In my opinion, quirks mode is the number one obstacle to web standards.
Arguably, quirks mode was conceived as a way for page authors to still be able to view their content if their markup wasn't valid. However, it seems to have evolved into an excuse not to create valid markup of any sort. The "it looks fine, I'm done" mentality of authors.
What are your thoughts on quirks mode, how it affects CSS, and how can the web escape the legacy need for it?
AOL knows there can be no success related to Netscape. What they do seem to be interested in is how many ways and to what completeness they can use Netscape as a loss leader for obviously dismal failures.
Everything AOL has done under the name Netscape has been a mind bogglingly stupid idea, or just a rather dumb idea with no marketing behind it so failure is assured.
I'm sure AOL does market research. They have to have a spreadsheet somewhere showing that Netscape brand recognition is near 0. Any smart corporation would shelve the Netscape property and let it die with its last microscopic shred of business dignity intact. Who still uses their @netscape.net email anyway?
Alas, this is AOL we're talking about. They'll beat this horse until no one remembers that the bloody sludge on their shoes was once a horse.
Whether or not tables are a better (I think you mean easier) layout tool, they are not meant to be used for anything other than (gasp) tabular data. Using a table for anything else is bad semantics, page bloat, and, let's face it, primitive.
In the last three years, every site I've attempted to rebuild in CSS from tables I've been able to do with 90% accuracy. It's not only a different layout tool, it's a different layout model. You can't expect tables to CSS to be a 1:1 conversion, there will be compromises along the way.
I've been in the same situation with graphic designers. The problem is that they think the web works like paper, where the design is a monolithic entity that simply exists. They have little to no understanding of what HTML and CSS is, does, or how it works. The concept that their full screen 50 layer photoshop file will be chopped up, gutted of text, and reassembled later is entirely beyond them. Long time print designers make the absolute worst web designers, I've found.
Another part of the problem is browser support for CSS, especially the various values for the display property (especially table, table-row, table-cell, inline-block), and the position property. Position is mostly misunderstood, anyway: "relative" is not the default value, "static" is. See my sig for my thoughts on browser CSS support.
Too many people try to wrestle with CSS to make it do what they want. This is most often the fault of a poorly thought out document structure combined with a poor understanding of CSS. Let the document work for you, I always say.
CSS is vastly better than what was before: nested tables full of font tags. CSS is more flexible, concise, and clean. Is it perfect? Not in its current form, but maybe the next version.
Equal height columns are easy: height: 100%;. Too bad IE can't get this right unless you declare the height of the parent element. Hate the implementation, not the specification.
AJAX is the functional foundation of Web 2.0. Sprinkle in a design philosophy that actually embraces whitespace and non-miniscule fonts, and primitive machine to machine communication, and you get the rest of the "trend".
HTML has been deprecated for six years. XHTML finally got rid of HTML's quirky syntax and bad semantics.
What's next won't even be achieveable for two to three years. The other browsers will continue to implement standards as they are drafted while IE continues to struggle with catching up to 1998, much less 2006. This involves several elements:
CSS3: This is the next generation style and layout methodology. Even though some properties will behave vastly differently from their 2.0/2.1 versions, the vast amount of new properties will entice designers with the possibility to do more (gradients, shadows, masks, text rotation, and more). Because, as Daniel Glazman blogged months ago, CSS has no verioning mechainsm, designers will be able to pick and choose what they want to use.
XHTML2: This is the next generation for web page markup itself (the canvas to the paint of CSS). Further steps towards semantic bliss include semantically-relavant tag attributes, more versatile workhorse attributes (add href and src onto any tag), and a more streamlined namespace.
XHTML2 has some competition, however, in the form of HTML5. While I can understand frustration at the glacial speed of the W3C at producing new documents, WHATWG seeks to damage most of the progress made since HTML 4.01. Apparently "tag soup" becomes an option again, which means few people will bother to write valid, correct pages (a key element for machine readable content to work).
The canvas element and SVG bring new ways of displaying graphical stuff to be interacted with. XForms will finally allow data input to happen in a non-archaic way.
And when this all happens, the table layout trolls and Dreamweaver monkeys will be two tech generations behind. More work for those of us who have real skill.
NORAD was running several drills on the morning of 9/11, amazingly, to simulate almost the exact 9/11 events. This is why so many air traffic controllers and military personnel in various tape recordings seem confused and ask for numerous confirmations that what actually happened was not an exercise.
"There's a sucker born every minute." Widely and falsely attributed to P.T. Barnum.
"A fool and his money are soon parted." Thomas Tusser.
MS is apparently hoping that lightning will strike twice in millions of places.
They've said repeatedly that Vista will be the most secure Windows ever, so why would Vista need any additional security software, from the creator of the OS or a third party? Obviously, the answer is that Vista isn't secure, and MS already knows it. They've even thought of a way to turn Vista's lackluster security into a secondary revenue stream.
To which the suckers and fools will gladly contribute.
I applaud Rob for a) implementing CSS months ago; b) deciding it was time for a design freshening; and c) picking an attractive winner.
I do have a couple of thoughts.
The green gradient backgrounds seem to make those areas darker than the corresponding areas of the classic design. I was struck by a very slight feeling of disparagement by this (the darker color, not the design). While the color may be mathematically correct, it doesn't seem correct visually.
The gray gradient backgrounds (story footer) seem a little flatter than I think they were intended to be.
The gray slashbox headers could stand to be a little darker. The contrast here with the white slashbox title is a bit weak.
In the left side menu, inverting the colors on mouse over is too drastic and heavy, and conflicts with the feel of the rest of the design with regard to this kind of UI feedback. It also makes my first thought about the green gradients more apparent. A much lighter color is called for IMO, perhaps a midtone gray to light green gradient?
Given how easy it is to write MS Office malware, how long until a more advanced version of this worm can search a user's hard drive for other Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Visio documents, infect them, and wait for the next generation of itself to be transmitted?
If the malware itself could change/adapt/evolve (ie, create new functionality within itself), then MS has essentially created a petri dish out of each install of Office.
In other words, MS has created a true "software ecosystem".
Re:Can it be better than EditPad [Lite]...?
on
Acme for Windows
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
EditPad (I've been using Pro for several years now) is without a doubt the best editor available on Windows. There is a binary version available for *nix, which unfortunately for GNOME users, is compiled against Qt.
Features:
Unlimited undo
Syntax highlighting for most common languages (anyone could write a highlighting scheme for, say, brainf*ck if they wanted to)
Almost unlimited simultaneous files open (my personal record: 784)
PCRE-based search and replace
Highly customizable interface
Can use external executables/scripts to manipulate open files
In short, EditPad rules. The only features it lacks for me is a way to disable insert/overwrite mode switching. Folding would be nice too. Are you listening, Jan?
I think the term PC is what is being killed, and it has succeeded.
I agree, but this is not solely the doing of the software companies. It is also the fault of the user base, for not taking the initiative to make their computer "personal", which means substantially more than changing their desktop background.
There is a difference between a tool and an appliance, a large part of which is whether the thing is used actively or passively. Toasters and dishwashers are appliances because they perform their function without intervention from the user (loading/unloading aside). Drills and saws are tools because they must be guided by the user in order to perform properly.
Most computer users think their computer is an appliance, and get frustrated with it because they actually use it like a tool (which contributes to the intimidating stigma of the computer itself). It can be used both ways, but most people can't get past the intimidation to realize that, and rarely if ever get exposed to how to use their computer as an appliance (prime example: cron).
And the big software companies deliberately do little to change this. They know that a consumer who thinks is likely to make an informed decision... and they could choose a competitor's product (gasp!). The same principle is what made Martin Luther so dangerous to the Catholic Church.
People in general will continue to be intimidated by electronics for the next couple of decades. Think about the long-lived joke about setting the clock on a VCR; the same applies to just about anything in the digital age: PC, camera, phone, you name it.
Web development has paid my bills for seven years. Every employer (and most clients) I've had has gotten at least part of that speech. I've had more than one friend/co-worker/manager tell me I should write a book about XHTML/CSS/web usability. I've read the standards, I know the standards, and I know how to avoid browser bugs rather than hack around them after the fact.
Is a fool who doesn't deserve to be involved in web development.
The Web would never have been much more than an academic experiment without web standards. Anything that has a sufficiently large group of people that use it at various levels needs standards. Think road traffic is bad now? Imagine if there were no lines on the roads, no standardised street signs, or even pavement. Getting anywhere would be total chaos, and most of us would be doing it on foot.
Sure, Opera 9 is the only browser released for public use that passes acid2, but the Gecko codebase achieved this a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, we'll likely have to wait for Firefox 3 in order to experience it.
IE7b2 is complete as far as standards compliance is concerned, so you might as well go ahead and test it now. It still has the worst compliance compared to all other non-MS browsers.
The distance between any W3C recommendation and the browsers is a result of 2 things: vagueness in the document, and how any browser vendor decides to interpret it (if at all).
The biggest threats to web standards aren't MS, WHATWG, Motorola, or any other entity.
Number one: Quirks Mode. As long as browsers try to correct invalid documents, there is not real incentive for valid documents to be produced. Interoperability can't be fully achieved, and machine-to-machine exchange of data remains tenuous.
Number two: Nomenclature and Authority. Part of the W3C's problem is the terms they use to identify the stages of a standard. "Draft" is understandable, but labeling a final document "Recommendation" almost begs people to ignore it at will. Furthermore, the W3C just produces documents, and there is no body anywhere to monitor and enforce standards compliance among browser vendors. I believe the W3C should be absorbed into an existing technical organization which people actually respect, probably IEEE.
Anyone who doesn't care about web standards might as well go back to 1998-99 and try to keep riding the bubble.
And will continue to be low priority until the result of graphics and sound is indistinguishable from reality (another 5 to 10 years). Once all the eye- and ear-candy has been exhausted, then the game designers will have nothing left to do but enhance gameplay; one element of which is AI.
FPS and RTS games don't need highly sophisticated AI compared to RPG's. If developers wanted to (read: saw the business), sufficient AI from for FPS/RTS games could be achieved in 2-3 years.
An RPG needs AI capable of sustaining social interactions (at personal, econoomic, and political levels) between any 2 or more agents, in both speech and in writing. When a virtual population can sustain its society (then grow/adapt/react to stimuli) without the presence of players, then a true RPG is possible.
How cool would it be if you could walk through town in [insert fantasy franchise] and overhear the conversation between the butcher and the blacksmith's wife? Think of the ways quest hooks could be handled with such a mechanism. Your character is now the commander of legions, and it all started with eavesdropping in a tavern. Who hasn't played a D&D game that involved such a scenario?
(Psst... levels don't work at this scale... stop relying on them)
Eye candy sells games. Game play keeps the players interested. The more dynamic (and balanced) the game play, the better the game and the longer the player will (wait for it)... play. One player gets bored? Publisher just lost $10 per month. 10,000 players get pissed off because the mechanics get over-tweaked by a patch? Publisher lost $100,000 a month.
The web will render text just fine for people who set their screen's dpi correctly. Gone are the days of 72px (96 for Macs) == 1 physical inch on a screen. It's just the images and backgrounds (or anything else with fixed dimensions) that won't scale with the text.
While I agree to a point (being able to cram SVG into everywhere it could possibly work will be awesome), any hi-def web design will take a back seat while the next generation standard is decided upon... I vote XHTML2 over HTML5.
We can rename the boring "slashdot effect" the "slashdot pony stampede"! LOLZ!!!!111oneoneeleven
(holy shit, I participated in puss^H^H^Hinkdot day)
I'm damn glad this will only last a day. In high school, a friend of worked at Toys-r-Us for the Christmas season, and got stuck stocking the Barbie aisle. In 3 weeks he went color blind, and his vision didn't return to normal until the following February.
Light sabers (and all other Star Wars pseudo-science) work because Lucas has no idea how physics works in reality, and he doesn't understand that there is a point where suspension of disbelief can no longer support the premise,especially in an adult audience.
IE7 will only be installable on Vista and XP+SP2. IE7 will also not be integrated into the underlying OS, so Joe Sixpack running XP likely won't just automagically get it as part of his bi-millenial visit to Windows Update.
It appears that MS doesn't know how to sell Vista, and will probably have to rely on OEMs to just "make it available". The $500M marketing campaign might directly generate some retail sales, but I think it's likely that big business is starting to catch on to the FUD.
IE7 is capable in 2006 of what most other modern browsers were capable of in 2002 (or earlier). Granted, that only means something to developers, but there are high profile ways that IE is behind the curve (tabs, anyone?).
The fate of IE7 is directly tied to Vista, which more than likely will have a very slow uptake (slower than the 2k to XP conversion), and be based almost completely on new PC sales. I doubt is IE7 will have much more than 25% usage share 3 years after Vista is released sometime (not January... maybe June/July, in time for the back-to-school PC sales rush) next year.
Unfortunately, this means that the decline of IE6 will be just as slow. Most developers I know now hate IE6 more than they ever hated Netscape 4. Firefox 2 is coming, Opera 9 is due soon, and Apple will likely update Safari, all before Vista is released. IE7 may get an independant release schedule, but I doubt it.
I spent 2 hours reading that thread, and the one thing that dropped my jaw was the post claiming that MS has been unable to stave off six 6-digit corporate desktop migrations.
*blink*
The only one I've heard about is IBM: that's 330,000 desktops. It's more than likely one of the six. This sounds to me like the Fortune 500 is getting really tired of the lack of security, empty promises, endless delays, absurd licensing costs... and has gotten wise to the FUD.
They know that if Apple can put OSX 10.5 on shelves in November, that will start the snowball rolling, and the avalanche is coming.
Sure, when Vista does ship (too late), there will be a huge marketing campaign for it. It seems though that they don't even know how to make a compelling pitch to customers, business or retail. Even with a January launch (I'm not holding my breath), the advertising will start in November, and those campaigns will need to be conceptualized in the next few weeks, if that hasn't started already.
MS has a disaster on its hands that no one seems to want, and they don't know how to sell it. Meanwhile, their enemies (aka the rest of the industry) are circling the bloated prey, waiting for MS to collapse under its own weight before they move in for the kill.
This Professor knows that real education is about thought and analysis, not turning facts into brain vomit. She knows her students will be better served in the long run if they comprehend law, which can only happen if the students participate in their education. Too many kids (for a long time now) think an education is a handout, mostly because the system is designed to make it that way. It's not--look at any international test results. The students don't understand this because they lack thought and analysis skills, which their fact-vomit based K-12 "education" doesn't include.
If there were more educators like Professor Entman at all levels of education, the US would be much better off, now and in the future.
By the way, "snowball effect"? Law students today can't use legal phrases such as "establishes precedent"? I rest my case.
In the mid 90's, a friend of mine worked in a GE Medical warehouse. A hospital, clinic, or whatever would need a part for some piece of GE equipment, and somehow the invoice would end up on his screen, and he'd pack it up and ship it.
One day he told me that a CAT scan machine which costs a hospital a million dollars only costs $10,000 to produce. He said that the 4 orders of magnitude in price came from GE selling the machine back and forth between various internal departments before it was *actually* sold to the place that would use it.
Between this and the pharmaceuticals, the health care industry makes Enron look like they botched some simple addition with "carry the twelve".
By the way, his warehouse also had 15 inch floppy disks in stock. That made me shudder.
Slashdot Mirror
s/user/victim/g
After all, this is Windows and IE we're talking about.
There already is a solution in CSS3: the nth-child pseudo-class
In my opinion, quirks mode is the number one obstacle to web standards.
Arguably, quirks mode was conceived as a way for page authors to still be able to view their content if their markup wasn't valid. However, it seems to have evolved into an excuse not to create valid markup of any sort. The "it looks fine, I'm done" mentality of authors.
What are your thoughts on quirks mode, how it affects CSS, and how can the web escape the legacy need for it?
You almost got it right.
AOL knows there can be no success related to Netscape. What they do seem to be interested in is how many ways and to what completeness they can use Netscape as a loss leader for obviously dismal failures.
Everything AOL has done under the name Netscape has been a mind bogglingly stupid idea, or just a rather dumb idea with no marketing behind it so failure is assured.
I'm sure AOL does market research. They have to have a spreadsheet somewhere showing that Netscape brand recognition is near 0. Any smart corporation would shelve the Netscape property and let it die with its last microscopic shred of business dignity intact. Who still uses their @netscape.net email anyway?
Alas, this is AOL we're talking about. They'll beat this horse until no one remembers that the bloody sludge on their shoes was once a horse.
Whether or not tables are a better (I think you mean easier) layout tool, they are not meant to be used for anything other than (gasp) tabular data. Using a table for anything else is bad semantics, page bloat, and, let's face it, primitive.
In the last three years, every site I've attempted to rebuild in CSS from tables I've been able to do with 90% accuracy. It's not only a different layout tool, it's a different layout model. You can't expect tables to CSS to be a 1:1 conversion, there will be compromises along the way.
I've been in the same situation with graphic designers. The problem is that they think the web works like paper, where the design is a monolithic entity that simply exists. They have little to no understanding of what HTML and CSS is, does, or how it works. The concept that their full screen 50 layer photoshop file will be chopped up, gutted of text, and reassembled later is entirely beyond them. Long time print designers make the absolute worst web designers, I've found.
Another part of the problem is browser support for CSS, especially the various values for the display property (especially table, table-row, table-cell, inline-block), and the position property. Position is mostly misunderstood, anyway: "relative" is not the default value, "static" is. See my sig for my thoughts on browser CSS support.
Too many people try to wrestle with CSS to make it do what they want. This is most often the fault of a poorly thought out document structure combined with a poor understanding of CSS. Let the document work for you, I always say.
CSS is vastly better than what was before: nested tables full of font tags. CSS is more flexible, concise, and clean. Is it perfect? Not in its current form, but maybe the next version.
Equal height columns are easy: height: 100%;. Too bad IE can't get this right unless you declare the height of the parent element. Hate the implementation, not the specification.
First, let's get a couple things straight:
What's next won't even be achieveable for two to three years. The other browsers will continue to implement standards as they are drafted while IE continues to struggle with catching up to 1998, much less 2006. This involves several elements:
CSS3: This is the next generation style and layout methodology. Even though some properties will behave vastly differently from their 2.0/2.1 versions, the vast amount of new properties will entice designers with the possibility to do more (gradients, shadows, masks, text rotation, and more). Because, as Daniel Glazman blogged months ago, CSS has no verioning mechainsm, designers will be able to pick and choose what they want to use.
XHTML2: This is the next generation for web page markup itself (the canvas to the paint of CSS). Further steps towards semantic bliss include semantically-relavant tag attributes, more versatile workhorse attributes (add href and src onto any tag), and a more streamlined namespace.
XHTML2 has some competition, however, in the form of HTML5. While I can understand frustration at the glacial speed of the W3C at producing new documents, WHATWG seeks to damage most of the progress made since HTML 4.01. Apparently "tag soup" becomes an option again, which means few people will bother to write valid, correct pages (a key element for machine readable content to work).
The canvas element and SVG bring new ways of displaying graphical stuff to be interacted with. XForms will finally allow data input to happen in a non-archaic way.
And when this all happens, the table layout trolls and Dreamweaver monkeys will be two tech generations behind. More work for those of us who have real skill.
NORAD was running several drills on the morning of 9/11, amazingly, to simulate almost the exact 9/11 events. This is why so many air traffic controllers and military personnel in various tape recordings seem confused and ask for numerous confirmations that what actually happened was not an exercise.
[/tinfoil-hat]
"There's a sucker born every minute." Widely and falsely attributed to P.T. Barnum.
"A fool and his money are soon parted." Thomas Tusser.
MS is apparently hoping that lightning will strike twice in millions of places.
They've said repeatedly that Vista will be the most secure Windows ever, so why would Vista need any additional security software, from the creator of the OS or a third party? Obviously, the answer is that Vista isn't secure, and MS already knows it. They've even thought of a way to turn Vista's lackluster security into a secondary revenue stream.
To which the suckers and fools will gladly contribute.
I applaud Rob for a) implementing CSS months ago; b) deciding it was time for a design freshening; and c) picking an attractive winner.
I do have a couple of thoughts.
The green gradient backgrounds seem to make those areas darker than the corresponding areas of the classic design. I was struck by a very slight feeling of disparagement by this (the darker color, not the design). While the color may be mathematically correct, it doesn't seem correct visually.
The gray gradient backgrounds (story footer) seem a little flatter than I think they were intended to be.
The gray slashbox headers could stand to be a little darker. The contrast here with the white slashbox title is a bit weak.
In the left side menu, inverting the colors on mouse over is too drastic and heavy, and conflicts with the feel of the rest of the design with regard to this kind of UI feedback. It also makes my first thought about the green gradients more apparent. A much lighter color is called for IMO, perhaps a midtone gray to light green gradient?
I don't know of any software Google produces that is worth bundling with a new machine. Google Earth? Nope. Picasa? Maybe. Google Desktop? No thanks.
As far as I'm concerned, Google belongs in one of my browser tabs, not on my hard drive.
If Dell and Google want to do a service to consumers, Google would give Dell a pile of money to put Firefox on the desktop.
Given how easy it is to write MS Office malware, how long until a more advanced version of this worm can search a user's hard drive for other Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Visio documents, infect them, and wait for the next generation of itself to be transmitted?
If the malware itself could change/adapt/evolve (ie, create new functionality within itself), then MS has essentially created a petri dish out of each install of Office.
In other words, MS has created a true "software ecosystem".
EditPad (I've been using Pro for several years now) is without a doubt the best editor available on Windows. There is a binary version available for *nix, which unfortunately for GNOME users, is compiled against Qt.
Features:
In short, EditPad rules. The only features it lacks for me is a way to disable insert/overwrite mode switching. Folding would be nice too. Are you listening, Jan?
I agree, but this is not solely the doing of the software companies. It is also the fault of the user base, for not taking the initiative to make their computer "personal", which means substantially more than changing their desktop background.
There is a difference between a tool and an appliance, a large part of which is whether the thing is used actively or passively. Toasters and dishwashers are appliances because they perform their function without intervention from the user (loading/unloading aside). Drills and saws are tools because they must be guided by the user in order to perform properly.
Most computer users think their computer is an appliance, and get frustrated with it because they actually use it like a tool (which contributes to the intimidating stigma of the computer itself). It can be used both ways, but most people can't get past the intimidation to realize that, and rarely if ever get exposed to how to use their computer as an appliance (prime example: cron).
And the big software companies deliberately do little to change this. They know that a consumer who thinks is likely to make an informed decision... and they could choose a competitor's product (gasp!). The same principle is what made Martin Luther so dangerous to the Catholic Church.
People in general will continue to be intimidated by electronics for the next couple of decades. Think about the long-lived joke about setting the clock on a VCR; the same applies to just about anything in the digital age: PC, camera, phone, you name it.
Web development has paid my bills for seven years. Every employer (and most clients) I've had has gotten at least part of that speech. I've had more than one friend/co-worker/manager tell me I should write a book about XHTML/CSS/web usability. I've read the standards, I know the standards, and I know how to avoid browser bugs rather than hack around them after the fact.
Is a fool who doesn't deserve to be involved in web development.
The Web would never have been much more than an academic experiment without web standards. Anything that has a sufficiently large group of people that use it at various levels needs standards. Think road traffic is bad now? Imagine if there were no lines on the roads, no standardised street signs, or even pavement. Getting anywhere would be total chaos, and most of us would be doing it on foot.
Sure, Opera 9 is the only browser released for public use that passes acid2, but the Gecko codebase achieved this a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, we'll likely have to wait for Firefox 3 in order to experience it.
IE7b2 is complete as far as standards compliance is concerned, so you might as well go ahead and test it now. It still has the worst compliance compared to all other non-MS browsers.
The distance between any W3C recommendation and the browsers is a result of 2 things: vagueness in the document, and how any browser vendor decides to interpret it (if at all).
The biggest threats to web standards aren't MS, WHATWG, Motorola, or any other entity.
Number one: Quirks Mode. As long as browsers try to correct invalid documents, there is not real incentive for valid documents to be produced. Interoperability can't be fully achieved, and machine-to-machine exchange of data remains tenuous.
Number two: Nomenclature and Authority. Part of the W3C's problem is the terms they use to identify the stages of a standard. "Draft" is understandable, but labeling a final document "Recommendation" almost begs people to ignore it at will. Furthermore, the W3C just produces documents, and there is no body anywhere to monitor and enforce standards compliance among browser vendors. I believe the W3C should be absorbed into an existing technical organization which people actually respect, probably IEEE.
Anyone who doesn't care about web standards might as well go back to 1998-99 and try to keep riding the bubble.
And will continue to be low priority until the result of graphics and sound is indistinguishable from reality (another 5 to 10 years). Once all the eye- and ear-candy has been exhausted, then the game designers will have nothing left to do but enhance gameplay; one element of which is AI.
FPS and RTS games don't need highly sophisticated AI compared to RPG's. If developers wanted to (read: saw the business), sufficient AI from for FPS/RTS games could be achieved in 2-3 years.
An RPG needs AI capable of sustaining social interactions (at personal, econoomic, and political levels) between any 2 or more agents, in both speech and in writing. When a virtual population can sustain its society (then grow/adapt/react to stimuli) without the presence of players, then a true RPG is possible.
How cool would it be if you could walk through town in [insert fantasy franchise] and overhear the conversation between the butcher and the blacksmith's wife? Think of the ways quest hooks could be handled with such a mechanism. Your character is now the commander of legions, and it all started with eavesdropping in a tavern. Who hasn't played a D&D game that involved such a scenario?
(Psst... levels don't work at this scale... stop relying on them)
Eye candy sells games. Game play keeps the players interested. The more dynamic (and balanced) the game play, the better the game and the longer the player will (wait for it)... play. One player gets bored? Publisher just lost $10 per month. 10,000 players get pissed off because the mechanics get over-tweaked by a patch? Publisher lost $100,000 a month.
The web will render text just fine for people who set their screen's dpi correctly. Gone are the days of 72px (96 for Macs) == 1 physical inch on a screen. It's just the images and backgrounds (or anything else with fixed dimensions) that won't scale with the text.
While I agree to a point (being able to cram SVG into everywhere it could possibly work will be awesome), any hi-def web design will take a back seat while the next generation standard is decided upon... I vote XHTML2 over HTML5.
We can rename the boring "slashdot effect" the "slashdot pony stampede"! LOLZ!!!!111oneoneeleven
(holy shit, I participated in puss^H^H^Hinkdot day)
I'm damn glad this will only last a day. In high school, a friend of worked at Toys-r-Us for the Christmas season, and got stuck stocking the Barbie aisle. In 3 weeks he went color blind, and his vision didn't return to normal until the following February.
Light sabers (and all other Star Wars pseudo-science) work because Lucas has no idea how physics works in reality, and he doesn't understand that there is a point where suspension of disbelief can no longer support the premise,especially in an adult audience.
The voice-family hack was broken by SP2.
IE7 will only be installable on Vista and XP+SP2. IE7 will also not be integrated into the underlying OS, so Joe Sixpack running XP likely won't just automagically get it as part of his bi-millenial visit to Windows Update.
It appears that MS doesn't know how to sell Vista, and will probably have to rely on OEMs to just "make it available". The $500M marketing campaign might directly generate some retail sales, but I think it's likely that big business is starting to catch on to the FUD.
IE7 is capable in 2006 of what most other modern browsers were capable of in 2002 (or earlier). Granted, that only means something to developers, but there are high profile ways that IE is behind the curve (tabs, anyone?).
The fate of IE7 is directly tied to Vista, which more than likely will have a very slow uptake (slower than the 2k to XP conversion), and be based almost completely on new PC sales. I doubt is IE7 will have much more than 25% usage share 3 years after Vista is released sometime (not January... maybe June/July, in time for the back-to-school PC sales rush) next year.
Unfortunately, this means that the decline of IE6 will be just as slow. Most developers I know now hate IE6 more than they ever hated Netscape 4. Firefox 2 is coming, Opera 9 is due soon, and Apple will likely update Safari, all before Vista is released. IE7 may get an independant release schedule, but I doubt it.
Peter Jackson and WETA started using pre-vis before production began on LOTR.
Other firms may have used it even earlier.
I spent 2 hours reading that thread, and the one thing that dropped my jaw was the post claiming that MS has been unable to stave off six 6-digit corporate desktop migrations.
*blink*
The only one I've heard about is IBM: that's 330,000 desktops. It's more than likely one of the six. This sounds to me like the Fortune 500 is getting really tired of the lack of security, empty promises, endless delays, absurd licensing costs... and has gotten wise to the FUD.
They know that if Apple can put OSX 10.5 on shelves in November, that will start the snowball rolling, and the avalanche is coming.
Sure, when Vista does ship (too late), there will be a huge marketing campaign for it. It seems though that they don't even know how to make a compelling pitch to customers, business or retail. Even with a January launch (I'm not holding my breath), the advertising will start in November, and those campaigns will need to be conceptualized in the next few weeks, if that hasn't started already.
MS has a disaster on its hands that no one seems to want, and they don't know how to sell it. Meanwhile, their enemies (aka the rest of the industry) are circling the bloated prey, waiting for MS to collapse under its own weight before they move in for the kill.
This Professor knows that real education is about thought and analysis, not turning facts into brain vomit. She knows her students will be better served in the long run if they comprehend law, which can only happen if the students participate in their education. Too many kids (for a long time now) think an education is a handout, mostly because the system is designed to make it that way. It's not--look at any international test results. The students don't understand this because they lack thought and analysis skills, which their fact-vomit based K-12 "education" doesn't include.
If there were more educators like Professor Entman at all levels of education, the US would be much better off, now and in the future.
By the way, "snowball effect"? Law students today can't use legal phrases such as "establishes precedent"? I rest my case.
Abolutely.
In the mid 90's, a friend of mine worked in a GE Medical warehouse. A hospital, clinic, or whatever would need a part for some piece of GE equipment, and somehow the invoice would end up on his screen, and he'd pack it up and ship it.
One day he told me that a CAT scan machine which costs a hospital a million dollars only costs $10,000 to produce. He said that the 4 orders of magnitude in price came from GE selling the machine back and forth between various internal departments before it was *actually* sold to the place that would use it.
Between this and the pharmaceuticals, the health care industry makes Enron look like they botched some simple addition with "carry the twelve".
By the way, his warehouse also had 15 inch floppy disks in stock. That made me shudder.