This doesn't work well in real time games. The client needs to know another player is on the other side of that wall so it can
* Play sounds from their actions
* Actually be able to render them when either player comes around the corner without them obviously materializing out of thin air.
I'm saying no such thing. I'm saying that that wrong is no excuse for the other wrong.
There are infinite ways to attack any problem, and it's not a requirement but a choice to persue only certain ideas vs others.
For instance, these approaches are based on removing agency from all users for the supposed goal of dealing with the bad users.
But there is no law of physics that says that is the only way to do that.
You could go the opposite direction and empower all users to deal with bad actors themselves just like in real life where anbasshole simply gets avoided or punched in the nose, which works by the simple math that the bad actors are outnumbered by everyone else. They still always exist but they are relegated to operating in the corners and shadows.
But their low level presence is a fact of life no matter what. Oppressive regimes don't get rid of them either. The sales pitch is we'll protect you but in fact they don't any better than you could have yoirself.
A company that has an easier option and has no other value meter than money divorced from any consideration of how it is attained, simply has no incentive to bother doing anything but the easiest thing. That's the only reason they want the keys to your house, because you stupidly give them, not because they need them or have the tiniest right to demand them to protect their entertainment business.
We have a working solution that some games still use, dedicated servers with admins that can investigate and ban people themselves. Has its own suite of problems but it works well against cheaters.
But skill based matchmaking type games where you're matched with random people is fundamentally incompatible with this model, that is why the person you responded to you said that you're suggesting that these games should cease to exist.
It only needs to be good enough that people keep buying (or not) the Prime when their old account gets banned. There is good reason that it exist, also from cheating perspective.
The problem is that most cheaters don't just go full aimbot and track people through walls. That is a surefire way to make sure your account gets reported, reviewed, and banned regardless of what anti-cheat is in place.
Serial cheaters cheat just enough to give themselves an edge without making it obvious to the people watching them. By just looking at their stats, it can become very difficult (though not impossible) to differentiate a cheater from a pro player. This difficulty increases the odds of getting a false positive, necessitating a higher detection threshhold to avoid banning innocent players.
Nukes are also not very stable long-term Their fissile payload is radioactive after all, and as it decays it becomes harder and harder to achieve prompt criticality.
They're more stable in the sense that it takes active effort to move them to the exploded state, while chemical explosives need active efforts to keep them unexploded.
I think this is largely only true with Windows games from the '90s using still-nascent 3D apis. Many of these games were broken on modern versions of Windows by the time Vista came out.
Once you get to the early '00s, you can still find a lot of games that are broken, but the culprit is usually changes in hardware and driver behavior rather than Windows itself.
No, not really. Even if you ignore DRM which practically makes ALL games from the XP-Vista era unplayable (which I ignore since that is often not better in Wine), just search around for the amount of workarounds that are required even when you apply these patches.
I wasn't saying that fewer games from the '00s require fixes, I said that the things that are broken in them are more often caused by factors other than Windows itself. The most common compatibility issues I see with games from this era are caused by changes made to GPUs and/or their accompanying drivers.
Take for example the first two Splinter Cell games. Certain shadows on them do not render on modern GPUs. The root cause isn't any changes Microsoft made to DirectX or Windows, but Nvidia deprecating a feature they relied on in their GPUs and their drivers not providing any kind of fallback. If you play these games on Windows XP with hardware from 2003, they run fine. But if you play them on Windows XP with hardware from 2007, they do not.
Wine fixes a lot of these games because it is already providing its own translation layer for graphics calls, and any GPU vendor-specific DirectX stuff gets translated into hardware-agnostic Vulkan. These same games are often easy to fix on Windows using DXVK (Wine's DirectX translation layer), or wrappers designed for late '90s and '00s games like dgvoodoo2.
The big elephant in the room is DRM, with popular solutions like StarForce being deliberately broken by Microsoft.
Forgive my ignorance, but can the police not get the identity of the people calling these in from the phone companies? Swatting would be over very quickly if we just started handing out 5 year prison sentences to every moron who tries this.
The police apparently chose to do this based on an emailed tip, not a phone call. If the attacker was the least bit competent there will be no way to uncover their identity at all. Even NSA-level traffic and timing analysis would not necessarily be effective against a well-constructed anonymous email setup.
Unless there was something specific about the email's contents justifying it, the police seem very much at fault here for attacking someone based on an entirely unauthenticated, unverifiable, untraceable message. Society readily holds people who fall for obvious phishing attacks responsible for their negligence, and this seems similar.
They shouldn't be bursting down peoples doors and placing them in handcuffs based on tips with such poor veracity. If there is no way to verify the identity of someone making a serious claim, then it shouldn't be taken this seriously.
Clearly the system as it exists today is ripe for abuse.
To be fair this is very likely the work of "an angry troll", so I have some hope that they'll get caught. People don't tend to be at their best when they're raging, especially when that rage is directed at someone so seemingly non-offensive.
Re: the last point, I would definitely not vote to have my police ignore anonymous tips, if it ever came up in a referendum. I think it's a pretty damn good use of tax dollars, as far as these things go.
Wouldn't it have been better to do the typical thing of sending a patrol unit out to see what might be going on, and then send out the rest of the squad if they request the back up?
What percentage of tips like this do you think are fraudulent? How long is it worth delaying all the real ones as a matter of practice on the off chance that the tip is bad?
A lot actually, including this one. How many bomb threats are real? Ohio is struggling with this now because of some stupidity about eating pets. From a student wanting to delay an exam, or whatever else, they are rarely real. The Secret Service filters threats against protectees, the FBI is forwarded threats as well. The problem is that local coppers just don't have the training, and the SWAT teams are always needing something to do, so there's no delay to sending a full on response.
What actually constitutes a "well-constructed anonymous email setup"? From my understanding I'd expect that with 'NSA-level analysis' that things like fingerprints from creation/usage would show up, making it rather difficult to evade entirely.
It's not only difficult to verify the identity from phone companies or ISPs (worst case you'd need a court order), depending on the nature of the report and the situation, it might also be straight up dangerous for the caller.
Besides, it's pretty damn simple to just a stolen phone or compromised computer to do this sort of thing. If you really were to get the identity this way, you now likely have two victims instead of one...
"This phone number was used to make a fraudulent 911 call, here is the recording" should more than enough to secure a warrant.
You have a complete recording of the phone call, so you can verify if the person speaking in it was the owner of the phone number. If it's not a match, then you can start investigating friends and family of the owner who would have had access to the phone.
If police can't figure out how to do this basic shit then why are we trusting them with SWAT gear?
1. How the hell do you plan to tell the difference between some prankster using voice modulation and a genuine caller stuck in a situation with weird acoustics? Or are you too dense to realize that emergencies don't always happen in perfect sound conditions?
2. Are you seriously okay with giving police dispatchers godlike powers to decide if your desperate plea for help is "real enough" for them? And if they get it wrong and write you off as a scammer while you're bleeding out, I guess that's just tough luck, huh? Still feeling smug about your brilliant plan now?
It's a catch-22 because if you stop innovating your UI for 20 years and alternatives come up with something people actually like then you will lose users to them and slowly fade into irrelevancy.
Firefox succeeded because it was a fresh take on the entire browser UX at a time when Internet Explorer had been stagnant for half a decade.
As I remember it, Firefox succeeded because it fundamentally worked well and was very configurable, not because of the UX. The others at the time were bad at both of those things.
The UX of Firefox was (and, I'd argue, still is) not great, but it made up for that by being configurable enough that you could fix it for yourself.
Firefox (Phoenix / Firebird) initially got its userbase from the Mozilla userbase which was this capable browser with many features and flexibility (extensions), but it was bloated, slow, with a kinda outdated (non-native) UI. Firefox's differing feature was its lightness and (native-like, per-platform) UI freshness, not configurability.
FF success against IE was mainly caused by Microsoft completely dropping the ball by simply not developing IE for a couple of years. I think one of the elementary features which has driven mass FF adoption was tabbing support, which IE6 didn't have.
Everyone I knew who wasn't working in tech that switched to Firefox did so because tabs were this revolutionary new thing that transformed their browsing experience.
Of course, Firefox wasn't the first browser to offer tabs, but it was the first that was also fast, highly compatible, and easy for the average person to pick up and use. It's predecessor, the Mozilla suite, included all the same extensibility and customization, but it was also a bloated mess that nobody wanted to use.
In my opinion, Firefox has never been particularly good. I tried it when it first came out - it was slow and a memory hog. Using IE6 was a much better experience, so I stayed there. It was only once Chrome came out that we had an actual good alternative to IE, and I switched immediately once I tried it.
I would love for Firefox to be awesome, but ultimately (in my subjective opinion of course) it just kind of sucks and always has.
* Play sounds from their actions * Actually be able to render them when either player comes around the corner without them obviously materializing out of thin air.