP request has DNT:1, and you're a server. What does that header tell you? Do you have a branch in your code, where the value of the header influences your code's behavior? Or is the header just wasted bandwidth, since it doesn't actually tell you anything?
DNT cannot be "fixed." It is already as powerful as it can possibly be. Go back from the server's PoV to the user's: can you even imagine how you would implement a situation where an HTTP header somehow magically forces other peoples' computers to forget things? DNT not a "technical measure" in DMCA-speak; it's an expression of a user's preference.
DNT's expression is advisory and it always will be, at best. The most you can ever possibly change it, would be to push it from advisory and informative, to ignored -- from possibly useless to definitely useless.
That's why it should default to unset, neither on nor off. It is only through an act of the user's will, that the header can possibly contain information, in the hopes that the server chooses to use it (and hoping to persuade someone else's computer to act a certain way, is the upper bound in what you can hope to achieve; that is the best case scenario). If you make it default to something other than unset, then you have removed information and lowered the probability that the server chooses to act the way you want it to. Whatever value DNT has, will be decreased.
I don't play FPSes on consoles so I can't speak to what makes sense for FOV there. I've never been willing to give up the fine degree of control and responsiveness that you get from the keyboard+mouse combination.
I agree with you that three monitor set ups with 120 degrees per monitor does cross the line. That's a bit much to be able to accept.
Oh, I understand the issue perfectly. I've been playing FPSes for about 20 years. Yes, at times I've played on organized ladders (sometimes with a great deal of success).
Older games that allowed complete freedom of the definition of the FOV were generally limited in the ladder play that I participated in. However, the limits were always larger than 90 degrees.
My bone of contention isn't necessarily the imposition of a limit for such play. I just happen to think that 90 degrees is a ridiculously small, arbitrarily chosen limit designed to meet the limitations of the 4:3 ratio monitors that we used to play on.
Push it out to the 110 or 120 degrees that I referred earlier and I have less of a problem with it, especially since the newer 16:10, 16:9 and wider ratio displays can handle the view without distortion. Throw in multiple monitor set ups and I don't see why, say, 140 degrees shouldn't be doable these days.
To your point about playing with a 360 view? Have you actually tried that on any sort of large scale or architecturally busy map? It might work on a simple, cartoonish flat palette map design like TF2 where the sight lines are also typically limited to 10-20 meters. Then it might be possible to train yourself to pick out players fast enough to be able to react. I'd eat your lunch playing any game where sight lines are generally much longer and/or terrain is much more complex.
I can't imagine playing the OpFlash/ArmA series that way, for example. Forget Red Orchestra, the Battlefield series, Soldier of Fortune, Joint Ops, etc.
Call of Duty or America's Army? Maybe. The maps tend to be a bit smaller for CoD. AA's maps tend to be tight urban ones these days instead of the much larger ones from earlier in the series.
Windows already has that, using a fancy filesystem API which was implemented by something called "Samba."
No, I heard the project got re-homed and is being actively developed, somewhere in Russia.
How can one exercise freedom of speech when in 21st century nearly all speech is digital, over this or that walled garden?
You had to exercise your freedom to put yourself into the walled garden. By default, everyone's speech starts out free and they do things to put limitations on themselves. Don't do that. Or reverse your earlier decision to stop being free.
Even if you're required to use Facebook for work or something like that, it's not like anybody makes you use Facebook for your own actual speech.
It takes a lot of work and inconvenience to keep yourself from being free. Just don't go to all that extra trouble, and you ought to be fine.
As a point of comparison: it's considered cheating in most first and third person shooting games multiplayer to increase your FoV beyond certain limit.
An attitude which I never understood. Games designed to enforce a 90 degree FOV fail to take into account that on average, our peripheral vision encompasses about 150-160 degrees for most people.
This is so because it gives you vastly superior awareness of your surroundings, making it much harder to surprise you with flanking.
Well, that's sort of the point of peripheral vision, isn't it? There's an easy test that I was taught in junior high that quickly demonstrates this. Hold your arms out in front of you, thumbs up. Move them to the edges of your vision on both sides until you can just see them. Stop, and take a quick look left and right. If you're like most people, you'll find that you're arms are now almost straight out from your sides.
Games which take into account this awareness tend to to do one or both of two things. The first is to allow an FOV up to some arbitrary limit somewhat greater than 90 degrees, say 110 or 120 degrees. Anything after that tends to get so distorted as to be useless on a single monitor anyhow.
The second option is to show some sort of indicators on the side of your monitor and/or allow a quick free look around of just your head. The best implementation of this model belongs to an FPS series that emphasizes realism in its player model to an extent that I've seen nowhere else. I'm speaking of course of the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA I-III series. This game series has been working on this basic model since, what? 1998? The ArmA branch of that series has also provided native support for multiple monitors and TrackIR since the first iteration.
If a FPS this fanatically dedicated to realism (OK, as long as you forget the brain dead AI and concentrate on everything else!) thinks this is OK, then why can't other games at least acknowledge the issue?
"Aww, if you make me cry anymore, you'll fog up my helmet." -- "Visionaries" cartoon
