The main difference between the web and games is the size of the world.
Actually, I'd say the main difference between the web and games is the type of interaction.
Most of the web is like a simulated library. It's generally about obtaining, providing, or exchanging information, whether it's reading an encyclopedia article, sending an order to a store, or watching your friend's latest video post on MySpace.
Games are generally about simulating a type of activity -- sports, combat, puzzle-solving, etc.
You can graft one type of interactivity onto the other interface -- people have jammed IM/chat capabilities into web pages, despite there being apps better suited for it, and you can certainly use the web as a delivery platform for games of all types. And you can use web-like capabilities in games (putting a dynamic message board in a tavern, for instance). But a 3-D interface doesn't add much to reading a piece of text with a photo attached. (I've often played games where the quest log, or a spell book, or some sort of in-game text is put into a rendered representation of a book, complete with pages that you have to turn one at a time, when it would actually be easier to use if it were one column with a scroll bar.) And a 2-D page isn't much good for slaying dragons or shooting Nazis unless you go the interactive fiction route.
It may be useless in its current incarnation, but that doesn't mean someone won't come up with a good way to use it as the technology matures.
The main problem is that people have this nifty tool, but they keep applying it to bolt it onto an existing interface instead of really trying to create a new one. (And when they do try to create a new one, the drawbacks outweigh the advantages. I swear, these "airport/city" metaphors and the like remind me of nothing so much as Microsoft Bob.) It's like using advanced 3D graphics to render a console app -- in a hard-to-read font.
Someone needs to figure out what a 3D display brings to the table, and build on that. Texture-mapping the 2D web onto the walls doesn't accomplish much.
It seems to me that the developers of Firefox have fallen down the same pothole-filled path that Microsoft has - forget about your past, focus only on the future.
Actually, Microsoft is a lot better than their competition about maintaining backward compatibility. If you grab a DOS app from 1993, chances are you'll be able to run it on a Windows XP system you picked up last week. Now try picking up a 68K Macintosh app from the same time period and see if you can run it on an Intel iMac. Or how about a dynamically linked Linux program from 10 years ago, running on SuSE 10.1 or Fedora Core 5?*
This of course comes at a price -- the price of continuing to support aging, obsolete APIs in addition to current stuff. The program (whether application or OS) gets crufty and hard to maintain, which increases the likelihood of hard-to-identify bugs. Whether you agree with the decision or not, that cruftiness is the very reason Mozilla is dropping this support.
*At least with Linux, you can usually grab the source and recompile with the newer libraries. And you can probably still run a static binary on a newer OS.
I think you missed that fact that this is an unofficial project... i.e. Red Hat didn't make the decision to issue the respin.
As far as whether things work or not, once you run the updater, there should be no difference between a system installed with the standard FC5 discs and a system installed with the respin. In theory, anyway.
It's not an incremental release. It's Fedora Core 5 plus all updates as of the time the ISOs were created.
In theory, if you were to take two systems, install one from the stock FC5 disc and the other from the respin disc, then run the updater on each, both systems would be identical except for your config choices.
The difference is that one system only has to download updates released since the end of May, while the other had to download updates since March. Both of them end up being Fedora Core 5.
(As far as naming is concerned, it's not an official Fedora release, so Fedora Core 5.1 wouldn't make sense. http://fedoraunity.org/re-spins/faq )
What the hell has Red Hat ever done for the Linux community?
What, aside from from contributions to the kernel, employing Linux developers (Alan Cox, anyone?) pushing the development of the ext3 filesystem... Grab the latest kernel source and grep -r for @redhat.com -- you might be surprised.
Oh, sorry, you didn't actually want an answer to that, did you?
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
From what I can tell, they've only produced respins of the DVD images. So if you don't have a DVD burner, or if you need to install on machines that only have CD players, you'll still need to download 2 months' worth of updates.
A nice year for browsers, indeed, at has taken too long to get here.
Oh, yeah!
Opera 9 should take care of most of the lingering compatibility issues with AJAX, rich text, etc. that web developers are currently able to use with IE and Firefox. Most Opera users will probably upgrade, making it much easier to do things like formatted web mail.
Internet Explorer 7 is a huge leap forward for what we'll be able to do with cross-browser design, though it'll probably take a couple of years before it supplants enough IE6 installations that we can really make use of it.
I haven't really been following Firefox 2 -- most of the work on the rendering engine is going into what will become Firefox 3 -- but I'm definitly looking forward to O9, Fx2, and IE7 this summer!
Well, fall, probably. IIRC Fx2 is scheduled for late summer and will probably slip, and IE7 is scheduled for... when is IE7 scheduled for?
Opera admits to security fixes -- they just make arrangements with places like Secunia to synchronize the reports with the updates.
Here's how it seems to go when someone fins a security hole in...
Firefox: Vulnerability announced through SecurityFocus, BugTraq, Secunia, etc. Mozilla works to fix bug. Mozilla releases updated version and their own advisory.
Internet Explorer: Vulnerability announced through SecurityFocus, BugTraq, Secunia, etc. Microsoft tries to decide whether they're better off fixing or downplaying the bug. Microsoft works to fix bug (maybe). Microsoft releases updated version and their own advisory.
Opera: Vulnerability reported to Opera. Opera works to fix bug. Opera releases updated version and publishes advisory to Secunia.
Speaking of lakes and engineering disasters, there's also the Salton Sea. Up until the 20th Century it was known as the Salton Basin or Salton Sink -- a big low-lying area in the middle of the California desert.
In 1901, people dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River. Due to a flood, most of the river gushed through the canals into the basin. By the time they diverted the river back to its own bed, it had created a lake 35 miles long and buried several towns under water.
Things were okay for a while, and it became a resort area. But since there's no outlet, water flows into the lake, evaporates, and leaves behind whatever minerals it brought with it. Much of the influx is runoff from agriculture, so fertilizer is a major pollutant, and the lake is more saline than the ocean. The shores are littered with ghost towns and abandoned motels.
Yeah, people had the same reactions to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Everyone spent years telling Microsoft to improve security. Security was more important than convenience and compatibility, why couldn't they see that? So finally, Microsoft sacrificed compatibility for the sake of improved security*, and what happened? Suddenly, everyone was complaining about broken apps in SP2, and how dare Microsoft ship something that screwed up.
*XP SP2 security is still swiss cheese, but it's better than the soap bubbles you get with XP SP1.
I was going to update my nofollow story from a year ago, but it seems nothing's changed
Heh. I know what you mean. I just re-read your post and followed a pingback to my own comments and realized that I said pretty much the same thing last year that I posted above.
You can't just "blast comment spams to the entire net", you need to target particular implementations.
Sorry, that was shorthand. Sure, they have to "target" Movable Type, MediaWiki, etc., but they're still blasting comments to the entire install base for each CMS.
And when those implementations have nofollow, there's no point (at least for pagerank purposes).
So, please tell me why comment spammers continue to blast comments to blogs powered by WordPress, which has had nofollow built in for 1.5 years and needs a plugin to disable it?
Cue renewed speculation on the existence of dinosaurs in other isolated locations. Never mind the fact that you'd need a much bigger ecosystem to support a breeding population of dinosaurs than for a handful of crustaceans, and never mind that they would have evolved into something totally different over million years, just as the species in this cave gave up on eyes.
Cryptozoologists will probably have fun with this one too. But then, we're far more likely to find a previously-unknown or previously-rumored animal than to find a live dinosaur, identical to those that lived 65+ million years ago.
There are three main reasons nofollow has failed to stop webspam:
It misjudged the root problem -- page rank isn't the only thing spammers are looking for. This is the main point of Justin Mason's post, if I remember correctly. (I read it at home a few hours ago, before it showed up on./, and of course now I can't pull it up here.)
It relied on near-universal implementation. If even 50% of blogs, wikis, etc. used nofollow, it would still be worth the spammers' effort to blast comment spams to the entire net.
It got applied incorrectly, as a blanket label on all links from non-admins.
What nofollow could have been useful for is a simple "I don't endorse this link" statement so that you can link to sites you dislike without adding to their fame. But applying it to all user-supplied links in blog comments, slashdot threads, wiki pages, etc. diluted its meaning, and as a result, diluted its usefulness.
Are you dead set on this name? Would you be OK with another name, or a variation on this one?
Does it have to be.com? Would a.net or.<country> domain work as well? (But avoid.biz or.info if you're going to us it in email. It seems like 90% of these domains in use are run by spammers, so your mail will look suspicious.)
Do you think getting this exact domain will gain you the discoverability, memorability, etc. to make up for that $1500?
If you stick with this company name, but choose a different domain name to start with (you can always add aliases later), are you willing to take the chance that the current owner will jack up the price in the future?
I suppose if you go by "Congress shall make no law..." then it would be perfectly acceptable for the President to issue an executive order declaring all political dissent punishable by imprisonment. But that makes an end run around the principle behind the free speech/press/assembly/petition for redress clauses of the first amendment, which is simple:
The government should not be allowed to punish people for speaking out in ways that the government does not like.
Arguing that punishments outside the judicial system, or punishments declared by another branch of government, are perfectly OK, seems to violate the spirit of the clause.
On the other hand, Puzzle Pirates started out as a subscription-based game. They still have servers with a flat monthly fee where doubloons are irrelevant, though I understand the doubloon model has been working well for them.
It may be that Bang! Howdy, designed with "Big Shot Units" (I can't even type that with a straight face) from the ground up, will work out differently as far as the business model's impact on game play is concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
The main difference between the web and games is the size of the world.
Actually, I'd say the main difference between the web and games is the type of interaction.
Most of the web is like a simulated library. It's generally about obtaining, providing, or exchanging information, whether it's reading an encyclopedia article, sending an order to a store, or watching your friend's latest video post on MySpace.
Games are generally about simulating a type of activity -- sports, combat, puzzle-solving, etc.
You can graft one type of interactivity onto the other interface -- people have jammed IM/chat capabilities into web pages, despite there being apps better suited for it, and you can certainly use the web as a delivery platform for games of all types. And you can use web-like capabilities in games (putting a dynamic message board in a tavern, for instance). But a 3-D interface doesn't add much to reading a piece of text with a photo attached. (I've often played games where the quest log, or a spell book, or some sort of in-game text is put into a rendered representation of a book, complete with pages that you have to turn one at a time, when it would actually be easier to use if it were one column with a scroll bar.) And a 2-D page isn't much good for slaying dragons or shooting Nazis unless you go the interactive fiction route.
It may be useless in its current incarnation, but that doesn't mean someone won't come up with a good way to use it as the technology matures.
The main problem is that people have this nifty tool, but they keep applying it to bolt it onto an existing interface instead of really trying to create a new one. (And when they do try to create a new one, the drawbacks outweigh the advantages. I swear, these "airport/city" metaphors and the like remind me of nothing so much as Microsoft Bob.) It's like using advanced 3D graphics to render a console app -- in a hard-to-read font.
Someone needs to figure out what a 3D display brings to the table, and build on that. Texture-mapping the 2D web onto the walls doesn't accomplish much.
Thanks for the link. For some reason, though, I keep misreading the title as "No Trolls on the Internet."
It seems to me that the developers of Firefox have fallen down the same pothole-filled path that Microsoft has - forget about your past, focus only on the future.
Actually, Microsoft is a lot better than their competition about maintaining backward compatibility. If you grab a DOS app from 1993, chances are you'll be able to run it on a Windows XP system you picked up last week. Now try picking up a 68K Macintosh app from the same time period and see if you can run it on an Intel iMac. Or how about a dynamically linked Linux program from 10 years ago, running on SuSE 10.1 or Fedora Core 5?*
This of course comes at a price -- the price of continuing to support aging, obsolete APIs in addition to current stuff. The program (whether application or OS) gets crufty and hard to maintain, which increases the likelihood of hard-to-identify bugs. Whether you agree with the decision or not, that cruftiness is the very reason Mozilla is dropping this support.
*At least with Linux, you can usually grab the source and recompile with the newer libraries. And you can probably still run a static binary on a newer OS.
I think you missed that fact that this is an unofficial project... i.e. Red Hat didn't make the decision to issue the respin.
As far as whether things work or not, once you run the updater, there should be no difference between a system installed with the standard FC5 discs and a system installed with the respin. In theory, anyway.
It's not an incremental release. It's Fedora Core 5 plus all updates as of the time the ISOs were created.
In theory, if you were to take two systems, install one from the stock FC5 disc and the other from the respin disc, then run the updater on each, both systems would be identical except for your config choices.
The difference is that one system only has to download updates released since the end of May, while the other had to download updates since March. Both of them end up being Fedora Core 5.
(As far as naming is concerned, it's not an official Fedora release, so Fedora Core 5.1 wouldn't make sense. http://fedoraunity.org/re-spins/faq )
What the hell has Red Hat ever done for the Linux community?
What, aside from from contributions to the kernel, employing Linux developers (Alan Cox, anyone?) pushing the development of the ext3 filesystem... Grab the latest kernel source and grep -r for @redhat.com -- you might be surprised.
Oh, sorry, you didn't actually want an answer to that, did you?
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
From what I can tell, they've only produced respins of the DVD images. So if you don't have a DVD burner, or if you need to install on machines that only have CD players, you'll still need to download 2 months' worth of updates.
Are we getting slashdot articles for each verion bump of the mozilla products?
Apparently not, since Seamonkey has also been updated.
And I'm already tired of Mozilla team not addressing the most critical issue - memory hogging.
./, so you'll have to copy that URL and paste it into your browser).
Actually, they've been whacking memory leaks in each of the ".forget-it releases," except for 1.5.0.3 which was just one security fix.
Firefox 1.5.0.1 Changelog
Firefox 1.5.0.2 Changelog
Bugzilla query: fixed in Gecko 1.8.0.4/Firefox 1.5.0.4 (remember, Bugzilla doesn't allow direct links from
I believe more major work on memory fixes is going into 2.0, which can accept larger changes.
A nice year for browsers, indeed, at has taken too long to get here.
Oh, yeah!
Opera 9 should take care of most of the lingering compatibility issues with AJAX, rich text, etc. that web developers are currently able to use with IE and Firefox. Most Opera users will probably upgrade, making it much easier to do things like formatted web mail.
Internet Explorer 7 is a huge leap forward for what we'll be able to do with cross-browser design, though it'll probably take a couple of years before it supplants enough IE6 installations that we can really make use of it.
I haven't really been following Firefox 2 -- most of the work on the rendering engine is going into what will become Firefox 3 -- but I'm definitly looking forward to O9, Fx2, and IE7 this summer!
Well, fall, probably. IIRC Fx2 is scheduled for late summer and will probably slip, and IE7 is scheduled for... when is IE7 scheduled for?
Opera admits to security fixes -- they just make arrangements with places like Secunia to synchronize the reports with the updates.
Here's how it seems to go when someone fins a security hole in...
Firefox:
Vulnerability announced through SecurityFocus, BugTraq, Secunia, etc.
Mozilla works to fix bug.
Mozilla releases updated version and their own advisory.
Internet Explorer:
Vulnerability announced through SecurityFocus, BugTraq, Secunia, etc.
Microsoft tries to decide whether they're better off fixing or downplaying the bug.
Microsoft works to fix bug (maybe).
Microsoft releases updated version and their own advisory.
Opera:
Vulnerability reported to Opera.
Opera works to fix bug.
Opera releases updated version and publishes advisory to Secunia.
Speaking of lakes and engineering disasters, there's also the Salton Sea. Up until the 20th Century it was known as the Salton Basin or Salton Sink -- a big low-lying area in the middle of the California desert.
In 1901, people dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River. Due to a flood, most of the river gushed through the canals into the basin. By the time they diverted the river back to its own bed, it had created a lake 35 miles long and buried several towns under water.
Things were okay for a while, and it became a resort area. But since there's no outlet, water flows into the lake, evaporates, and leaves behind whatever minerals it brought with it. Much of the influx is runoff from agriculture, so fertilizer is a major pollutant, and the lake is more saline than the ocean. The shores are littered with ghost towns and abandoned motels.
How is a wave of molasses going to kill anyone? You could probably outrun it easily; molasses isn't very fast.
You'd think so... but it was estimated at 35 MPH. In January, no less.
Not so easy to outrun, that.
How fast was the syrup moving?
35 MPH, according to one of the articles posted elsewhere in this thread.
Yeah, people had the same reactions to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Everyone spent years telling Microsoft to improve security. Security was more important than convenience and compatibility, why couldn't they see that? So finally, Microsoft sacrificed compatibility for the sake of improved security*, and what happened? Suddenly, everyone was complaining about broken apps in SP2, and how dare Microsoft ship something that screwed up.
*XP SP2 security is still swiss cheese, but it's better than the soap bubbles you get with XP SP1.
I was going to update my nofollow story from a year ago, but it seems nothing's changed
Heh. I know what you mean. I just re-read your post and followed a pingback to my own comments and realized that I said pretty much the same thing last year that I posted above.
Some ignorant people apparently assumed that this would eliminate comment spam on blogs and other commentable media.
No "ignorant people" required. Google was quite capable of claiming that nofollow would prevent comment spam on their own.
You can't just "blast comment spams to the entire net", you need to target particular implementations.
Sorry, that was shorthand. Sure, they have to "target" Movable Type, MediaWiki, etc., but they're still blasting comments to the entire install base for each CMS.
And when those implementations have nofollow, there's no point (at least for pagerank purposes).
So, please tell me why comment spammers continue to blast comments to blogs powered by WordPress, which has had nofollow built in for 1.5 years and needs a plugin to disable it?
Cue renewed speculation on the existence of dinosaurs in other isolated locations. Never mind the fact that you'd need a much bigger ecosystem to support a breeding population of dinosaurs than for a handful of crustaceans, and never mind that they would have evolved into something totally different over million years, just as the species in this cave gave up on eyes.
Cryptozoologists will probably have fun with this one too. But then, we're far more likely to find a previously-unknown or previously-rumored animal than to find a live dinosaur, identical to those that lived 65+ million years ago.
There are three main reasons nofollow has failed to stop webspam:
What nofollow could have been useful for is a simple "I don't endorse this link" statement so that you can link to sites you dislike without adding to their fame. But applying it to all user-supplied links in blog comments, slashdot threads, wiki pages, etc. diluted its meaning, and as a result, diluted its usefulness.
No easy answers, just some things to consider:
I suppose if you go by "Congress shall make no law..." then it would be perfectly acceptable for the President to issue an executive order declaring all political dissent punishable by imprisonment. But that makes an end run around the principle behind the free speech/press/assembly/petition for redress clauses of the first amendment, which is simple:
The government should not be allowed to punish people for speaking out in ways that the government does not like.
Arguing that punishments outside the judicial system, or punishments declared by another branch of government, are perfectly OK, seems to violate the spirit of the clause.
On the website, the mighty website,
The auction ends toniiight....
On the other hand, Puzzle Pirates started out as a subscription-based game. They still have servers with a flat monthly fee where doubloons are irrelevant, though I understand the doubloon model has been working well for them.
It may be that Bang! Howdy, designed with "Big Shot Units" (I can't even type that with a straight face) from the ground up, will work out differently as far as the business model's impact on game play is concerned.