Quotulatiousness

June 14, 2011

Duke Nukem Forever: “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era”

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

After all that time in “gestation”, gamers have been eager to see the final result . . . and it’s an underwhelming experience:

In a game bursting with 1980s macho-movie quotes and in-jokes, one line resonates far beyond Duke Nukem Forever’s puerile script. Besieged by an alien invasion, the President of the United States ignores calls to beg the eponymous meathead to save the planet, lamenting, “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era.”

It’s not just The Duke himself who’s from a different era. His repertoire of foul-mouthed quips might be ripped from the VHS reels of Commando, Total Recall and Aliens, among many others, but it’s the painfully dated gameplay that ultimately proves some relics are best left buried.

Everywhere you look, DNF is a testament to its infamously protracted and traumatic development. Long loading times, low-res textures and polygon counts, poor facial animations and lip-syncing, screen tearing, juddering frame rates, basic lighting and reflections, pop-up, jaggies and disappearing assets — you name it, DNF suffers from it. Every gaming advancement of the past thirteen years is undone; every conceivable design flaw evident.

Rather than play the actual game, you might enjoy Yahtzee Croshaw’s “review” of the game from May, 2009:

Verdict
Duke Nukem Forever is the sum of all its flaws – a truly terrible game with almost no redeeming features. It’s as if Gearbox simply swept the scraps off 3D Realms’ development floor and glued them together into this mess. Graphics, gameplay, narrative, innovation, there’s simply nothing to recommend this mangled wreck. Put simply, as The Duke might say, “This game is one ugly motherfucker!”

June 3, 2011

The right software tool for the job: Excel is not a database

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

You know how some people, having mastered a particular software tool, keep trying to fit every task into the one tool they know even when it’s awkward to do? I’ve seen people using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word or another word processor to produce letters — and people using Word to do spreadsheet-like tasks. The old adage seems to still apply in the software world: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It’s apparently not just small companies that suffer from this sort of problem:

The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world’s population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation’s entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel.

A job vacancy currently advertised on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) website is offering a competitive salary to someone who can maintain and report on data held in Microsoft’s spreadsheet software.

Now, a small biz with few customer accounts might consider Excel to be fit for purpose. But surely housing an Olympic stadium-sized database on a standalone spreadsheet is bonkers, isn’t it?

That’s a mighty big nail for such a small hammer.

May 27, 2011

Powerpoint: it’s not presentation software, it’s visual assault software

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

I’ve attended lots of meetings where the Powerpoint slides have been really bad, but I’m happy not to have encountered anything quite as bad as this:

One of this year’s winners in the InFocus Worst Powerpoint Slide Contest.

Our “What Not to Present” contest was epic! Many thanks to all of you kind folks that submitted entries and spread the word about it. Many amazingly horrendous slides were sent in from all around the world. We laughed. We cried. We cringed.

[. . .]

We randomly chose our top 3 winners, but then quickly realized that we had to do more. So we are giving away ANOTHER projector to the slide we thought was the most horrendous. We passed the ugliness around the InFocus offices and to many of our partners pandering for votes — and we have a winner!

Update: While I’m busy poking fun at PowerPoint, here’s the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. H/T to Paul “Inkless” Wells for the link.

May 20, 2011

Next on the primary school curriculum: Minecraft

Filed under: Education, Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:46

<voice style=”curmudgeon”>Back in my day, we didn’t have computers in the classroom. We had books. And we liked ’em. Kids these days are just spoiled, I tell you.</voice>

At the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, first and second grade computer teacher Joel Levin developed an experimental Minecraft teaching unit that was designed to let kids explore, build, and collaborate within the game. He wasn’t sure how it’d go over. Much to his surprise, the students took to Minecraft like they do to sniffing scented markers.

Levin allows his students to play in a modified Minecraft world that doesn’t include monsters. His classes aren’t so much focused on teaching kids to play Minecraft as they are on using Minecraft as a canvas for them to be creative with. In one situation, Levin had to take animals out of the game because students were just killing them all over the place, which wasn’t in the spirit of his lessons.

H/T to Victor for sending the link. Video at the linked site.

April 23, 2011

A neat way to address software piracy

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

I still find it hard to believe that Cracked, of all the media entities from the pre-internet era, is worth visiting (and linking to). However, this is good stuff:

The [Arkham Asylum] developers included a little bit of extra code to detect when the game has been pirated, a common tactic used to track a company’s losses or simply mess with cheap people. The game is mostly unchanged when hacked, with one seemingly minor exception: Batman’s glider cape is hilariously unusable and has the aerodynamics of a piece of cardboard riddled with bullet holes.

It’s not that the cape is faulty, apparently; it’s simply that your version of Batman doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of gliding from one surface to another, Batman simply opens his wings over and over like a total ass-clown, causing him to lose altitude and fall down. It’s like you’re being forced to play with the pudgy Batman copycat from the beginning of The Dark Knight.

All the other gadgets still work, so you can always fight your way across the level on foot, right? Well, yeah, except that without the glider cape you’ll be completely stranded in a certain room — you know, the one filled with poisonous gas. That’s right, in the pirated version of Arkham Asylum, the always-prepared Dark Knight is such an useless idiot that he gets himself killed due to his shitty cape.

This trick gets misconstrued a lot as a simple game glitch, so you have people like this guy asking what’s wrong with his game at the official Eidos message board … only for the forum administrator to explain the situation and tell him: “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code [punk].“

April 19, 2011

Another commercial wargame used for professional training

Filed under: Gaming, Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Back in 2005, I posted some information about a software package in use by the USMC called Tacops, which was a single-developer wargame that provided very high training value. The unusual thing was that the military was willing to adopt a commercial wargame for their own training, over internally developed simulations. They seem to have gotten over that inhibition, as Steel Beasts, another single developer wargame, is seeing similar use today:

It was a decade ago that tank crews the world over became aware of a computer tank simulator, Steel Beasts, that was different. Steel Beasts was created by a single programmer, but with input from several professional tank troops. The graphics weren’t the greatest, but it was very accurate, so much so that the professionals were starting to use it as a training device. The publisher and creator of Steel Beasts seized the opportunity, and by 2006 there was a version for military use (Steel Beasts Professional) only that allowed for the use of a LAN, an instructor watching over how all the players were doing, scenario and terrain building and AAR (after action report) functions so that everything that happened in a game was captured. This allowed the instructor to point out errors, and what should have been done.

So far, ten countries (Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Chile, Canada, Australia, Spain and the U.S.) have bought Steel Beast Professional (at $125 a copy) for training their armor vehicle crews. The troops find the vehicle controls, and tactical situations to be realistic, and compelling. The game really gets the pucker factor going, and even before the pro version came along, troops were buying the commercial version and playing it for the professional, and entertainment, value.

March 8, 2011

Lastest boon to spammers? The move to IPv6, apparently

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

John Leyden reports that with all the good things about moving to the vastly larger address space of IPv6, we can expect at least one negative:

The migration towards IPv6, which has been made necessary by the expansion of the internet, will make it harder to filter spam messages, service providers warn.

The current internet protocol, IPv4, has a limited address space which is reaching exhaustion thanks to the fast uptake of internet technology in populous countries such as India and China and the more widespread use of smartphones. IPv6 promises 3.4 x 1038 addresses compared to the paltry 4.3 billion (4.3 x 109) addresses offered by IPv4.

While this expansion allows far more devices to have a unique internet address, it creates a host of problems for security service providers, who have long used databases of known bad IP addresses to maintain blacklists of junk mail cesspools. Spam-filtering technology typically uses these blacklists as one (key component) in a multi-stage junk mail filtering process that also involves examining message contents.

“The primary method for stopping the majority of spam used by email providers is to track bad IP addresses sending email and block them — a process known as IP blacklisting,” explained Stuart Paton, a senior solutions architect at spam-filtering outfit Cloudmark. “With IPv6 this technique will no longer be possible and could mean that email systems would quickly become overloaded if new approaches are not developed to address this.”

March 4, 2011

Can you upgrade from Windows 1 to Windows 7?

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

I doubt very many of you ever used Windows 1.0 (I certainly didn’t: 3.0 was the first time I used Windows). Charles Arthur writes about an interesting experiment conducted by Andrew Tait to test how well your system would work if you somehow needed to upgrade through all the major Windows versions:

The question is: how robust is it? Can you really do all that updating? You have to start with MS-DOS 5.0, of course, because early versions of Windows needed that.

It’s a bit hairy and config.sys-y in the early versions up to 3.1.

But what’s really impressive is that Doom 2 and Monkey Island — installed right at the beginning — work all the way through, right up to Windows 7. Well, apart from in Windows 2000, where it hung at the start (lack of DOS support).

Well done Andrew Tait, alias Rasteri, the YouTube/Reddit user who had the enormous patience to do all this. Especially for sounding like Sean Connery all the way through. “It is indeed possible to upgrade through every version of Windows… and have some settings remain. This is nearly 20 years of application compatibility and Microsoft should be applauded.”

Of course, the real stumbling block to doing this would be the hardware: nothing that was available in the Windows 1.0 era would be able to run the far more demanding software of the Windows NT family of operating systems. To get around that, Tait used VMWare’s virtualization software:

February 24, 2011

The truth about software licenses

Filed under: Humour, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:53

Dilbert.com

February 19, 2011

“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

An interesting look at the epic battle between the perfectionist urge and the first-mover advantage:

There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.

What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.

[. . .]

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

February 18, 2011

How to view PDF documents natively in Chrome

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Royce McDaniels provides step-by-step instructions for installing the PDF reader plug-in for the Chrome browser:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s How To segment here at The Walrus Says! Today we’re examining another useful feature of the Chrome web browser from Google, namely the ability to display Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files directly in the browser rather than via an external application like Google Docs which has been necessary before. The instructions below not only show you how to activate this feature of Chrome, but show you an interesting way to access Chrome functionality not part of the standard configuration menus! (Chrome itself is an Open Source project sponsored by Google; you can get complete information about the browser’s development at The Chromium Project. Enjoy!

I’m still (barely) sticking with Firefox as my primary browser, although it’s becoming a pain to use these days: for example, as I’m typing this line, the letters I type are appearing several seconds after I type ’em. It’s a bit like using an old 300 baud line with a small buffer. If the next major release of Firefox doesn’t fix this problem, then I’ll be switching to Chrome as my primary browser.

February 12, 2011

Deeper implications of the rise of “3D printing”

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

One of the most interesting things happening in the manufacturing world is the rise of a technology that may well make huge swathes of factories obsolete: practical 3D printing. What was originally just a neat way to develop small prototypes for mass production is quickly becoming a viable way to replace the entire mass production step. The technology is still limited to a small range of materials, but the price has been dropping steeply enough that small 3D printers are within the reach of hobbyists already.

The Economist points out that this will not be an unmixed blessing (as technological revolutions ever have been):

Others maintain that, by reducing the need for factory workers, 3D printing will undermine the advantage of low-cost, low-wage countries and thus repatriate manufacturing capacity to the rich world. It might; but Asian manufacturers are just as well placed as anyone else to adopt the technology. And even if 3D printing does bring manufacturing back to developed countries, it may not create many jobs, since it is less labour-intensive than standard manufacturing.

The technology will have implications not just for the distribution of capital and jobs, but also for intellectual-property (IP) rules. When objects can be described in a digital file, they become much easier to copy and distribute — and, of course, to pirate. Just ask the music industry. When the blueprints for a new toy, or a designer shoe, escape onto the internet, the chances that the owner of the IP will lose out are greater.

There are sure to be calls for restrictions on the use of 3D printers, and lawsuits about how existing IP laws should be applied. As with open-source software, new non-commercial models will emerge. It is unclear whether 3D printing requires existing rules to be tightened (which could hamper innovation) or loosened (which could encourage piracy). The lawyers are, no doubt, rubbing their hands.

Just as nobody could have predicted the impact of the steam engine in 1750 — or the printing press in 1450, or the transistor in 1950 — it is impossible to foresee the long-term impact of 3D printing. But the technology is coming, and it is likely to disrupt every field it touches. Companies, regulators and entrepreneurs should start thinking about it now. One thing, at least, seems clear: although 3D printing will create winners and losers in the short term, in the long run it will expand the realm of industry — and imagination.

So, even if you don’t have immediate plans to buy a 3D printer, you could do worse than to dust off your old drafting book and learn a bit of CAD. You may be using those skills sooner than you expect.

There’s more information (from 2009) on the 3D printing process here.

February 3, 2011

Tools for protest marchers: anti-kettling app

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Patrick Kingsley talks to the developers of “Sukey”, a new mobile phone app intended to help protesters avoid being kettled by police:

Cairo, it wasn’t. But at about a quarter to four last Saturday afternoon, on a crowded backstreet in central London, something happened outside the Egyptian embassy that deserves at least a footnote in the annals of protest history. A crowd of students weren’t kettled.

In the context of recent British protests, this was a near-miracle. At each of the previous four major student protests in London since the Millbank riot on 10 November, police have kettled — or, in their terminology, “contained” — thousands of protesters, preventing them from leaving an area for several hours, and often from accessing basic amenities such as food, water and toilets.

Police kettle protesters supposedly to quell violence, but protesters arguably only turn to violence out of frustration at being kettled. Most notoriously, police trapped hundreds of teenage schoolchildren inside a tight grid on Whitehall on 24 November — and only subsequently did a few of them smash up a police van abandoned in their midst.

Saturday’s non-kettle, then, was a victory in itself. But the real excitement wasn’t that it didn’t happen — but how it didn’t happen. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why police and protesters behave in a certain way at a certain time, but one explanation for the kettle’s failure to form lies with a new communications network, which launched that afternoon: Sukey.

January 21, 2011

If you are finding Firefox to be much slower lately, uninstall the Skype toolbar

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:51

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a few years, and it generally works well for me. In the last month or so, however, I’ve noticed it being much slower. Some of that problem may have been caused by the Skype toolbar:

Mozilla has blocked a Skype toolbar add-on for its Firefox browser, after blaming the extension for causing 40,000 crashes last week.

The open source outfit said it vastly slowed down webpage-loading times.

The crash-prone add-on downed Firefox 3.6.13 — which is the current stable version of the browser — far too much, grumbled Mozilla.

“Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM [document object model] manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today (plain English: to the user, it appears that Firefox is slow loading web pages),” it said.

I started using Firefox as my default browser around the time they introduced tabbed pages (which every browser has offered for years now). I also use Opera, Chrome, and (unwillingly) IE for specific purposes. If the Firefox performance issues aren’t resolved when they release the new version 4.0 next month, I’ll consider switching to Chrome as my primary browser instead.

December 16, 2010

Military FPS games

Filed under: Gaming, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Perhaps all those concerned parent organizations had a germ of truth to feed their panic after all: the US military has been finding their FPS games really have been useful as recruiting tools:

The army began using simulation training game tech for recruiting a decade ago when it rolled out the online game “America’s Army” (www.americasarmy.com/). Britain, Australia and New Zealand eventually went in the same direction as the marines. To the despair of parents everywhere, it appears that video games do serve a useful purpose. “America’s Army” was originally developed as a recruiting and public relations tool. It cost over eight million dollars to create. By late 2002, it had 929,000 registered players, 563,000 of whom stayed around long enough to finish the basic training exercise. The game costs $3.5 million a year to maintain. So far, nearly ten million people have downloaded the front end (player) software. At peak times, over 5,000 players are online with the game simultaneously. Recruiters are satisfied with the number of prospects coming in because of the game. But an unexpected bonus has been the number of other uses the game has been put to.

The game, like many games today, was based on one of the “game engines” that are for sale to those developing commercial games. A “game engine” is the software for an earlier, successful, game, with all the specific graphics and play elements removed. When you buy a game engine, you add your own graphics and specific game and play elements, and have a new game. America’s Army used the Unreal game engine, and that led to clones of the America’s Army software for additional training systems. Using the highly realistic combat operations depicted in the game, special versions are used to create specific games for all sorts of combat situations. The public will never see most of these, especially the classified ones.

The USMC, of course, prefers not to do things the army way:

The marines went with a different engine because, well, even with lots of updates, the America’s Army software is showing its age. More realism is a matter of life and death in these training simulations, as getting the details wrong can teach troops the wrong lesson and get them killed. The marines have long been innovators in the use of tactical training and wargames. Back in the 90s, they adapted one of the first FPS (First Person perspective Shooters), “Doom” to marine use. Now they have a much more realistic game engine to use, and one that can be easily networked. Many marines take their laptop computers to combat zones, and that takes care of a lot of hardware problems.

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