March 14, 2009, 9:32 am
Australian IT is running a story (found via AusGamers forum) covering another chapter in Australian censorship. This time we have a web site threatened with fines of $11,000 a day for posting a link to an anti-abortion website. And what is wrong with this website? Apparently it shows “disturbing” images of dead foetuses.
Is it illegal to possess such photos? No? Then what is going on? It’s amazing to me is how quickly the super-secret-censorship-list has been bent to suit special interests; the scheme isnt implemented yet and they are already beyond “protecting the children”.
March 14, 2009, 9:03 am
trog has written about the lack of open standards in video. To be honest I would be happy enough if everyone switched to h264 and browsers had native support for that format.
The Ogg suite is a nice idea, but unfortunately I think is dead in the water – this field is so encumbered by patents its very hard to make a competitive product. Funnily enough with essentially all pirated HD material distributed in h264, the standard is starting to take hold in many hardware players too.
The only tricky bit for h264 is mobile devices; iPhone will play such video (though only at very specific encoding settings) and most other phones can’t decode it at all. Still, if we can’t solve this issue on the desktop what hope do we have of an industry wide standard?
March 14, 2009, 8:46 am
Ted Tso has written an in-depth blog entry about the recent “ext4″ defect which he (and many other people) see as defects in the user software, not the kernel.
The core of the issue is applications that have been coded to an implementation, not to the API. This is an issue that hs been discussed a few times on Raymond Chen’s Windows blog, and has no easy solution. The kernel developers are wont to completely ignore backwards compatibility though, so I suspect the most popular “broken” software will be fixed pretty quickly.
March 14, 2009, 8:21 am
The gameplay designer on SF2 HD Remix has a few interesting comments about the design mechanics of Street Fighter 4 (in which he had no involvement).
I haven’t played too much of the game, but most of the comments I agree with. I do however think it is “casual friendly” in that the game is very lax about the direction motions needed to do basic moves, to the point where its easy to trigger a DP move instead of QCF, and vice versa.
In this sense, it is casual friendly since the basic specials can be pulled off with relative ease. Certainly, there is a lot of “depth” in the moves, which Sirlin regards as unnecessarily complicated moves.