They're mutually exclusive if you want to work at the pace that the computer industry tends to move at. Doubly so for a bunch of volunteers working for free.
I guess that makes the assumption that the needs of the users includes a rapidly expanding feature set and whatnot. And while that is important (particularly if you're going for marketshare), there are still users who'd rather have some good code. Not to mention that eventually the bad code may catch up to you, and cause the needs of the users to change. Windows needed a lot of usability enhancements until the Win95-98 era. Then stability became a big issue. MS ironed a lot of those problems out, and now security and spyware is the big problem. A lot of those issues could have been mitigated by better code at earlier stages. Fortunately for MS, their monopoly has allowed them to advertise their security and spyware solutions as new features, and so a mostly under-informed public still thinks they're paying for innovative work.
But returning to the original point, even for a big, well funded company like MS or Apple, it's not really possible to write perfect software fast enough to lead the market in features. You can dump more money into it, and hire more engineers, but that just makes it all the more complicated and harder to coordinate, leading to more mistakes.
The KHTML team can avoid that because they're not trying to keep a business profitable, they're writing this stuff because it's a hobby for them. Personally, I try and keep my hobbies as free of deadlines as is possible. And if anyone wants to criticize how I indulge in my hobbies in any sort of non-constructive way, they can go to hell, I'm not interested.
It sounds to me like he's seeing a lot of rough edges in his own project, but he's trying to convince everyone that that is just part of how the game works, and anyone trying to play a different game is wrong, and wasting their time.
Exactly. Maybe Goodger, (and other people) is wrong in who he's considering as the KHTML team's "target market". Perhaps their primary concern isn't being most used browser in the world. Maybe the end user experience isn't their greatest litmus test.
Maybe the code itself, the creation of a tight, well written, efficient bundle of code is the target. They aren't doing it to fill an opening in the market, they're doing it for the love of the game.
And in the process, they made something that a company as influential as Apple liked. Then Apple used it as a base to follow Goodger's approach, because that's what Apple does. Good for them, and good for the KHTML team for making something so appealing to Apple. If you read some of the rational that Apple gave for choosing KHTML over the mozilla codebase for their browser, it basically boiled down to having a smaller, easier to understand, and easier to modify project.
If I'm right, or at least close to it, in determining the motivation of the KHTML team, it sounds to me like Apple's decision is a solid affirmation that they've been successful. So let Apple do their own thing, let KHTML do their thing, and Goodger should go back to doing his own thing, instead of judging the motivation of a bunch of successful OSS programmers.
You're talking about a double edged sword here, namely that the rapid advances in hardware has allowed software to be written much more sloppily, while still maintaining acceptable performance. It's good in some ways, because it allows things to get done faster and cheaper. You could also make an argument that some of the larger projects couldn't be realistically done at all beforehand. A project with dozens of programmers working on it becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate and perfect. Letting the specs of the hardware smooth over some of the bumps makes life easier.
Then the bad side is that sloppy coding is not only inferior performance-wise, it also leads to maintenance difficulties, as well as security issues. The most notable example being all of the legacy garbage that windows still carries around.
It sounds like the KHTML people are trying to buck the trend, and make a large, but solid piece of software. They're saying that it's not impossible, just that it takes a while. The "computer industry" has been moving at this incredible speed for a while, so fast in fact that it wasn't realizing a lot of the mistakes it was making. There are plenty of examples of how this is making life tougher now. The KHTML guys aren't interested in doing that anymore, they want to do something right, so they're doing it.
Maybe they're thinking of their renderer as more a piece of infrastructure or technology more than an end product for your everyday user. Try to draw a vague parallel to some guy writing code for the space shuttle. There's more at stake when you're sending humans up in a rocket, but the mentality can be the same. We want to get this right, on the first try. It's inherently complicated enough , no need to make things any denser with hastily added features and sloppy coding.
Exactly. That's the tradeoff, plain and simple. And people are willing to make that tradeoff some of the time, so iTMS has been a success. There's been attempts by the recording companies to force some of those tradeoffs onto CD's, without giving the buyer the convenience in exchange, and there's been protest. It seems to me that the market is working reasonably well. I don't understand why there's so much complaining about DRM. Just speak with your dollars, it's that simple.
People go to Walmart even though they know it's destructive to their town's overall economy, and you have to deal with their crappy parking lots and boring stores. They deal with those inconveniences in exchange for lower prices. If you want a car with more comfort and features, then you pay more for it. That compromise exists in every transaction, and businesses fail or thrive depending on their ability to gauge and make those compromises.
Well, there will be a shakeout, somewhere down the road. And the majority of services will go under, or be bought out. That's how it usually works with any new business "game". The dotcom nonsense was really only unusual in the scale of it all. And realize that while lots of companies crashed and burned, and droves of people lost their jobs, there are still plenty of websites still around, and plenty of people who got rich.
But in the end, there will probably be a handful of big companies, making some decent profit, as well as a few smaller, more niche companies staying afloat. Same as usual.
Apple has big marketshare, and a good product, but they tend to be very specific and limited in the services they offer. This makes their stuff very consistent and nice, but requires them leave other parts of the market open. That's fine with them, they're willing to make that decision.
That decision means that there are other aspects to the market that are left open to other companies, and that's where all these other companies are aiming for. While there is definitely a good bit of overlap, I'm betting that if you talked with Steve Jobs for about it for a while, he'd probably say something to the effect of these subscription based companies not even being a direct competitor to iTMS. Apple evaluated the subscription music business and decided not to get into it. Because the iTMS sales model looked bigger and better to them.
There will be subscription music services in the future. Some of them will be profitable. Probably none of them will do business on the scale of the iTMS, or something with a similar sales model. But they will continue.
An architect designing a museum or an airport is working under an entirely different set of restrictions than someone designing levels for a video game. There are plenty of architects out there who would be absolutely terrible at level design, but there are also plenty who would be very good at it, and bring to the table some extra talents. Things like a solid awareness of spacial qualities, good lighting (especially with the newest/future engines), and a developed understanding of the importance of scale.
If you grabbed a random architect off the street and asked him to design you a castle (responding to the same threats and functions that a medieval castle had to deal with) and didn't rush him/underpay him, I think you could end up with something close to equal to what already exists. Even better if you allowed for more modern materials/construction methods.
I guess the point is, ignoring the subset of celebrity architects who are living in their own world, the average architect is pretty smart, very flexible, and willing to learn and experiment. A whole lot of the problems with contemporary architecture are caused by financial/social/political limitations, not the skills and desires of the architects.
Agreed. This seems entirely legitimate to me. The article summary was grasping at straws to try and make MS sound bad and/or evil for doing this.
You can make a case that this whole idea is susceptible to fraud, but so is just about every other business idea/plan/system. That being said, if six months down the line, we find out that MS sent off letters demanding money from each and everyone who was reported as selling counterfeit windows, with no regards to fact checking or correctness, then we can criticize.
Yeah, there are definitely games that fall in between, or mix the two design philosophies. And that's a pretty good idea. Sort of taking the emotional attachment that an epic game can inspire, and supplementing it with the replay value that can be found in simpler games.
I think it's dumb that there's even an argument as to which one is inherently better. Doesn't it depend on what the point of the game is? Doesn't it depend on what kind of mood I'm in? Over the past 10 years or so, I've probably spent just as much time playing windows minesweeper as I spent playing through Knight of the old Republic on my Xbox over the course of a couple weeks. I enjoyed both of them a lot. I was much more emotionally invested in KOTOR while playing, but now that I'm finished with it, I'll probably never touch it again. One day, however, I'll probably be sitting around bored and fire up the ol' minesweeper and see if I'm as good at it as I was when I was younger. And I'll enjoy it then too.
Epic games are awesome, and by definition, they need to be longer to work. They basically end when the story ends, and once the story is known, the fun stops. So there has to be all that story. There may be puzzles, and there may be combat, or whatever, but in the end, you're playing to advance and learn the story.
Then there's games where there's absolutely no story, just the rules, and your goal is generally to learn how to be efficient at whatever the task is.
I guess my point is that it's silly to compare these classes of games in this way. The word "game" is a little to broad to draw comparisons between anything that falls under it. Taking the analogy that you quoted; a book and a short story are very different. They both fall under the category of "writing". Asking which one is a better form of Writing is a pointless question. It depends on what the author is trying to get across to the reader.
Probably not. But if it does happen, it'll be because of Xbox Live. There's a few big reasons that MS has stayed so strong in the PC world that don't exist when it comes to consoles. The most significant is Businesses/Governments. The majority of businesses and governments get their day to day work done on MS software, and that represents a huge investment in software, related hardware, support, and training. You're talking about lots of organizations with thousands and thousands of workstations, none of which are in any rush to switch away from something that, while certainly not perfect and foolproof, has worked well enough for years.
Consoles don't have that sort of market. They just go in people's houses. If I decide to switch from Xbox to Gamecube, I just have to convince myself, and go spend a couple hundred bucks for a system and some games. Learning the controls for a gamecube game isn't going to be any harder than learning the controls for a new Xbox game. Beyond that irrational fanaticism of some fanboys, a console is not that big of an investment. And when I get a new game system, I generally don't throw out the previous one, in case I feel like replaying some of the older stuff.
Another issue is file formats and compatibility and whatnot. This has helped MS keep such a good hold on the home consumer market, as well as tightened their grasp on the businesses/governments. Keeping compatibility with other people forces some conformity. Backwards compatibility is not as huge a deal in consoles as some people pretend, because most people don't throw out their old consoles when they get a new one, and I doubt the average casual gamer goes back to their older games all that much.
Xbox live is a chance for MS to lock people in, by storing data remotely. People can get pretty obsessive over their statistics and whatnot, as the comments in any/. article about a MMORPG will reflect. As Xbox live starts to track those sorts of things more throughly, there will be plenty of people who invest enough time building up their numbers online that they'll be loathe to just walk away, regardless of what hardware MS asks them to buy in the future, just to keep their accounts.
Nintendo had the big monopoly in the past, and they did some pretty anti-competitive things to solidify it. It didn't work for them when they hardly had any competitors. MS is strong, but they've got two well established opponents in their market, which would make all out domination quite unlikely.
I find myself using the same files repeatedly in a number of different apps. Drag and drop onto an application's icon on the dock makes this so much easier for me. To each his own I guess. The dock isn't perfect, but it's got its uses.
Adding in some card games that many players had requested sure did make all the other stuff in the game less original and worthwhile. Only an idiot would bother even looking at PP! I feel stupid for even mentioning it!
That list is incomplete. There's been a few other additions. There's currently an Alchemy puzzle, a Ship Building puzzle, and I think they just added Hearts to go along with spades.
I don't hate puzzle games, it's just that they generally have a weird life time to me. I get terribly addicted to one for a while, and play it all the time, hardcore intense. Then one day, it's all of a sudden just entirely boring to me. I've been playing PP for a little over a year, and it's about to the point where I'm bored with all of them. Shipwriting is finally getting tired to me, but I sure loved it when it first came out.
Of course, there's a huge economic and social/political aspect to the game as well. The only problem there is that Midnight (the original ocean) is pretty tightly bound up by established players, and to get anywhere on the new oceans, I'd have to spend some time in all of the puzzles again, building up my stats. And I have no interest in doing that. *shrug*
The most important part, maybe step 5.5, is polish it all so that steps 1-5 actually lead to 6.
Is there any other company that could actually make this plan work? I doubt it. Are we better off having OSX as an option? I think so.
Apple basically did something really similar to what a lot of people have been trying to do with Linux.I think they deserve all the money they've made, and plenty of credit.
Exactly. People need to understand that Apple did not send a bunch of engineers over to join the KHTML project. They just used some source code that was available to them, and as is required, they give out the changes they make.
Apple is developing "WebKit", not KHTML. They both have just evolved from a common codebase in the past.
I've had that problem as well. My girlfriend showed me a magazine article a while back about a guy who was making furniture out of old boxes because he was poor. He was apparently poor because he sent every dime he got his hands on to Apple, since every furniture piece he had was constructed out of one of their boxes.
Or maybe he was just stealing them from other people.
It's definitely a branding thing, and also a result of the "holistic design" philosophy that Apple is known for. If all those engineers are going to spend all that time and energy trying to make your computer as pleasant and easy to use as they can, why shouldn't that experience start with the box? Your binoculars analogy is basically the same. With Apple, I'm paying a premium over other computer manufacturers. I want to be reminded at every step why I paid that extra money.
Not to mention that a bunch of imac boxes, sitting up on top of the shelves at CompUSA are much more eye catching than piles of brown Dell boxes. Apple already has a tough fight to get shelf space. Anything to make more out of what they get can help.
It's not quite that simple. First off, when you're granted a trademark, eg. "Windows", it's for a specific area of commerce. MS owns a trademark on the word windows as the name of a piece of software. Apple is still free to talk about windows in their operating system. There are still plenty of companies manufacturing actual, physical glass windows that use that word in their name. Trademarks do serve an important function that's useful to the everyday person, in that it clears up confusion, helps us make choices, and makes it a little more difficult for us to get cheated. If I order an iMac from a website, I can be pretty confident that it's an iMac made by Apple Computer, and not some schmuck in his basement using the same name. And if someone tries to do that, Apple can shut him down. Everyone wins except for the scumbag.
It's hard to be constantly unique and clever all the time. Especially when you're talking about something like product names. The movie office space sort of spoofed that with company names like Innetech and Intertroad, or whatever it was. The point is, when you end up using nonsense names, they tend to wind up sounding pretty stupid, and basically the same.
That being said, there's only so many good words out there. Any advertising hack will tell you that you don't want your product name to be too long or complicated. It sounds confusing and makes it harder to make creative advertisements. So common words get used, but there are rules for keeping things organized and as fair as is possible. Some people will always try to bend the rules in their favor, but that's not unique to this issue.
I don't mind MS using Windows at their OS name. It's easy to remember, and it makes sense. Calling their word processor "Word" is stretching it a little, but there are plenty of other word processors that have "word" in their names. I don't know if MS has ever gone after someone for that, but that is a case that might be more questionable.
When I still lived with my parents, I'd write little scripts that just said things with the text to speech, so you could have very limited (if not predictable) conversations with the computer. I'd name them things that my family members would say a lot, and since the computer was sitting out in a common area, it responded to people who weren't expecting the computer to enter their conversations. I guess it was fun.
While I would never want something like you described running on my home machine, there's certainly places where this would be reasonable and useful. Take corporations and government institutions. If I'm hiring a bunch of people to work for me on a bunch of computers that I paid for and have to maintain, I'm certainly going to be interested in limiting the ways that they can mess up those machines, and also limiting the amount of info lost if a machine is stolen. That all seems very reasonable to me, and not evil. Consider the fact that corporate/government sales are a huge part of microsoft's sales, and it looks pretty intelligent on their part.
I think it's a matter of just the amount of information we're dealing with nowadays. Back when I was on my MacLC with a 40 Meg drive, I was very careful with what I saved, and where I put it. I had files inside folders inside folders inside folders, all carefully organized, and hardly ever changing. Now I've got a 150gig drive, and I download enough data to fill my LC's harddrive at least three times over pretty much each and every day.
Broadband has made it really easy for me to constantly be adding stuff to my computer, software/files get more complex and harder to categorize, and so I've just ended up dumping most things into a temp folder, and then organizing it every few months. Not ideal, but reality.
Good ol' fashioned organization and Spotlight are two different solutions to the same problem. Nothing wrong with a little choice. I don't see how the existence of spotlight will make life any more difficult for someone who consistently keeps their stuff organized already.
Not only that, but some of the more important areas could constantly be changing. In the towns, construction sites should appear, and over time become more and more complete, until finally there's a new building, providing some useful additions/content. Better yet if players can have some direct input into the process, although quality control of design/artwork makes that difficult.
Second Life as an example provides both pros and cons. The world is constantly evolving, and there are some really talented people out there making cool stuff for the fun of it. But there's also a whole lot of worthless and ugly crap, everywhere you look.
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They're mutually exclusive if you want to work at the pace that the computer industry tends to move at. Doubly so for a bunch of volunteers working for free.
I guess that makes the assumption that the needs of the users includes a rapidly expanding feature set and whatnot. And while that is important (particularly if you're going for marketshare), there are still users who'd rather have some good code. Not to mention that eventually the bad code may catch up to you, and cause the needs of the users to change. Windows needed a lot of usability enhancements until the Win95-98 era. Then stability became a big issue. MS ironed a lot of those problems out, and now security and spyware is the big problem. A lot of those issues could have been mitigated by better code at earlier stages. Fortunately for MS, their monopoly has allowed them to advertise their security and spyware solutions as new features, and so a mostly under-informed public still thinks they're paying for innovative work.
But returning to the original point, even for a big, well funded company like MS or Apple, it's not really possible to write perfect software fast enough to lead the market in features. You can dump more money into it, and hire more engineers, but that just makes it all the more complicated and harder to coordinate, leading to more mistakes.
The KHTML team can avoid that because they're not trying to keep a business profitable, they're writing this stuff because it's a hobby for them. Personally, I try and keep my hobbies as free of deadlines as is possible. And if anyone wants to criticize how I indulge in my hobbies in any sort of non-constructive way, they can go to hell, I'm not interested.
It sounds to me like he's seeing a lot of rough edges in his own project, but he's trying to convince everyone that that is just part of how the game works, and anyone trying to play a different game is wrong, and wasting their time.
Exactly. Maybe Goodger, (and other people) is wrong in who he's considering as the KHTML team's "target market". Perhaps their primary concern isn't being most used browser in the world. Maybe the end user experience isn't their greatest litmus test.
Maybe the code itself, the creation of a tight, well written, efficient bundle of code is the target. They aren't doing it to fill an opening in the market, they're doing it for the love of the game.
And in the process, they made something that a company as influential as Apple liked. Then Apple used it as a base to follow Goodger's approach, because that's what Apple does. Good for them, and good for the KHTML team for making something so appealing to Apple. If you read some of the rational that Apple gave for choosing KHTML over the mozilla codebase for their browser, it basically boiled down to having a smaller, easier to understand, and easier to modify project.
If I'm right, or at least close to it, in determining the motivation of the KHTML team, it sounds to me like Apple's decision is a solid affirmation that they've been successful. So let Apple do their own thing, let KHTML do their thing, and Goodger should go back to doing his own thing, instead of judging the motivation of a bunch of successful OSS programmers.
You're talking about a double edged sword here, namely that the rapid advances in hardware has allowed software to be written much more sloppily, while still maintaining acceptable performance. It's good in some ways, because it allows things to get done faster and cheaper. You could also make an argument that some of the larger projects couldn't be realistically done at all beforehand. A project with dozens of programmers working on it becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate and perfect. Letting the specs of the hardware smooth over some of the bumps makes life easier.
Then the bad side is that sloppy coding is not only inferior performance-wise, it also leads to maintenance difficulties, as well as security issues. The most notable example being all of the legacy garbage that windows still carries around.
It sounds like the KHTML people are trying to buck the trend, and make a large, but solid piece of software. They're saying that it's not impossible, just that it takes a while. The "computer industry" has been moving at this incredible speed for a while, so fast in fact that it wasn't realizing a lot of the mistakes it was making. There are plenty of examples of how this is making life tougher now. The KHTML guys aren't interested in doing that anymore, they want to do something right, so they're doing it.
Maybe they're thinking of their renderer as more a piece of infrastructure or technology more than an end product for your everyday user. Try to draw a vague parallel to some guy writing code for the space shuttle. There's more at stake when you're sending humans up in a rocket, but the mentality can be the same. We want to get this right, on the first try. It's inherently complicated enough , no need to make things any denser with hastily added features and sloppy coding.
I think it was actually his father, Nigel Powers, who said that.
Exactly. That's the tradeoff, plain and simple. And people are willing to make that tradeoff some of the time, so iTMS has been a success. There's been attempts by the recording companies to force some of those tradeoffs onto CD's, without giving the buyer the convenience in exchange, and there's been protest. It seems to me that the market is working reasonably well. I don't understand why there's so much complaining about DRM. Just speak with your dollars, it's that simple.
People go to Walmart even though they know it's destructive to their town's overall economy, and you have to deal with their crappy parking lots and boring stores. They deal with those inconveniences in exchange for lower prices. If you want a car with more comfort and features, then you pay more for it. That compromise exists in every transaction, and businesses fail or thrive depending on their ability to gauge and make those compromises.
Well, there will be a shakeout, somewhere down the road. And the majority of services will go under, or be bought out. That's how it usually works with any new business "game". The dotcom nonsense was really only unusual in the scale of it all. And realize that while lots of companies crashed and burned, and droves of people lost their jobs, there are still plenty of websites still around, and plenty of people who got rich.
But in the end, there will probably be a handful of big companies, making some decent profit, as well as a few smaller, more niche companies staying afloat. Same as usual.
Apple has big marketshare, and a good product, but they tend to be very specific and limited in the services they offer. This makes their stuff very consistent and nice, but requires them leave other parts of the market open. That's fine with them, they're willing to make that decision.
That decision means that there are other aspects to the market that are left open to other companies, and that's where all these other companies are aiming for. While there is definitely a good bit of overlap, I'm betting that if you talked with Steve Jobs for about it for a while, he'd probably say something to the effect of these subscription based companies not even being a direct competitor to iTMS. Apple evaluated the subscription music business and decided not to get into it. Because the iTMS sales model looked bigger and better to them.
There will be subscription music services in the future. Some of them will be profitable. Probably none of them will do business on the scale of the iTMS, or something with a similar sales model. But they will continue.
An architect designing a museum or an airport is working under an entirely different set of restrictions than someone designing levels for a video game. There are plenty of architects out there who would be absolutely terrible at level design, but there are also plenty who would be very good at it, and bring to the table some extra talents. Things like a solid awareness of spacial qualities, good lighting (especially with the newest/future engines), and a developed understanding of the importance of scale.
If you grabbed a random architect off the street and asked him to design you a castle (responding to the same threats and functions that a medieval castle had to deal with) and didn't rush him/underpay him, I think you could end up with something close to equal to what already exists. Even better if you allowed for more modern materials/construction methods.
I guess the point is, ignoring the subset of celebrity architects who are living in their own world, the average architect is pretty smart, very flexible, and willing to learn and experiment. A whole lot of the problems with contemporary architecture are caused by financial/social/political limitations, not the skills and desires of the architects.
Agreed. This seems entirely legitimate to me. The article summary was grasping at straws to try and make MS sound bad and/or evil for doing this.
You can make a case that this whole idea is susceptible to fraud, but so is just about every other business idea/plan/system. That being said, if six months down the line, we find out that MS sent off letters demanding money from each and everyone who was reported as selling counterfeit windows, with no regards to fact checking or correctness, then we can criticize.
Yeah, there are definitely games that fall in between, or mix the two design philosophies. And that's a pretty good idea. Sort of taking the emotional attachment that an epic game can inspire, and supplementing it with the replay value that can be found in simpler games.
I think it's dumb that there's even an argument as to which one is inherently better. Doesn't it depend on what the point of the game is? Doesn't it depend on what kind of mood I'm in? Over the past 10 years or so, I've probably spent just as much time playing windows minesweeper as I spent playing through Knight of the old Republic on my Xbox over the course of a couple weeks. I enjoyed both of them a lot. I was much more emotionally invested in KOTOR while playing, but now that I'm finished with it, I'll probably never touch it again. One day, however, I'll probably be sitting around bored and fire up the ol' minesweeper and see if I'm as good at it as I was when I was younger. And I'll enjoy it then too.
Epic games are awesome, and by definition, they need to be longer to work. They basically end when the story ends, and once the story is known, the fun stops. So there has to be all that story. There may be puzzles, and there may be combat, or whatever, but in the end, you're playing to advance and learn the story.
Then there's games where there's absolutely no story, just the rules, and your goal is generally to learn how to be efficient at whatever the task is.
I guess my point is that it's silly to compare these classes of games in this way. The word "game" is a little to broad to draw comparisons between anything that falls under it. Taking the analogy that you quoted; a book and a short story are very different. They both fall under the category of "writing". Asking which one is a better form of Writing is a pointless question. It depends on what the author is trying to get across to the reader.
Probably not. But if it does happen, it'll be because of Xbox Live. There's a few big reasons that MS has stayed so strong in the PC world that don't exist when it comes to consoles. The most significant is Businesses/Governments. The majority of businesses and governments get their day to day work done on MS software, and that represents a huge investment in software, related hardware, support, and training. You're talking about lots of organizations with thousands and thousands of workstations, none of which are in any rush to switch away from something that, while certainly not perfect and foolproof, has worked well enough for years.
/. article about a MMORPG will reflect. As Xbox live starts to track those sorts of things more throughly, there will be plenty of people who invest enough time building up their numbers online that they'll be loathe to just walk away, regardless of what hardware MS asks them to buy in the future, just to keep their accounts.
Consoles don't have that sort of market. They just go in people's houses. If I decide to switch from Xbox to Gamecube, I just have to convince myself, and go spend a couple hundred bucks for a system and some games. Learning the controls for a gamecube game isn't going to be any harder than learning the controls for a new Xbox game. Beyond that irrational fanaticism of some fanboys, a console is not that big of an investment. And when I get a new game system, I generally don't throw out the previous one, in case I feel like replaying some of the older stuff.
Another issue is file formats and compatibility and whatnot. This has helped MS keep such a good hold on the home consumer market, as well as tightened their grasp on the businesses/governments. Keeping compatibility with other people forces some conformity. Backwards compatibility is not as huge a deal in consoles as some people pretend, because most people don't throw out their old consoles when they get a new one, and I doubt the average casual gamer goes back to their older games all that much.
Xbox live is a chance for MS to lock people in, by storing data remotely. People can get pretty obsessive over their statistics and whatnot, as the comments in any
Nintendo had the big monopoly in the past, and they did some pretty anti-competitive things to solidify it. It didn't work for them when they hardly had any competitors. MS is strong, but they've got two well established opponents in their market, which would make all out domination quite unlikely.
I find myself using the same files repeatedly in a number of different apps. Drag and drop onto an application's icon on the dock makes this so much easier for me. To each his own I guess. The dock isn't perfect, but it's got its uses.
Well, thanks for your sarcasm. Here's some more:
Adding in some card games that many players had requested sure did make all the other stuff in the game less original and worthwhile. Only an idiot would bother even looking at PP! I feel stupid for even mentioning it!
That list is incomplete. There's been a few other additions. There's currently an Alchemy puzzle, a Ship Building puzzle, and I think they just added Hearts to go along with spades.
I don't hate puzzle games, it's just that they generally have a weird life time to me. I get terribly addicted to one for a while, and play it all the time, hardcore intense. Then one day, it's all of a sudden just entirely boring to me. I've been playing PP for a little over a year, and it's about to the point where I'm bored with all of them. Shipwriting is finally getting tired to me, but I sure loved it when it first came out.
Of course, there's a huge economic and social/political aspect to the game as well. The only problem there is that Midnight (the original ocean) is pretty tightly bound up by established players, and to get anywhere on the new oceans, I'd have to spend some time in all of the puzzles again, building up my stats. And I have no interest in doing that. *shrug*
The most important part, maybe step 5.5, is polish it all so that steps 1-5 actually lead to 6.
Is there any other company that could actually make this plan work? I doubt it. Are we better off having OSX as an option? I think so.
Apple basically did something really similar to what a lot of people have been trying to do with Linux.I think they deserve all the money they've made, and plenty of credit.
Exactly. People need to understand that Apple did not send a bunch of engineers over to join the KHTML project. They just used some source code that was available to them, and as is required, they give out the changes they make.
Apple is developing "WebKit", not KHTML. They both have just evolved from a common codebase in the past.
I've had that problem as well. My girlfriend showed me a magazine article a while back about a guy who was making furniture out of old boxes because he was poor. He was apparently poor because he sent every dime he got his hands on to Apple, since every furniture piece he had was constructed out of one of their boxes.
Or maybe he was just stealing them from other people.
It's definitely a branding thing, and also a result of the "holistic design" philosophy that Apple is known for. If all those engineers are going to spend all that time and energy trying to make your computer as pleasant and easy to use as they can, why shouldn't that experience start with the box? Your binoculars analogy is basically the same. With Apple, I'm paying a premium over other computer manufacturers. I want to be reminded at every step why I paid that extra money.
Not to mention that a bunch of imac boxes, sitting up on top of the shelves at CompUSA are much more eye catching than piles of brown Dell boxes. Apple already has a tough fight to get shelf space. Anything to make more out of what they get can help.
It's not quite that simple. First off, when you're granted a trademark, eg. "Windows", it's for a specific area of commerce. MS owns a trademark on the word windows as the name of a piece of software. Apple is still free to talk about windows in their operating system. There are still plenty of companies manufacturing actual, physical glass windows that use that word in their name. Trademarks do serve an important function that's useful to the everyday person, in that it clears up confusion, helps us make choices, and makes it a little more difficult for us to get cheated. If I order an iMac from a website, I can be pretty confident that it's an iMac made by Apple Computer, and not some schmuck in his basement using the same name. And if someone tries to do that, Apple can shut him down. Everyone wins except for the scumbag.
It's hard to be constantly unique and clever all the time. Especially when you're talking about something like product names. The movie office space sort of spoofed that with company names like Innetech and Intertroad, or whatever it was. The point is, when you end up using nonsense names, they tend to wind up sounding pretty stupid, and basically the same.
That being said, there's only so many good words out there. Any advertising hack will tell you that you don't want your product name to be too long or complicated. It sounds confusing and makes it harder to make creative advertisements. So common words get used, but there are rules for keeping things organized and as fair as is possible. Some people will always try to bend the rules in their favor, but that's not unique to this issue.
I don't mind MS using Windows at their OS name. It's easy to remember, and it makes sense. Calling their word processor "Word" is stretching it a little, but there are plenty of other word processors that have "word" in their names. I don't know if MS has ever gone after someone for that, but that is a case that might be more questionable.
When I still lived with my parents, I'd write little scripts that just said things with the text to speech, so you could have very limited (if not predictable) conversations with the computer. I'd name them things that my family members would say a lot, and since the computer was sitting out in a common area, it responded to people who weren't expecting the computer to enter their conversations. I guess it was fun.
While I would never want something like you described running on my home machine, there's certainly places where this would be reasonable and useful. Take corporations and government institutions. If I'm hiring a bunch of people to work for me on a bunch of computers that I paid for and have to maintain, I'm certainly going to be interested in limiting the ways that they can mess up those machines, and also limiting the amount of info lost if a machine is stolen. That all seems very reasonable to me, and not evil. Consider the fact that corporate/government sales are a huge part of microsoft's sales, and it looks pretty intelligent on their part.
I think it's a matter of just the amount of information we're dealing with nowadays. Back when I was on my MacLC with a 40 Meg drive, I was very careful with what I saved, and where I put it. I had files inside folders inside folders inside folders, all carefully organized, and hardly ever changing. Now I've got a 150gig drive, and I download enough data to fill my LC's harddrive at least three times over pretty much each and every day.
Broadband has made it really easy for me to constantly be adding stuff to my computer, software/files get more complex and harder to categorize, and so I've just ended up dumping most things into a temp folder, and then organizing it every few months. Not ideal, but reality.
Good ol' fashioned organization and Spotlight are two different solutions to the same problem. Nothing wrong with a little choice. I don't see how the existence of spotlight will make life any more difficult for someone who consistently keeps their stuff organized already.
Not only that, but some of the more important areas could constantly be changing. In the towns, construction sites should appear, and over time become more and more complete, until finally there's a new building, providing some useful additions/content. Better yet if players can have some direct input into the process, although quality control of design/artwork makes that difficult.
Second Life as an example provides both pros and cons. The world is constantly evolving, and there are some really talented people out there making cool stuff for the fun of it. But there's also a whole lot of worthless and ugly crap, everywhere you look.