Maay of you are probably not familiar with Xaraya, but here's the story of where the name came from.
"Project X", as we were calling ourselves in the early days, decided to conduct a name contest among the development team. Entries were submitted, and the voting commenced. Not happy with any of the entries, I decided to come up with something new based of 3 criteria:
Must start with X. Many of the devs had become collectively fond of this letter for various reasons.
Must end in A. I thought the product (a CMS) should be female. Most Latin-derived languages identify female words by ending in A.
Must have three syllables. I considered this the optimal length; nice flow, little chance of getting confused with existing words in most languages, and not too long.
I also felt the name should be a little exotic according to US/European tastes. So, I trolled through a database of Australian place names, entering various short combinations of letters. After a while I had a list of seven possibilities... then I started swapping letters (mostly vowels).
I presented these in IRC, and a couple of them (including Xaraya) caught on. So well, in fact, that the name voting had to be reset to include the new entries. One of our devs who lives in Spain said Xaraya reminded him of the Spanish word for Manta Ray ("raya", literally "blanket"), so I went looking for manta images to create a logo which supported this concept. "Xaraya" won the name contest, and evenually a Manta logo was also adopted.
Of course, this name has nothing to to with what Xaraya does. Making that connection is the realm of the marketing and branding people.
"We feel that the Claria Corporation name will allow us to better communicate the expanding breadth of offerings that we provide to consumers and advertisers."
In layman's terms: "'Gator' has to much brand recognition. We feel we can better serve our advertisers under a name no consumer has heard of."
Is that there's very little R-O-L-E PLAYING involved in them. There's lots of R-O-L-L PLAYING, because the computer can roll thousands of dice at a time.
I would very much like it if this type of game was rechristened MMOFPS (Massively Multiplayer Online First Person [Shooter|Slasher]), because it's a more accurate term.
Here's what a year will get us: more patches for IE (maybe), real upgrades for every other browser, and all of us a year older.
Nothing has really changed in IE for 5 years, and won't. We're stuck with it for at least 2 years, more likely 4 or 5, until the MS marketing machine makes everyone choke to death on Longhorn, which supposedly will have a new from scratch browser (not the Mosaic-derived spaghetti that is IE).
Whether this new browser will have decent standards support is anybody's guess.
First, a reminder that this is 2003, not 1998, which was the year IE4 and Netscape4 were introduced. Since then, Mozilla has come, and with it Netscape 6 and 7. Also, we've seen the arrival of Konqueror (and Safari) and Opera.
Netscape 4 is dead: don't worry about it beyond getting your sites to still be legible in it.
Gecko based browsers, Konq, and Opera all do very well with W3C standards.
IE, however, has not had a major rendering revamp since version 4. The biggest change was for IE6, which is actually less compliant than previous versions. Sure it fixed some things, but broke many more.
Among web designers I know, IE is quickly gaining the hatred that had previously been reserved for Netscape4, because they know that NN4 is irrelevant, and the hatred has to go somewhere: the least compliant browser out there... IE.
Now, why is IE the least compliant? Because MS doesn't see the need to make it compliant. They have their precious market share, which is all they care about... not the users, not the developers which must coddle to IE because it works the way MS sees fit, not the standards bodies which MS continually ignores while attempting to participate.
The only way to break IE and move to standards is to use them, and explain to users why sites don't work: it's not the site's fault, it's the browser's.
Given all this, most people who have a clue about W3C standards would say you're doing your development backwards. You'd probably save a lot of time if you coded to the standards first, then hacked up the code for IE.
With their stock up in thwe last few months, this plan seems to be working. Mayube they should hire some gnomes to figure out what the fatal flaw in the plan is.
For example, Netscape 6 (as opposed to Netscape 5) was released because MSIE was already at version 6.
Wrong. There was was a 5.x version of Netscape, based on the 4.x codebase. Early in the dev cycle, it was abandoned in favor of Gecko, which is the core of NS6, Mozilla, etc.
I suggest not using the exact acronym, but something that pays tribute to the president who created the department: DuH. _Department _uv _Homeland--ooh! Security should be in a different color, like the background.
I've always believed that the lifespan of WoD was directly tied to the goth craze of the 90's: when there were no new goths kidz, WoD would dissappear.
With seemingly every other publisher in the RPG industry joining the d20 lemming parade, lining WoTC's pockets while slitting their own throats (including WW, in their other product lines), I hope WW has the foresight to not base the second generation of their flagship products on d20. A lot of people don't like d20 (myself included), and I keep hearing that number is increasing. D&D 3.5 won't help matters... enough people are annoyed with having to buy all the books again that I think 3.5E sales will stabilize about twice as fast as 3E (which took about 6 months).
And, putting a minor version number on something that's not software is just plain stupid IMO.
The browser wars are over. Pitting products against each other is now pointless, because the rules of engagement have changed.
The new conflict is the Standards War, where the features (or lack thereof) of the products stand toe to toe. The W3C now decrees the rules of war, not various marketing departments.
A side skirmish in this will be about user interface: tabs, popup blocking, etc.
The announcement about IE6 development being at an end is not news: a resourceful googler could put together the pieces months ago, as I did. The only thing not verified yet is a bit about IE7 only being useable on an MSN account, which seems like MS shooting themselves in the foot.
MacIE suffered its fate because MS is a poor loser, but a smart one. They know Apple is going to do the same thing on Mac that MS did on Windows.
Many people (the author of the article included) forget that Mozilla is not a commercial product, which is why there is still a Netscape branded browser.
Many forward thinking people are beginning to realize that over the next decade, the desktop based browser will become an ever shrinking peice of the browser market. PDA's, phones, kitchen appliances will all have browsers. The embedded browser is coming fast. Is IE6 capable of being embedded in anything? The correct question is: Is Windows capable of being embedded in anything? Probably not. Will IE7 be embeddable? Ask about Longhorn instead. Mozilla (Gecko) is capable of being embedded, so MS has already fallen behind once again.
I personally wouldn't even put Opera on the battlefield, they're like Switzerland: capable and organized, but too small to make a difference and not interested anyway.
Neither does IE6: horribly broken CSS box model, and missing lots of stuff from HTML 4.0. In the most recent compliance scores I've seen, Gecko and Safari have the best compliance, with IE fourth, behind Opera.
Ask any webprogrammer/designer, netscape 4.x is the bane of their existance.
Not mine. I never coded specifically for IE, and still don't. Why? Because of all the times my coworkers asked me "Why doesn't this table show up in Netscape?" My automatic reply: "IE tries to interpret your missing tags, add the </table> where it belongs. And start closing everything else properly while you're at it."
The day Mozilla 1.0 was released, I decided to drop all support for NS4. Now IE is the bane of my existence, not only because it's still stuck in 1998 with regard to standard support, but because every version of IE has a slightly different set of rendering bugs. There are things that work according to W3C spec in 5.5 that don't in 6, and so on.
I now code XHTML 1.0 all the time, strict if I can get away with it. The projects I work on benefit greatly from this.
My candidate for sneakiest NS4 bug: Naming any form control "submit" (all lower case) hides the submit() function of the form, and you won't be able to submit the form back to the server via script.
I have to code in many ways to the lowest common denominator
If all the people out there would just grow some balls and future proof their sites by implementing modern standards now, the sooner this problem will go away. A little "Your browser sucks, download Mozilla" won't hurt anyone. Then delete iexplore.exe to make them use Moz... nobody will miss the popups.
The browser war is no longer Netscape vs IE... it's implementation vs published standards: W3C recommendations, not any company's "de facto" (read: proprietary and/or buggy) code.
The white flag on the browser war can't be raised until every browser behaves 100% according to the open standards they implement.
Once eye candy becomes eye nourishment, games almost have to revert to good game design: plots, dynamic and interactive characters and populations (AI), social structures, and real consequences for player actions.
Even still, "Gaming after Photorealism" only addresses a single sense: sight. We also have very advanced audio realism. Tactile realism is limited because of hardware design & cost. Who will innovate the taste and smell aspects of a game, and when will that happen?
Full immersion can't happen until all the senses are involved.
The biggest problem with games like Ultima and EverQuest is that there is very little actual role-playing going on. This is news to no one in here, of course, but I do find it interesting how the term 'RPG' has been kind of mutated.
Finally, someone on/. who isn't pixel-blinded as to the definition of "RPG".
"MMORPG" is a misnomer at best, and really dilutes the meaning of its "RPG" element. I've said it before and I'll repeat it here: Quake + character.creation != RPG. Unless the R stands for "roll", not "role" (well, in software is should probably stand for "random()").
Online games do have a certain number of "role" players, many of which cast "role" aside in order to keep up with the advancement rates of the Quake-boys: the roll-players who do nothing that doesn't advance their character; the social voids that play 22 hours a day, even after the novelty wears off.
The social hierarchy in online games simply isn't sophisticated enough. Most involve a very small number of (semi)-automated NPC's, versus thousands of PC's. Almost every one of those NPC's has a specific purpose, most likely to feed some part of the player driven economy. There are no common folk for the sake of having common folk. When was the last time you walked into a village in an online game and saw children? Farmers? The butcher's wife? If you did, they were there only to support a non-essential sub plot (quest).
Offline games haven't even truly achieved this yet, but the Elder Scrolls games come close.
An RPG is a social event. Face to face. There's no substitute for that, no matter how much bandwidth is burned for audio and video. Sitting at a table, you and your friends accomplish something together. "Grouping" in an online game is a flimsy facsimile of this. There's also the tactility of tossing dice (which most players of online games would only find distracting, if they could actually get past the concept of having to do simple math for themselves). Finally, the thing most people don't understand about a true RPG, is that there is no concrete definition of winning, therefore people don't see the point of playing. The reasons for playing are:
Being there
Having fun
Working together
Escapism
Exercising the imagination
Now, any MMORPG could provide these, except #1 and #5. Why? There is no "there" in an online game: it's virtual. If you can see and hear everything, you don't have to imagine it.
All this rambling to get to imagination: that' the key. Online games deprecate your imagination, instead of nourishing it.
I know that IE renders things "wrong", but because of those percentages, that makes it right, and everyone else wrong. So why can't Netscape/Gecko/Mozilla/etc render things the way I want them to? And until they do, I'm using IE.
This is exactly the attitude that keeps the browser wars going. The browser wars will end when every browser is fully compliant with all the W3C standards that browser claims to support. I doubt anybody who complains "[insert browser] doesn't render pages as incorrectly as IE" is a member of the W3C or any of their working groups.
Support the W3C and its standards by writing pages that validate, or don't.
Slashdot Mirror
...has the name "Fisher-Price" on it somewhere.
Maay of you are probably not familiar with Xaraya, but here's the story of where the name came from.
"Project X", as we were calling ourselves in the early days, decided to conduct a name contest among the development team. Entries were submitted, and the voting commenced. Not happy with any of the entries, I decided to come up with something new based of 3 criteria:
I also felt the name should be a little exotic according to US/European tastes. So, I trolled through a database of Australian place names, entering various short combinations of letters. After a while I had a list of seven possibilities... then I started swapping letters (mostly vowels).
I presented these in IRC, and a couple of them (including Xaraya) caught on. So well, in fact, that the name voting had to be reset to include the new entries. One of our devs who lives in Spain said Xaraya reminded him of the Spanish word for Manta Ray ("raya", literally "blanket"), so I went looking for manta images to create a logo which supported this concept. "Xaraya" won the name contest, and evenually a Manta logo was also adopted.
Of course, this name has nothing to to with what Xaraya does. Making that connection is the realm of the marketing and branding people.
...is to ship everyone a new PC in the mail twice a week.
Finally, junk mail that would be useful.
In layman's terms: "'Gator' has to much brand recognition. We feel we can better serve our advertisers under a name no consumer has heard of."
Is that there's very little R-O-L-E PLAYING involved in them. There's lots of R-O-L-L PLAYING, because the computer can roll thousands of dice at a time.
I would very much like it if this type of game was rechristened MMOFPS (Massively Multiplayer Online First Person [Shooter|Slasher]), because it's a more accurate term.
IIRC, a judge declared that the -zilla suffix was not an infringment, and had become a ubiquitous bit of culture.
Here's what a year will get us: more patches for IE (maybe), real upgrades for every other browser, and all of us a year older.
Nothing has really changed in IE for 5 years, and won't. We're stuck with it for at least 2 years, more likely 4 or 5, until the MS marketing machine makes everyone choke to death on Longhorn, which supposedly will have a new from scratch browser (not the Mosaic-derived spaghetti that is IE).
Whether this new browser will have decent standards support is anybody's guess.
First, a reminder that this is 2003, not 1998, which was the year IE4 and Netscape4 were introduced. Since then, Mozilla has come, and with it Netscape 6 and 7. Also, we've seen the arrival of Konqueror (and Safari) and Opera.
Netscape 4 is dead: don't worry about it beyond getting your sites to still be legible in it.
Gecko based browsers, Konq, and Opera all do very well with W3C standards.
IE, however, has not had a major rendering revamp since version 4. The biggest change was for IE6, which is actually less compliant than previous versions. Sure it fixed some things, but broke many more.
Among web designers I know, IE is quickly gaining the hatred that had previously been reserved for Netscape4, because they know that NN4 is irrelevant, and the hatred has to go somewhere: the least compliant browser out there... IE.
Now, why is IE the least compliant? Because MS doesn't see the need to make it compliant. They have their precious market share, which is all they care about... not the users, not the developers which must coddle to IE because it works the way MS sees fit, not the standards bodies which MS continually ignores while attempting to participate.
The only way to break IE and move to standards is to use them, and explain to users why sites don't work: it's not the site's fault, it's the browser's.
Given all this, most people who have a clue about W3C standards would say you're doing your development backwards. You'd probably save a lot of time if you coded to the standards first, then hacked up the code for IE.
And proof that SCO are not human:
With their stock up in thwe last few months, this plan seems to be working. Mayube they should hire some gnomes to figure out what the fatal flaw in the plan is.
Wrong. There was was a 5.x version of Netscape, based on the 4.x codebase. Early in the dev cycle, it was abandoned in favor of Gecko, which is the core of NS6, Mozilla, etc.
I suggest not using the exact acronym, but something that pays tribute to the president who created the department: DuH. _Department _uv _Homeland--ooh! Security should be in a different color, like the background.
I've always believed that the lifespan of WoD was directly tied to the goth craze of the 90's: when there were no new goths kidz, WoD would dissappear.
With seemingly every other publisher in the RPG industry joining the d20 lemming parade, lining WoTC's pockets while slitting their own throats (including WW, in their other product lines), I hope WW has the foresight to not base the second generation of their flagship products on d20. A lot of people don't like d20 (myself included), and I keep hearing that number is increasing. D&D 3.5 won't help matters... enough people are annoyed with having to buy all the books again that I think 3.5E sales will stabilize about twice as fast as 3E (which took about 6 months).
And, putting a minor version number on something that's not software is just plain stupid IMO.
Microsoft:software::WotC:RPG
Windows:OS::d20:RPG
See my previous comment here.
The browser wars are over. Pitting products against each other is now pointless, because the rules of engagement have changed.
The new conflict is the Standards War, where the features (or lack thereof) of the products stand toe to toe. The W3C now decrees the rules of war, not various marketing departments.
A side skirmish in this will be about user interface: tabs, popup blocking, etc.
The announcement about IE6 development being at an end is not news: a resourceful googler could put together the pieces months ago, as I did. The only thing not verified yet is a bit about IE7 only being useable on an MSN account, which seems like MS shooting themselves in the foot.
MacIE suffered its fate because MS is a poor loser, but a smart one. They know Apple is going to do the same thing on Mac that MS did on Windows.
Many people (the author of the article included) forget that Mozilla is not a commercial product, which is why there is still a Netscape branded browser.
Many forward thinking people are beginning to realize that over the next decade, the desktop based browser will become an ever shrinking peice of the browser market. PDA's, phones, kitchen appliances will all have browsers. The embedded browser is coming fast. Is IE6 capable of being embedded in anything? The correct question is: Is Windows capable of being embedded in anything? Probably not. Will IE7 be embeddable? Ask about Longhorn instead. Mozilla (Gecko) is capable of being embedded, so MS has already fallen behind once again.
I personally wouldn't even put Opera on the battlefield, they're like Switzerland: capable and organized, but too small to make a difference and not interested anyway.
Neither does IE6: horribly broken CSS box model, and missing lots of stuff from HTML 4.0. In the most recent compliance scores I've seen, Gecko and Safari have the best compliance, with IE fourth, behind Opera.
Not mine. I never coded specifically for IE, and still don't. Why? Because of all the times my coworkers asked me "Why doesn't this table show up in Netscape?" My automatic reply: "IE tries to interpret your missing tags, add the </table> where it belongs. And start closing everything else properly while you're at it."
The day Mozilla 1.0 was released, I decided to drop all support for NS4. Now IE is the bane of my existence, not only because it's still stuck in 1998 with regard to standard support, but because every version of IE has a slightly different set of rendering bugs. There are things that work according to W3C spec in 5.5 that don't in 6, and so on.
I now code XHTML 1.0 all the time, strict if I can get away with it. The projects I work on benefit greatly from this.
My candidate for sneakiest NS4 bug: Naming any form control "submit" (all lower case) hides the submit() function of the form, and you won't be able to submit the form back to the server via script.
If all the people out there would just grow some balls and future proof their sites by implementing modern standards now, the sooner this problem will go away. A little "Your browser sucks, download Mozilla" won't hurt anyone. Then delete iexplore.exe to make them use Moz... nobody will miss the popups.
The browser war is no longer Netscape vs IE... it's implementation vs published standards: W3C recommendations, not any company's "de facto" (read: proprietary and/or buggy) code.
The white flag on the browser war can't be raised until every browser behaves 100% according to the open standards they implement.
Which means, in another 10 years, they'll actually be 1 year ahead.
Uh, right.
No, all we neeed is this in preferences:
Easy. Bayesian image filtering would probably be too much of a performance hit, anyway.
They can leave it disabled (or even a hidden pref) to keep the pixel spammers at bay.
Just think of what could be done when Lego updates Mindstorms to use this.
Once eye candy becomes eye nourishment, games almost have to revert to good game design: plots, dynamic and interactive characters and populations (AI), social structures, and real consequences for player actions.
Even still, "Gaming after Photorealism" only addresses a single sense: sight. We also have very advanced audio realism. Tactile realism is limited because of hardware design & cost. Who will innovate the taste and smell aspects of a game, and when will that happen?
Full immersion can't happen until all the senses are involved.
Finally, someone on /. who isn't pixel-blinded as to the definition of "RPG".
"MMORPG" is a misnomer at best, and really dilutes the meaning of its "RPG" element. I've said it before and I'll repeat it here: Quake + character.creation != RPG. Unless the R stands for "roll", not "role" (well, in software is should probably stand for "random()").
Online games do have a certain number of "role" players, many of which cast "role" aside in order to keep up with the advancement rates of the Quake-boys: the roll-players who do nothing that doesn't advance their character; the social voids that play 22 hours a day, even after the novelty wears off.
The social hierarchy in online games simply isn't sophisticated enough. Most involve a very small number of (semi)-automated NPC's, versus thousands of PC's. Almost every one of those NPC's has a specific purpose, most likely to feed some part of the player driven economy. There are no common folk for the sake of having common folk. When was the last time you walked into a village in an online game and saw children? Farmers? The butcher's wife? If you did, they were there only to support a non-essential sub plot (quest).
Offline games haven't even truly achieved this yet, but the Elder Scrolls games come close.
An RPG is a social event. Face to face. There's no substitute for that, no matter how much bandwidth is burned for audio and video. Sitting at a table, you and your friends accomplish something together. "Grouping" in an online game is a flimsy facsimile of this. There's also the tactility of tossing dice (which most players of online games would only find distracting, if they could actually get past the concept of having to do simple math for themselves). Finally, the thing most people don't understand about a true RPG, is that there is no concrete definition of winning, therefore people don't see the point of playing. The reasons for playing are:
Now, any MMORPG could provide these, except #1 and #5. Why? There is no "there" in an online game: it's virtual. If you can see and hear everything, you don't have to imagine it.
All this rambling to get to imagination: that' the key. Online games deprecate your imagination, instead of nourishing it.
This is exactly the attitude that keeps the browser wars going. The browser wars will end when every browser is fully compliant with all the W3C standards that browser claims to support. I doubt anybody who complains "[insert browser] doesn't render pages as incorrectly as IE" is a member of the W3C or any of their working groups.
Support the W3C and its standards by writing pages that validate, or don't.
But DW still uses IE for its rendering core (thus perpetuating broken IE-centric HTML), and still writes 17 lines of js to do a simple image rollover.
I used DW2 back in the day, and I know people who use DWMX, so I know nothing much has changed.