I was expecting Diablo 3, but I actually thought that Blizzard would move it to a console title.
Business-wise, getting some of that juicy console money seems like a no-brainer for Blizzard (or their corporate masters). The *-craft games are somewhat problematic to move to the consoles, but Diablo looks like an excellent candidate: fondly remembered IP, a fallow period so people can't complain too much about gameplay changes, and the action heavy diablo style suits the consoles well.
But no. Windows and Mac, they say. Seems like a missed opportunity to me.
When business people talk about what they like in outlook, it is almost always a feature that uses both outlook and the Microsoft Exchange product as well. The tight integration of features between client and server software across the group really provides some cool functionality.
Now, if you take the time, you can configure a half dozen different open source server programs (mail, calendaring, centralized address book, etc.) and configure Thunderbird to talk to them (with several addons, of course). But it is a real hassle.
So what I'm getting at is that if businesses are a real target for Mozilla Messaging (and I'm not sure if they are or not, does anyone know? are they only interested in home users?) then they need to address the server side as well as the client side.
I think that the time is right for what I'm calling a Computer Aided Roleplaying Game (CARPG).
What this would be is a mostly traditional tabletop RPG (not a Computer RPG or MMORPG), but the game would be designed from the ground up with an accompanying computer program and you would be required to have at least one computer at the table to run the software. The system requirements would be very modest (no real-time 3D or the like), so I don't think that it is asking too much for 4+ geeks to scare up one old computer. (An optional form of play would have one computer per player, networked.)
The point of all this is to have the computer take over all the boring game system stuff that computer are good at and let the player focus on the fun, creative stuff that humans are good at.
I'm well aware that there are programs available for most of the major RPG systems that sort of do what I'm saying (and 4E will have some online software of this sort). But the point of a designed-from-the-ground-up CARPG is that you can design the rule systems to best take advantage of the availability of the software; rather than just writing a program that simply supports rules that were designed for humans to manage.
I will grant that selling a $100,000 house is different than selling a $1,000,000 house. And there is some argument to be made for different fees in this case.
But I expect you to also grant to me that selling a $200,000 house is pretty much the same as selling a $250,000 house. So why should an agent get more money for the $250,000 house in this case?
In the real estate fantasy world that I'm constructing here, I'm not saying that all agents must charge exactly the same flat fee. If an agent specializes in selling very expensive houses and is able to show the seller that they offer a good value proposition, then they can go right ahead and charge a higher fee than the agent who handles mid- or low- end housing.
I think that the main problem with real estate is that the fee is based on a percentage of the home value. This causes all kinds of incentive distortion and offends people's sense of fairness.
If real estate agents switched to either a flat fee or hourly rate pricing structure (independent of the sale price of the house), I think that a lot of the animosity they receive would go away.
And I would be perfectly willing to pay someone like your wife a flat fee for those services. What I won't pay is a percentage of the sale value of the house.
I think that the pricing model (ie. percentage of sale price) is the primary cause of people's complaints with the real estate industry. If agents switched to a flat fee or hourly rate pricing structure then I think that a lot of the complaints would disappear.
There is a purely practical problem that has nothing to do with privacy. I get so much junk mail at the email address listed for my domains that it is literally impossible for me to filter out the legitimate email. I'm talking spam to ham ratios of 10,000+ to 1. No software based filtering will handle that much of a mismatch. And I don't have the money to hire a full time employee to manually filter them.
Now, the snail mail address for my domains doesn't have this problem (because snail mail costs money to send, I guess). But the idea of having public email addresses for domains fails the practicality test.
This raises something that I've been thinking about for a while. There are two different kinds of network manipulation that ISPs can do and I think that it is important to make a distinction between them. They are:
1) Filtering/modifying/shaping traffic based on type (protocol), but not looking at source or destination. For example, giving streaming video priority over email.
2) Filtering/etc traffic based on source and/or destination. For example, giving streaming video from BellVideoLand priority over video from Youtube.
I think that ISPs can possibly make a case justifying the first type, based on protocol, on the basis of network management.
But the second, based on source, is just evil.
I think that we need to be careful to not lump both of these types under the single crusade of "net neutrality". I think that the term net neutrality should be reserved for source based filtering.
I really wish that these types of devices would get away from the obsession with streaming.
I say this because to accomplish "start playing the movie in two minutes" streaming you have to degrade the picture quality to a point that I find very noticeable (by both reducing the resolution and increasing the compression).
I've had my bluray player and 46" 1080p TV for six months now and I've really gotten used to that quality level. Highly compressed 720p (or, oh god, 480p) looks like a big step backwards.
So please, please, big companies, offer an option for local storage, bluray quality, and overnight downloads for people like me. Please.
Great! Does that mean we might see a 64-bit plug sooner rather than later? We've been waiting over 5 years! Unfortunately, no. Now that it is open source, Sun gets to legitimately use that old open source excuse: "hey, it's open source, if you want a new feature, here's the code, you do it."
I think that this is just a case where the term blog doesn't mean what it used to. In the past, a blog used to be a personal, fairly frequent journal. Now it just means any sort of at least semi-regular postings.
I mean these days a company can take what they used to call their press release archive and call it a blog. Heck, by the current definition of the term,/. is a blog.
So all this Malaysian thing has nothing to do with blogging (in the original sense of the word) gaining any mindshare. All that is is really saying is that Malaysian politicians are required to put their position papers and general propaganda online. Unfortunately, no serious politician, Malaysian or otherwise, is really going to put their unedited musings online.
You're arguing about the way things should be. I'm telling you how they actually are in the real world.
In an ideal world, yes absolutely, the government should force the phone company to provide real open access to competitors; for all the reasons you listed.
But that hasn't happened. And your ranting (WITH LOTS OF CAPS) isn't going to make it happen. If you have some concrete, realistic suggestions about how to make governments do the right thing, I'd love to hear them. The whole world would love to hear them.
(And no, "vote for someone else" doesn't help because for most voters this simply isn't an important issue. If you have some concrete, realistic ideas on how to make voters care about this stuff, we'd all love to hear that too.)
Do you have the billions of dollars required to lay new wires to everybody's house (or to put up new antennas for broadband wireless)?
If not, then, in Canada (and in most parts of the United States, and most other countries for that matter) your ISP will be sending data through wires controlled by either the big telephone regional monopoly of the bit cable regional monopoly. Because those companies own the "last mile" wires.
And they will throttle your traffic. You think you'll be able to stop them? You're wrong.
And even if you do happen to have those billions, most municipalities won't, in fact, grant you the necessary rights to lay new wire or new antennas (usually due to regulatory capture).
And even if you do happen to have those billions, and a cooperative municipality, you have to set your rates high enough to recoup that investment while competing with companies that already paid off their investment in wires decades ago.
I'd like to clarify what the previous poster said, which is something important in net neutrality debates.
There are two types of filtering/throttling/shaping that are often lumped under the banner of net neutrality.
Type 1: Modifying IP traffic based on type of traffic (e.g. web, voip, email, video, bittorrent, etc). But with no consideration of source or destination. For example, all email gets the same treatment.
Type 2: Modifying IP traffic based on source and/or destination. For example, slowing down video from Youtube, but not slowing down video from AT&T VideoLand(tm). (Unless Google pays AT&T some money.)
I think that Type 1 (based on protocol) has some legitimate arguments in its favor, from a network management perspective. I think reasonable people can disagree on this point.
However Type 2 (based on source) is unarguably evil. ISPs would only do Type 2 as a blatant money grab move and it would hurt all internet users.
I think that lumping the two types together under one net neutrality banner hurts the cause.
Perhaps a similar law needs to be laid-down for internet providers like Teksaavy: Access to Bell's lines without restriction. The law you suggest already exists. That's not the issue here. The issue is the interpretation and enforcement of that law.
They (the CRTC, roughly the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) have already done what you say. Forcing Bell to wholesale their lines is the only reason that independent ISPs (like Teksavvy exist).
But, of course, the big cable and telephone companies really, really hate having to lease out their lines at fair prices, so they are doing everything in their power to weaken the restrictions that the regulator (the CRTC) put on them.
Basically, it's about getting the telephone monopoly to adhere to the spirit of the regulations rather than just their interpretation of the letter of the regulations.
Actually, that's exactly what Teksavvy (the ISP mentioned in the summary) already does (though they don't have as many levels as you suggest, but they add in the twist of additional per gigabyte charges once you exceed your monthly limit).
I'm not sure what your point is in relation to my post, which was basically saying: don't abandon incremental improvements in graphics because of the wii's success.
But anyway, yes, getting the wii's controls to work is challenging and many games fail at it. But some succeed and the number that succeed will increase as developers get experience. (The controller interaction part will probably move into a few third party software library packages that game developers will license, like they do now for graphics, sound, physics, etc.)
And game development is a risk, wii controllers or not. You can spend $20mil and have a game that fails because of a lousy game concept or gameplay or any number of other reasons; even on the most conventional console of the current generation (the 360).
Why can't I have it all? Jaw dropping graphics and innovative controls (and compelling gameplay while we're at it).
I see too many people dismissing the importance of improved graphics, particularly in the face of the wii's novel controls. But graphics can improve the gaming experience (of course, I'm not saying that they automatically do; a bad game is a bad game, from text adventures, to sprites, to 3D). And I'm not just talking about hyper realism. Improved graphics can help immerse you in highly stylized games as well (see the upcoming Little Big Planet).
What I'm getting at here is that I think that the wrong message to take from the current generation of games is: graphics don't matter because the wii sold well. (Which isn't really what Wright is saying, but I see it a lot.)
What I want from the next generation of consoles is an amalgam of everything that is good about the current generation. And that includes graphics better than the ps3.
There are a lot of comments about whether switching to hydrogen for transportation will save energy or not.
I advocate hydrogen for transportation not for energy savings, but just because it allows us to move the pollution we generate. With internal combustion engines (even hybrids) the pollution is spread out all over our residential and commercial areas. But with hydrogen transportation, we can move the pollution (from the hydrogen generation) almost where ever we want.
Now, hardcore environmentalists will probably be horrified by this suggestion. It's basically just sweeping the problem under the rug. But for someone who lives in a big city and has to deal with smog warnings daily, moving the transportation pollution out of our cities, even if hydrogen generation generates more pollution in total, sounds like a damn good idea.
Granted, you can get fancy and use stealth encryption methods as you describe and ISPs will have problems with that.
But I was talking more about using the standard encryption methods/protocols such as IPSec, SSL or L2TP; which, of course, the ISP can trivially detect.
I don't see that it is particularly likely that even the technically savvy user base will adopt tricky stealthy encryption methods. But I might be wrong on that, I suppose.
The problem with the all-encrypted-all-the-time approach is that the residential ISPs are probably going to start lowering the priority of encrypted traffic for exactly the reason that they can't do deep packet inspection on it. There have already been sporadic reports of people running into this when using company VPNs from home.
Granted, if everyone (or almost everyone) ran all-encrypted-all-the-time, then the residential ISPs couldn't do this. But I don't see pervasive encryption becoming mainstream. If say only the 10-20% of users who are technically savvy enough are the only ones who do it, then you should expect ISPs to "shape" encrypted traffic downward.
The goodmail people may be evil, but they're not technically stupid.
The techniques they're using involve cryptographic signing in such a way that it can't trivially spoofed (you'd probably have to do something fancy like a birthday attack).
In all these Dell linux announcements, has anyone heard anything about Ubuntu becoming a supported configuration for Dell servers? (Supported by Dell, I mean.)
Oh, I agree with the general sentiment that network printing in general is a pain regardless of operating system and the postscript is nice, if you can get it.
My complaint is just that I think that Apple could be a little more up front about the fact that most printer manufacturers don't make Mac (or Linux, for that matter) suitable network drivers and that you need to consult the gimp-print supported printer list. (Maybe on that page on the Apple web site where they tell you how easy it is to interoperate with Windows that the guy earlier in the thread who called me a liar linked to.)
I guess we were just a little spoiled by living in the Windows world where the same drivers are used for local and network printing. So all you need to do is check the manufacturer for drivers. My company did check the manufacturers web sites for our printers before we brought in Macs and were happy to see that all our printers had Mac drivers. It was only after we started trying to set up Mac network printing that we learned about the gimp-print twist. (And we only learned that by some detailed research.)
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I was expecting Diablo 3, but I actually thought that Blizzard would move it to a console title.
Business-wise, getting some of that juicy console money seems like a no-brainer for Blizzard (or their corporate masters). The *-craft games are somewhat problematic to move to the consoles, but Diablo looks like an excellent candidate: fondly remembered IP, a fallow period so people can't complain too much about gameplay changes, and the action heavy diablo style suits the consoles well.
But no. Windows and Mac, they say. Seems like a missed opportunity to me.
When business people talk about what they like in outlook, it is almost always a feature that uses both outlook and the Microsoft Exchange product as well. The tight integration of features between client and server software across the group really provides some cool functionality.
Now, if you take the time, you can configure a half dozen different open source server programs (mail, calendaring, centralized address book, etc.) and configure Thunderbird to talk to them (with several addons, of course). But it is a real hassle.
So what I'm getting at is that if businesses are a real target for Mozilla Messaging (and I'm not sure if they are or not, does anyone know? are they only interested in home users?) then they need to address the server side as well as the client side.
I think that the time is right for what I'm calling a Computer Aided Roleplaying Game (CARPG).
What this would be is a mostly traditional tabletop RPG (not a Computer RPG or MMORPG), but the game would be designed from the ground up with an accompanying computer program and you would be required to have at least one computer at the table to run the software. The system requirements would be very modest (no real-time 3D or the like), so I don't think that it is asking too much for 4+ geeks to scare up one old computer. (An optional form of play would have one computer per player, networked.)
The point of all this is to have the computer take over all the boring game system stuff that computer are good at and let the player focus on the fun, creative stuff that humans are good at.
I'm well aware that there are programs available for most of the major RPG systems that sort of do what I'm saying (and 4E will have some online software of this sort). But the point of a designed-from-the-ground-up CARPG is that you can design the rule systems to best take advantage of the availability of the software; rather than just writing a program that simply supports rules that were designed for humans to manage.
I will grant that selling a $100,000 house is different than selling a $1,000,000 house. And there is some argument to be made for different fees in this case.
But I expect you to also grant to me that selling a $200,000 house is pretty much the same as selling a $250,000 house. So why should an agent get more money for the $250,000 house in this case?
In the real estate fantasy world that I'm constructing here, I'm not saying that all agents must charge exactly the same flat fee. If an agent specializes in selling very expensive houses and is able to show the seller that they offer a good value proposition, then they can go right ahead and charge a higher fee than the agent who handles mid- or low- end housing.
Yeah. In theory, yes, you can negotiate anything. In practice, as the tag says, goodluckwiththat.
I think that the main problem with real estate is that the fee is based on a percentage of the home value. This causes all kinds of incentive distortion and offends people's sense of fairness.
If real estate agents switched to either a flat fee or hourly rate pricing structure (independent of the sale price of the house), I think that a lot of the animosity they receive would go away.
And I would be perfectly willing to pay someone like your wife a flat fee for those services. What I won't pay is a percentage of the sale value of the house.
I think that the pricing model (ie. percentage of sale price) is the primary cause of people's complaints with the real estate industry. If agents switched to a flat fee or hourly rate pricing structure then I think that a lot of the complaints would disappear.
There is a purely practical problem that has nothing to do with privacy. I get so much junk mail at the email address listed for my domains that it is literally impossible for me to filter out the legitimate email. I'm talking spam to ham ratios of 10,000+ to 1. No software based filtering will handle that much of a mismatch. And I don't have the money to hire a full time employee to manually filter them.
Now, the snail mail address for my domains doesn't have this problem (because snail mail costs money to send, I guess). But the idea of having public email addresses for domains fails the practicality test.
This raises something that I've been thinking about for a while. There are two different kinds of network manipulation that ISPs can do and I think that it is important to make a distinction between them. They are:
1) Filtering/modifying/shaping traffic based on type (protocol), but not looking at source or destination. For example, giving streaming video priority over email.
2) Filtering/etc traffic based on source and/or destination. For example, giving streaming video from BellVideoLand priority over video from Youtube.
I think that ISPs can possibly make a case justifying the first type, based on protocol, on the basis of network management.
But the second, based on source, is just evil.
I think that we need to be careful to not lump both of these types under the single crusade of "net neutrality". I think that the term net neutrality should be reserved for source based filtering.
I really wish that these types of devices would get away from the obsession with streaming.
I say this because to accomplish "start playing the movie in two minutes" streaming you have to degrade the picture quality to a point that I find very noticeable (by both reducing the resolution and increasing the compression).
I've had my bluray player and 46" 1080p TV for six months now and I've really gotten used to that quality level. Highly compressed 720p (or, oh god, 480p) looks like a big step backwards.
So please, please, big companies, offer an option for local storage, bluray quality, and overnight downloads for people like me. Please.
I think that this is just a case where the term blog doesn't mean what it used to. In the past, a blog used to be a personal, fairly frequent journal. Now it just means any sort of at least semi-regular postings.
/. is a blog.
I mean these days a company can take what they used to call their press release archive and call it a blog. Heck, by the current definition of the term,
So all this Malaysian thing has nothing to do with blogging (in the original sense of the word) gaining any mindshare. All that is is really saying is that Malaysian politicians are required to put their position papers and general propaganda online. Unfortunately, no serious politician, Malaysian or otherwise, is really going to put their unedited musings online.
You're arguing about the way things should be. I'm telling you how they actually are in the real world.
In an ideal world, yes absolutely, the government should force the phone company to provide real open access to competitors; for all the reasons you listed.
But that hasn't happened. And your ranting (WITH LOTS OF CAPS) isn't going to make it happen. If you have some concrete, realistic suggestions about how to make governments do the right thing, I'd love to hear them. The whole world would love to hear them.
(And no, "vote for someone else" doesn't help because for most voters this simply isn't an important issue. If you have some concrete, realistic ideas on how to make voters care about this stuff, we'd all love to hear that too.)
Do you have the billions of dollars required to lay new wires to everybody's house (or to put up new antennas for broadband wireless)?
If not, then, in Canada (and in most parts of the United States, and most other countries for that matter) your ISP will be sending data through wires controlled by either the big telephone regional monopoly of the bit cable regional monopoly. Because those companies own the "last mile" wires.
And they will throttle your traffic. You think you'll be able to stop them? You're wrong.
And even if you do happen to have those billions, most municipalities won't, in fact, grant you the necessary rights to lay new wire or new antennas (usually due to regulatory capture).
And even if you do happen to have those billions, and a cooperative municipality, you have to set your rates high enough to recoup that investment while competing with companies that already paid off their investment in wires decades ago.
Do you understand the problem now?
I'd like to clarify what the previous poster said, which is something important in net neutrality debates.
There are two types of filtering/throttling/shaping that are often lumped under the banner of net neutrality.
Type 1: Modifying IP traffic based on type of traffic (e.g. web, voip, email, video, bittorrent, etc). But with no consideration of source or destination. For example, all email gets the same treatment.
Type 2: Modifying IP traffic based on source and/or destination. For example, slowing down video from Youtube, but not slowing down video from AT&T VideoLand(tm). (Unless Google pays AT&T some money.)
I think that Type 1 (based on protocol) has some legitimate arguments in its favor, from a network management perspective. I think reasonable people can disagree on this point.
However Type 2 (based on source) is unarguably evil. ISPs would only do Type 2 as a blatant money grab move and it would hurt all internet users.
I think that lumping the two types together under one net neutrality banner hurts the cause.
They (the CRTC, roughly the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) have already done what you say. Forcing Bell to wholesale their lines is the only reason that independent ISPs (like Teksavvy exist).
But, of course, the big cable and telephone companies really, really hate having to lease out their lines at fair prices, so they are doing everything in their power to weaken the restrictions that the regulator (the CRTC) put on them.
Basically, it's about getting the telephone monopoly to adhere to the spirit of the regulations rather than just their interpretation of the letter of the regulations.
Actually, that's exactly what Teksavvy (the ISP mentioned in the summary) already does (though they don't have as many levels as you suggest, but they add in the twist of additional per gigabyte charges once you exceed your monthly limit).
http://teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1
Though I don't know if the graduated pricing is shared with the wholesaler.
I'm not sure what your point is in relation to my post, which was basically saying: don't abandon incremental improvements in graphics because of the wii's success.
But anyway, yes, getting the wii's controls to work is challenging and many games fail at it. But some succeed and the number that succeed will increase as developers get experience. (The controller interaction part will probably move into a few third party software library packages that game developers will license, like they do now for graphics, sound, physics, etc.)
And game development is a risk, wii controllers or not. You can spend $20mil and have a game that fails because of a lousy game concept or gameplay or any number of other reasons; even on the most conventional console of the current generation (the 360).
Why can't I have it all? Jaw dropping graphics and innovative controls (and compelling gameplay while we're at it).
I see too many people dismissing the importance of improved graphics, particularly in the face of the wii's novel controls. But graphics can improve the gaming experience (of course, I'm not saying that they automatically do; a bad game is a bad game, from text adventures, to sprites, to 3D). And I'm not just talking about hyper realism. Improved graphics can help immerse you in highly stylized games as well (see the upcoming Little Big Planet).
What I'm getting at here is that I think that the wrong message to take from the current generation of games is: graphics don't matter because the wii sold well. (Which isn't really what Wright is saying, but I see it a lot.)
What I want from the next generation of consoles is an amalgam of everything that is good about the current generation. And that includes graphics better than the ps3.
There are a lot of comments about whether switching to hydrogen for transportation will save energy or not.
I advocate hydrogen for transportation not for energy savings, but just because it allows us to move the pollution we generate. With internal combustion engines (even hybrids) the pollution is spread out all over our residential and commercial areas. But with hydrogen transportation, we can move the pollution (from the hydrogen generation) almost where ever we want.
Now, hardcore environmentalists will probably be horrified by this suggestion. It's basically just sweeping the problem under the rug. But for someone who lives in a big city and has to deal with smog warnings daily, moving the transportation pollution out of our cities, even if hydrogen generation generates more pollution in total, sounds like a damn good idea.
Granted, you can get fancy and use stealth encryption methods as you describe and ISPs will have problems with that.
But I was talking more about using the standard encryption methods/protocols such as IPSec, SSL or L2TP; which, of course, the ISP can trivially detect.
I don't see that it is particularly likely that even the technically savvy user base will adopt tricky stealthy encryption methods. But I might be wrong on that, I suppose.
The problem with the all-encrypted-all-the-time approach is that the residential ISPs are probably going to start lowering the priority of encrypted traffic for exactly the reason that they can't do deep packet inspection on it. There have already been sporadic reports of people running into this when using company VPNs from home.
Granted, if everyone (or almost everyone) ran all-encrypted-all-the-time, then the residential ISPs couldn't do this. But I don't see pervasive encryption becoming mainstream. If say only the 10-20% of users who are technically savvy enough are the only ones who do it, then you should expect ISPs to "shape" encrypted traffic downward.
The goodmail people may be evil, but they're not technically stupid.
The techniques they're using involve cryptographic signing in such a way that it can't trivially spoofed (you'd probably have to do something fancy like a birthday attack).
In all these Dell linux announcements, has anyone heard anything about Ubuntu becoming a supported configuration for Dell servers? (Supported by Dell, I mean.)
Oh, I agree with the general sentiment that network printing in general is a pain regardless of operating system and the postscript is nice, if you can get it.
My complaint is just that I think that Apple could be a little more up front about the fact that most printer manufacturers don't make Mac (or Linux, for that matter) suitable network drivers and that you need to consult the gimp-print supported printer list. (Maybe on that page on the Apple web site where they tell you how easy it is to interoperate with Windows that the guy earlier in the thread who called me a liar linked to.)
I guess we were just a little spoiled by living in the Windows world where the same drivers are used for local and network printing. So all you need to do is check the manufacturer for drivers. My company did check the manufacturers web sites for our printers before we brought in Macs and were happy to see that all our printers had Mac drivers. It was only after we started trying to set up Mac network printing that we learned about the gimp-print twist. (And we only learned that by some detailed research.)