The point is that some people just don't care about ping rates and bandwidth. For the life of me I can't get my father in the USA to upgrade his internet connection from a 1MB connection to a 10MB connection for an extra $10 per month. I just do not get it.
However if I'm gaming and my ping rate goes above 200ms I get very concerned. I would pay to have my network traffic prioritised, but I am doing something for which I perceive a greater need for a better response time. I know Demon are trialling a new gaming broadband service, however I don't think what they are doing is degrading the service for others.
They have their normal good network, but also have direct hooks into gaming events and servers. If AT&T offered a direct network connection to a game network (say Battle.Net) that got my ping rate down to 40ms on a game I played 24/7, then I would be seriously considering buying this 'premium' service. Even the idea of offering better connection to NetFlix would appeal to some people.
Anyway there has to be a recognition that some people don't give a shit how fast their connection is and there are those that really really really do and some of us might even pay for that.
Without governments accepting the expertise they employed and where Portugal has demonstrated that the decriminalization of drugs actually works, then this type of tracking system will only ever work when there is a root and branch reform of the criminal system.
This really is a bandaid.
The problem here is that there are people in prison because they need therapy for drug addiction. Cannabis is less destructive than Alcohol.
I know this is a rant about drugs, but prohibition, really comes with massive social costs and to lock away people that actually need therapy is wrong.
I know I'm asking for a lot here, but could people who state "Flash sucks" or "Flash runs like a pig" try and quantify which verison and what you were running it on?
I've found Flash 10.1 to be extremely good. I haven't seen Flash running on Android 2.2 yet, so don't want to comment, but from articles on the matter, the main thing that people are saying is that it is the first true "internet in your pocket" experience but it needs a decent phone and even then, you need a decent programmer who has written mobile friendly code.
This reminds me of a Software Team lead who stated that a particular product was awful. After a bit of questioning, the last time he had used the product was 4 versions ago. It's a horrendous closed mentality to have.
Personally Adobe really got to grips with the failings of Flash and 10.1 is their answer.
If a pressure group has a specific issue to address, rather than ask their members to spam their MPs, they should collect signatories and then submit one email to the MPs whose constituants have signed up. The email should also list the set of MPs to whom the email has been sent. It should also provide a respone email address which will distribute the response to the sigantories. If really clever, then the MPs in question come up with a reasoned response each or one official one for each party.
Instead we have this pressure group sending out 700 emails to each of the 600 odd MPs who then have to create an individual response and most need to respond in writing. The cost is enormous.
I can understand why this MP is asking his constituants to write to him. It takes effort. You really have to care about the issue. Sending off an email is easy. Writing a letter and putting in the post shows you actually care.
I still don't get why this is BP's fault and not the sub-contractor. As a software contractor I have a professional duty to deliver sound good quality code. If not I get sued. At what point is Halliburton or one of the other contractors involved not financially responsible for their poor work.
For iPhone/iPad users, it just runs a lot slower now.:)
The point is the development tools are awesome for Flash and support the Designer -> Developer synergy necessary to get good looking apps/sites out there.
All the reasons given in the article are valid, but to understand why those reasons are valid, you need to have been involved in the design process, and more importantly, tried taken a design through the development process and tried to argue why SIFR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement ) is a bad thing, but still have to implement it.
Basically body mapping with face recognition. Quite sweet, but the devil is going to be in the software written for it and unlike the Wii, it isn't part of the 'base' system, so software that is written for Natal will have a smaller user base and will probably cost more.
Security is always an issue, however from an application experience, I can guarantee my application works as intended on whatever Flash enabled device you are using.
The hardware manufacturer is a straw man argument. If you develop hardware that is not capable of running a mainstream OS or one of the other Mobile OS (even Jaguar are using Flash in their cars) then you are unlikely to stay in business for very long.
Flash is an open standard and you are welcome to write your own engine.
How good Flash or Silverlight are as dev platforms for deployment to multiple platforms is all this is about.
Apple don't like what Adobe are doing as it obsoletes their "mobile" business model.
In the coming years, mobiles is where it is at, and you better have a way to develop for that environment and , in particular, have a way to push your applications through their various app stores.
Flash 10.1 with the AIR packager offers me a platform agnostic solution.
Please, somebody point me in the direction of another technology (open or closed) that offers me a similar solution.
In all this I am not talking about what Flash does now, but what will happen with the release of Android 2.2.
In 2 years time when HTML5 finally has a decent tool set and is mature, I will again re-evaluate the situation, but right here, right now, Flash offers the best platform agnostic solution. Nobody here has given me reason to doubt that. "I hate Flash" is not good enough.
Any company developing flash apps will naturally be very concerned about the few people running FreeBSD.
Not sure you get what this is about. This isn't about desktop environments.
This is about portable devices. It's about providing a viable way to deploy functionally rich applications across as many platforms as possible without me having to fork my code/use a nother language.
Once HTML5 has been ratified, the development tools are mature and complex applications have been successfully and easily implemented (and run smoothly), I will re-visit HTML5.
However Adobe are giving me the facility to easily create a flash application (either in Flash or in Flex), deploy it inside the browser, or as a standalone application that can be uploaded to any app store or on the desktop using AIR.
Show me one other company that is offering me such a complete solution to the current shift in the way people are using the internet and I will happily spend time researching it and putting together a business case.
As it stands, Flash wins hands down.
You may not like it, but there is some serious money to be saved by having one development platform deployed to 7 different mobile OS the various app stores, as well as knowing that it will run happily on 'most' desktops and 'most' browsers.
The irony is, I don't even write Flash and I can see the value in investing time into this.
I'm assuming you will be screaming for an addon that disables all canvas elements on the page, y'know to kill all those adverts....
There are performance demo's around demonstrating Flash 10.1 vs HTML5 canvas implementations with Flash around 30fps and canvas around 6fps (SVG around 2fps).
HTML5 has got a lot of work to make it a viable alternative, but I suppose they actually need to finish defining what HTML5 actually is first.
Personally, as a development platform, with Android 2.2 around the corner, and Adobe releasing the iPhone packager for other mobile OS, I'm willing to give them breathing space to get on with what they are trying to achieve.
Currently there is no other company out there trying to deliver such a comprehensive write once, run anywhere solution. If they pull this off, my life as a developer becomes a lot simpler.
The merge itself is good imho, however there is a major problem with Parental Controls. The old login server used to terminate your connection when you hit a 'no play' time. Now it leaves you logged in. If you try and login in during 'no play' time then it stops you which is fine.
This is a major issue for somebody that enjoys the game, wants their child to enjoy the game, but doesn't want that child ruining their education. I know how addictive WoW can be.
Have raised it with Blizzard, but they haven't responded as yet. This needs fixing. Yes I want to instil a sense of responsibility in my child, but sometimes a machine just saying no, is very difficult to argue with.
Adobe have basically announced a way to compile Flash to native iPhone apps. This should mean that all their future product releases that author Flash should hopefully have similar functionality. (I'm being selfish and thinking Flex here.)
The next logical step is for Adobe to allow you to deploy natively to other Phone OS. So as a Flex(read Flash, well AS3 ) developer I should be able to write an application, and then deploy to Air, browser, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Do you realise the impact on development time? Bug fixing each target environment suddenly becomes a non-issue. Time to market is massively shortened. This is huge.
I don't know if Adobe realise the potential for this. I know they were trying to get around Apple's intransigence, but I think they may have something exceptionally useful here.
Simply put, you arrived into a company and have determined they are using software illegally. The buck stops with the director of the company.
1) Inform director/upper management of the situation in writing explaining the seriousness of the issue (i.e. Fines, Prison etc.). 2) Perform a software audit. 3) Present findings to the upper management. 4) Buy required software licences.
If budget is an issue, then suggest ways to mitigate costs (e.g. Move everyone to Open Office)
As long as you legally cover yourself, it is not your responsibility. The responsibility is with the company director/board.
As a WoW and War player this here are a number of facts you need to know: 1) WoW is about to have patch 3.02 go live (estimated to hit on the 15th).
2) On the 13th of November you get a whole new expansion to play with. Unless you were in the end game raiding Black Temple+, most of your gear will be replaced by the time you hit level 75.
3) WoW is a game about getting better equipment so with a month to go before you can get better equipment, why bother.
4) Summer happened and huge numbers of raiding guilds fell apart as apathy set in and waiting for the new expansion.
5) Blizzard didn't help themselves by allowing sites to 'mine' their Beta data and allow people to show you what you can get in a months time.
6) Warhammer hit at the right time and has given people 'something to do' while waiting, maybe even swap the game that they were going to play 247.
7) Warhammer free month ends on or around the 18th of this month.
Now on to my opinion. I held off from playing War for a bit. WoW is boring atm and it's difficult to get a raid going when people know that the gear is being replaced soon. So I started playing War two weeks after the initial release. I even joined the server that my WoW guild in WoW used.
The problem is, that I've come late to the party and War is all about your interaction with other players. (You can level without once doing a quest). Areas are empty. Public quests are unachievable (well the later phases) and up until recently, you could only join your racial RvR event.
Then there's the queues. If you login at 8pm, you can't get to your server for at least an hour. However the irony is that because the game needs a fully populated server to 'function' you don't want to be able to get on a server immediately at 8pm. This server will have a low population at other times and the Player vs Player elements will degrade badly.
Ironically I queue for War, then go play WoW for an hour.
So my current feeling is that I'm dropping Warhammer the moment WoW patch 3.02 comes out and I think there are a lot of people who are in the same boat.
What I do hope is that Blizzard look at Warhammer and take some of the ideas on board:
1) Public Quests 2) Queue for a BG from anywhere (which a Blizzard employee has already hinted at). 3) Siege weaponry that can kill players. 4) The ability not to be able to walk through mobs. (This would enable position strategies where tanks could create shield walls etc).
From what I'm reading above, there is a major issue with dodgy sellers on Ebay. Paypal are just handling the payment and offer better safeguards than a transfer to a bank account. TFA is focusing on the fact it would cause a monopoly situation and the ACCC wants competition in the market.
What actually needs to happen is the ability to have a "one click" report item as dodgy. Ebay gains too much from providing a lax vetting process to ever get serious about it.
When governments actually get serious about this and start arresting Ebay executives and putting them in prison rather than fining them pathetically small amounts is when we will see them doing something about it.(http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080604/bs_afp/franceluxurypiracytrialusebay))
If you look into the dim and distant past SMS was a free service that came with your phone 'package'. Then they realised they could actually make money from it.
Ironically the price of an SMS is dropping and it actually costs somebody who 'bulk' buys 10000 messages around about 1.5p .
My concern is that it is getting so cheap, that I've already started receiving spam SMS.
As an aside, some companies now provide a SIM card hosting service. So if you can get the right package from an Operator (e.g. unlimited SMS messages) there is nothing to stop you spamming the world.
Thankfully 'clicking' on any links is not so simple and most people realise clicking actually costs them money.
As an example pop over to http://www.dilbert.com/ and see how a PHB sub-committee has ruined a rather fantastic site by slapping a flash front-end on the toon for the day. The Sunday toon requires you to sense that there is an arrow on the last pane and know there should be more.
Absolutely ridiculous, however thankfully this link is available http://dilbert.com/fast for those that still want there fix.
In the UK contention ratios on domestic cable/dsl is 1:50. So bandwidth is allocated on certain assumed behaviour patterns.
P2P messes up that usage pattern by using constant bandwidth for hours/days at a time.
As a company I think I am very happy to throttle P2P traffic if it allows the other 49 households to get a 'quality' experience.
The real issue is with shaping. Virgin Media in the UK have declared that unless the bigger internet companies (e.g. youtube pay them money), their data streams will be shaped to reduce load on Virgin's network. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/13/1913241
Throttling P2P traffic because little Timmy 4 doors down wants to share pirated music etc is fine by me. If he has an issue, go ask daddy to switch providers. Get the hell away from downgrading my cluster.
Lack of time is a big factor. I have to choose a technology that is mature, cross platform and deliverable now. More importantly I have to have the perception that it's *important* to the business strategy of the company. Adobe are pressing all the right buttons for me (even open sourcing the SDK).
As a caveat I am a Coldfusion developer and was able to hook a Flex reporting app to our servers in a matter of minutes. More importantly the Flex Builder plugged into my current Eclipse installation seamlessly so I had very little downtime. Are these the right reasons? Probably not.
Do I think Microsoft have a lot to do to catch up with Adobe Flash 9? I think so. With Silverlight 2 in beta already 5 months after the release of 1.1, it's almost like they are racing against Flash. I would expect at least 18 months between versions. To MS advantage, Adobe have dictated that Flex will run on Flash 9 for the next 4 years so they have time to play catch up and do funky stuff with graphics etc.
I think, however the real point is being missed. Adobe have sorted there runtime environment out a long time ago. What they are now doing is removing the need for a browser with AIR. From a business point of view, this is where it gets very useful.
I honestly think when Silverlight hits version 3 (which should be within a year based on current release schedules) I might look again but not now. Not with what they did with Vista, or IE on the Mac, or Java 1.1 IDE. There is unfortunately a certain level of mistrust here.
A technology that requires you to be running Windows (there is a nod towards delivering a Linux runtime at some point) and inside a browser.
In comparison, you have a Adobe's Flash runtime which pretty much permeates the browser 'sphere', the release of AIR which completely discards the browser (which is a hugely significant for business), and Flex which can be considered a mature development environment seeing as they've now hit version 3. Adobe have also committed to not use anything other than Flash 9 for the Flex SDK until at least version 4. So we are talking about a 4 year stable build environment and Flash is always built backwards compatible.
I really can't see why a business would choose Silverlight as a delivery technology. There are too many OSs out there to bet everybody I want to deliver my apps to are running Windows.
I will evaluate Silverlight when I can see it as *cross-platform* and not a *cross-browser* solution. Until that day arrives I'll poke it with a stick to see all the sparkly bits, but I'm not investing my time on a single platform technology. I realise the same could be said for AIR, however they already are in Beta for Linux, and I believe they are testing OS X as well. I don't see any of this type of effort coming out of Microsoft.
Now if Adobe could commit to releasing AIR for PDAs/Mobiles at some point, then I think we may have complete ownage.
Just to give some background on this. AIR is an equivalent to the Java Runtime Environment. Now unfortunately (or fortunately) Adobe also released Flex 3 Builder (application development for Flash 9) at the same time and made it the easiest way to deliver AIR apps. You could easily build air apps using Flash 9, javascript or even plain html but I can't see the point to this.
There are certain things Air does provide that will be interesting to see how they are used: SQLLite engine and system resource (disk drive etc) access. The latter screams security risk however this the same risk as installing any app on your computer.
To be honest there are a couple of big companies (e.g. Ebay) that are writing AIR apps, but I don't really see there being much need in that arena (searching for auctions). I think it's is going to shine when hooking up to business applications (which is also indicative of the number of financial institutions looking for Flex developers).
As an example, I've written an air app that hooks into our servers and provides an easy way to managing our error log entries, and various data characteristics. Previously this would be a case of logging into the back end through a browser and finding this out from various reports. There may be a case that a better dashboard design would have made this simpler, however I can have an AIR app sitting in the background feeding this information to me, and most importantly, it took very little time, as it hooked into existing web services.
Personally it has a lot going for it, but it really is going to shine in big business.
Oh and please don't compare it to MS Silverlight. Compare Flash to Silverlight, but not AIR.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that some people just don't care about ping rates and bandwidth. For the life of me I can't get my father in the USA to upgrade his internet connection from a 1MB connection to a 10MB connection for an extra $10 per month. I just do not get it.
However if I'm gaming and my ping rate goes above 200ms I get very concerned. I would pay to have my network traffic prioritised, but I am doing something for which I perceive a greater need for a better response time. I know Demon are trialling a new gaming broadband service, however I don't think what they are doing is degrading the service for others.
They have their normal good network, but also have direct hooks into gaming events and servers. If AT&T offered a direct network connection to a game network (say Battle.Net) that got my ping rate down to 40ms on a game I played 24/7, then I would be seriously considering buying this 'premium' service. Even the idea of offering better connection to NetFlix would appeal to some people.
Anyway there has to be a recognition that some people don't give a shit how fast their connection is and there are those that really really really do and some of us might even pay for that.
Without governments accepting the expertise they employed and where Portugal has demonstrated that the decriminalization of drugs actually works, then this type of tracking system will only ever work when there is a root and branch reform of the criminal system.
This really is a bandaid.
The problem here is that there are people in prison because they need therapy for drug addiction. Cannabis is less destructive than Alcohol.
I know this is a rant about drugs, but prohibition, really comes with massive social costs and to lock away people that actually need therapy is wrong.
I know I'm asking for a lot here, but could people who state "Flash sucks" or "Flash runs like a pig" try and quantify which verison and what you were running it on?
I've found Flash 10.1 to be extremely good. I haven't seen Flash running on Android 2.2 yet, so don't want to comment, but from articles on the matter, the main thing that people are saying is that it is the first true "internet in your pocket" experience but it needs a decent phone and even then, you need a decent programmer who has written mobile friendly code.
This reminds me of a Software Team lead who stated that a particular product was awful. After a bit of questioning, the last time he had used the product was 4 versions ago. It's a horrendous closed mentality to have.
Personally Adobe really got to grips with the failings of Flash and 10.1 is their answer.
If a pressure group has a specific issue to address, rather than ask their members to spam their MPs, they should collect signatories and then submit one email to the MPs whose constituants have signed up. The email should also list the set of MPs to whom the email has been sent. It should also provide a respone email address which will distribute the response to the sigantories. If really clever, then the MPs in question come up with a reasoned response each or one official one for each party.
Instead we have this pressure group sending out 700 emails to each of the 600 odd MPs who then have to create an individual response and most need to respond in writing. The cost is enormous.
I can understand why this MP is asking his constituants to write to him. It takes effort. You really have to care about the issue. Sending off an email is easy. Writing a letter and putting in the post shows you actually care.
I still don't get why this is BP's fault and not the sub-contractor. As a software contractor I have a professional duty to deliver sound good quality code. If not I get sued. At what point is Halliburton or one of the other contractors involved not financially responsible for their poor work.
Yes you do, you just don't understand why.
The actual cost to you would be site subscriptions and all apps costing you money.
Society is not prepared to bare this cost.
Whether you like it or not, Flash is here to stay:
http://smokescreen.us/
For iPhone/iPad users, it just runs a lot slower now. :)
The point is the development tools are awesome for Flash and support the Designer -> Developer synergy necessary to get good looking apps/sites out there.
All the reasons given in the article are valid, but to understand why those reasons are valid, you need to have been involved in the design process, and more importantly, tried taken a design through the development process and tried to argue why SIFR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement ) is a bad thing, but still have to implement it.
This pretty much sums it up:
http://www.xbox.com/en-us/live/projectnatal/
Basically body mapping with face recognition. Quite sweet, but the devil is going to be in the software written for it and unlike the Wii, it isn't part of the 'base' system, so software that is written for Natal will have a smaller user base and will probably cost more.
Security is always an issue, however from an application experience, I can guarantee my application works as intended on whatever Flash enabled device you are using.
The hardware manufacturer is a straw man argument. If you develop hardware that is not capable of running a mainstream OS or one of the other Mobile OS (even Jaguar are using Flash in their cars) then you are unlikely to stay in business for very long.
Flash is an open standard and you are welcome to write your own engine.
How good Flash or Silverlight are as dev platforms for deployment to multiple platforms is all this is about.
Apple don't like what Adobe are doing as it obsoletes their "mobile" business model.
In the coming years, mobiles is where it is at, and you better have a way to develop for that environment and , in particular, have a way to push your applications through their various app stores.
Flash 10.1 with the AIR packager offers me a platform agnostic solution.
Please, somebody point me in the direction of another technology (open or closed) that offers me a similar solution.
In all this I am not talking about what Flash does now, but what will happen with the release of Android 2.2.
In 2 years time when HTML5 finally has a decent tool set and is mature, I will again re-evaluate the situation, but right here, right now, Flash offers the best platform agnostic solution. Nobody here has given me reason to doubt that. "I hate Flash" is not good enough.
Any company developing flash apps will naturally be very concerned about the few people running FreeBSD.
Not sure you get what this is about. This isn't about desktop environments.
This is about portable devices. It's about providing a viable way to deploy functionally rich applications across as many platforms as possible without me having to fork my code/use a nother language.
Once HTML5 has been ratified, the development tools are mature and complex applications have been successfully and easily implemented (and run smoothly), I will re-visit HTML5.
However Adobe are giving me the facility to easily create a flash application (either in Flash or in Flex), deploy it inside the browser, or as a standalone application that can be uploaded to any app store or on the desktop using AIR.
Show me one other company that is offering me such a complete solution to the current shift in the way people are using the internet and I will happily spend time researching it and putting together a business case.
As it stands, Flash wins hands down.
You may not like it, but there is some serious money to be saved by having one development platform deployed to 7 different mobile OS the various app stores, as well as knowing that it will run happily on 'most' desktops and 'most' browsers.
The irony is, I don't even write Flash and I can see the value in investing time into this.
I'm assuming you will be screaming for an addon that disables all canvas elements on the page, y'know to kill all those adverts....
There are performance demo's around demonstrating Flash 10.1 vs HTML5 canvas implementations with Flash around 30fps and canvas around 6fps (SVG around 2fps).
HTML5 has got a lot of work to make it a viable alternative, but I suppose they actually need to finish defining what HTML5 actually is first.
Personally, as a development platform, with Android 2.2 around the corner, and Adobe releasing the iPhone packager for other mobile OS, I'm willing to give them breathing space to get on with what they are trying to achieve.
The problem I find with /. is so many people seem to be doing the "well v6 was crap, v10.1 must be awful" routine. It's tedious. Please go and read this http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/05/engineering_flash_player.html .
Currently there is no other company out there trying to deliver such a comprehensive write once, run anywhere solution. If they pull this off, my life as a developer becomes a lot simpler.
The merge itself is good imho, however there is a major problem with Parental Controls. The old login server used to terminate your connection when you hit a 'no play' time. Now it leaves you logged in. If you try and login in during 'no play' time then it stops you which is fine.
This is a major issue for somebody that enjoys the game, wants their child to enjoy the game, but doesn't want that child ruining their education. I know how addictive WoW can be.
Have raised it with Blizzard, but they haven't responded as yet. This needs fixing. Yes I want to instil a sense of responsibility in my child, but sometimes a machine just saying no, is very difficult to argue with.
Adobe have basically announced a way to compile Flash to native iPhone apps. This should mean that all their future product releases that author Flash should hopefully have similar functionality. (I'm being selfish and thinking Flex here.)
The next logical step is for Adobe to allow you to deploy natively to other Phone OS. So as a Flex(read Flash, well AS3 ) developer I should be able to write an application, and then deploy to Air, browser, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Do you realise the impact on development time? Bug fixing each target environment suddenly becomes a non-issue. Time to market is massively shortened. This is huge.
I don't know if Adobe realise the potential for this. I know they were trying to get around Apple's intransigence, but I think they may have something exceptionally useful here.
Simply put, you arrived into a company and have determined they are using software illegally. The buck stops with the director of the company.
1) Inform director/upper management of the situation in writing explaining the seriousness of the issue (i.e. Fines, Prison etc.).
2) Perform a software audit.
3) Present findings to the upper management.
4) Buy required software licences.
If budget is an issue, then suggest ways to mitigate costs (e.g. Move everyone to Open Office)
As long as you legally cover yourself, it is not your responsibility. The responsibility is with the company director/board.
As a WoW and War player this here are a number of facts you need to know:
1) WoW is about to have patch 3.02 go live (estimated to hit on the 15th).
2) On the 13th of November you get a whole new expansion to play with. Unless you were in the end game raiding Black Temple+, most of your gear will be replaced by the time you hit level 75.
3) WoW is a game about getting better equipment so with a month to go before you can get better equipment, why bother.
4) Summer happened and huge numbers of raiding guilds fell apart as apathy set in and waiting for the new expansion.
5) Blizzard didn't help themselves by allowing sites to 'mine' their Beta data and allow people to show you what you can get in a months time.
6) Warhammer hit at the right time and has given people 'something to do' while waiting, maybe even swap the game that they were going to play 247.
7) Warhammer free month ends on or around the 18th of this month.
Now on to my opinion. I held off from playing War for a bit. WoW is boring atm and it's difficult to get a raid going when people know that the gear is being replaced soon. So I started playing War two weeks after the initial release. I even joined the server that my WoW guild in WoW used.
The problem is, that I've come late to the party and War is all about your interaction with other players. (You can level without once doing a quest). Areas are empty. Public quests are unachievable (well the later phases) and up until recently, you could only join your racial RvR event.
Then there's the queues. If you login at 8pm, you can't get to your server for at least an hour. However the irony is that because the game needs a fully populated server to 'function' you don't want to be able to get on a server immediately at 8pm. This server will have a low population at other times and the Player vs Player elements will degrade badly.
Ironically I queue for War, then go play WoW for an hour.
So my current feeling is that I'm dropping Warhammer the moment WoW patch 3.02 comes out and I think there are a lot of people who are in the same boat.
What I do hope is that Blizzard look at Warhammer and take some of the ideas on board:
1) Public Quests
2) Queue for a BG from anywhere (which a Blizzard employee has already hinted at).
3) Siege weaponry that can kill players.
4) The ability not to be able to walk through mobs. (This would enable position strategies where tanks could create shield walls etc).
There are probably a lot more ideas.
From what I'm reading above, there is a major issue with dodgy sellers on Ebay. Paypal are just handling the payment and offer better safeguards than a transfer to a bank account. TFA is focusing on the fact it would cause a monopoly situation and the ACCC wants competition in the market.
What actually needs to happen is the ability to have a "one click" report item as dodgy. Ebay gains too much from providing a lax vetting process to ever get serious about it.
When governments actually get serious about this and start arresting Ebay executives and putting them in prison rather than fining them pathetically small amounts is when we will see them doing something about it.(http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080604/bs_afp/franceluxurypiracytrialusebay))
If you look into the dim and distant past SMS was a free service that came with your phone 'package'. Then they realised they could actually make money from it.
Ironically the price of an SMS is dropping and it actually costs somebody who 'bulk' buys 10000 messages around about 1.5p .
My concern is that it is getting so cheap, that I've already started receiving spam SMS.
As an aside, some companies now provide a SIM card hosting service. So if you can get the right package from an Operator (e.g. unlimited SMS messages) there is nothing to stop you spamming the world.
Thankfully 'clicking' on any links is not so simple and most people realise clicking actually costs them money.
As an example pop over to http://www.dilbert.com/ and see how a PHB sub-committee has ruined a rather fantastic site by slapping a flash front-end on the toon for the day. The Sunday toon requires you to sense that there is an arrow on the last pane and know there should be more.
Absolutely ridiculous, however thankfully this link is available http://dilbert.com/fast for those that still want there fix.
In the UK contention ratios on domestic cable/dsl is 1:50. So bandwidth is allocated on certain assumed behaviour patterns.
P2P messes up that usage pattern by using constant bandwidth for hours/days at a time.
As a company I think I am very happy to throttle P2P traffic if it allows the other 49 households to get a 'quality' experience.
The real issue is with shaping. Virgin Media in the UK have declared that unless the bigger internet companies (e.g. youtube pay them money), their data streams will be shaped to reduce load on Virgin's network. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/13/1913241
Throttling P2P traffic because little Timmy 4 doors down wants to share pirated music etc is fine by me. If he has an issue, go ask daddy to switch providers. Get the hell away from downgrading my cluster.
Those Mac Intel only cross platform files?
Lack of time is a big factor. I have to choose a technology that is mature, cross platform and deliverable now. More importantly I have to have the perception that it's *important* to the business strategy of the company. Adobe are pressing all the right buttons for me (even open sourcing the SDK).
As a caveat I am a Coldfusion developer and was able to hook a Flex reporting app to our servers in a matter of minutes. More importantly the Flex Builder plugged into my current Eclipse installation seamlessly so I had very little downtime. Are these the right reasons? Probably not.
Do I think Microsoft have a lot to do to catch up with Adobe Flash 9? I think so. With Silverlight 2 in beta already 5 months after the release of 1.1, it's almost like they are racing against Flash. I would expect at least 18 months between versions. To MS advantage, Adobe have dictated that Flex will run on Flash 9 for the next 4 years so they have time to play catch up and do funky stuff with graphics etc.
I think, however the real point is being missed. Adobe have sorted there runtime environment out a long time ago. What they are now doing is removing the need for a browser with AIR. From a business point of view, this is where it gets very useful.
I honestly think when Silverlight hits version 3 (which should be within a year based on current release schedules) I might look again but not now. Not with what they did with Vista, or IE on the Mac, or Java 1.1 IDE. There is unfortunately a certain level of mistrust here.
A technology that requires you to be running Windows (there is a nod towards delivering a Linux runtime at some point) and inside a browser.
In comparison, you have a Adobe's Flash runtime which pretty much permeates the browser 'sphere', the release of AIR which completely discards the browser (which is a hugely significant for business), and Flex which can be considered a mature development environment seeing as they've now hit version 3. Adobe have also committed to not use anything other than Flash 9 for the Flex SDK until at least version 4. So we are talking about a 4 year stable build environment and Flash is always built backwards compatible.
I really can't see why a business would choose Silverlight as a delivery technology. There are too many OSs out there to bet everybody I want to deliver my apps to are running Windows.
I will evaluate Silverlight when I can see it as *cross-platform* and not a *cross-browser* solution. Until that day arrives I'll poke it with a stick to see all the sparkly bits, but I'm not investing my time on a single platform technology. I realise the same could be said for AIR, however they already are in Beta for Linux, and I believe they are testing OS X as well. I don't see any of this type of effort coming out of Microsoft.
Now if Adobe could commit to releasing AIR for PDAs/Mobiles at some point, then I think we may have complete ownage.
Just to give some background on this. AIR is an equivalent to the Java Runtime Environment. Now unfortunately (or fortunately) Adobe also released Flex 3 Builder (application development for Flash 9) at the same time and made it the easiest way to deliver AIR apps. You could easily build air apps using Flash 9, javascript or even plain html but I can't see the point to this. There are certain things Air does provide that will be interesting to see how they are used: SQLLite engine and system resource (disk drive etc) access. The latter screams security risk however this the same risk as installing any app on your computer. To be honest there are a couple of big companies (e.g. Ebay) that are writing AIR apps, but I don't really see there being much need in that arena (searching for auctions). I think it's is going to shine when hooking up to business applications (which is also indicative of the number of financial institutions looking for Flex developers). As an example, I've written an air app that hooks into our servers and provides an easy way to managing our error log entries, and various data characteristics. Previously this would be a case of logging into the back end through a browser and finding this out from various reports. There may be a case that a better dashboard design would have made this simpler, however I can have an AIR app sitting in the background feeding this information to me, and most importantly, it took very little time, as it hooked into existing web services. Personally it has a lot going for it, but it really is going to shine in big business. Oh and please don't compare it to MS Silverlight. Compare Flash to Silverlight, but not AIR.