as is the case with most computer patents, you have to -read- them to determine their fitness. the short description can't possibly hold all the pertinent details.
this pending patent covers their particular modular translation service, residing at a user-preference-designated network address (whether it be one device or a plurality of devices).
furthermore - the method states that a message comes from a sender, through the communication server directly to a recipient (no translation whatsoever to this point). the recipient's machine then automatically sends a translation request to the translation server specified in their stored preferences, and the result of that translation request is displayed.
the uniqueness of this system is that someone could set their preferences to point at a 3rd party translation service that perhaps gives better results than the stock german->japanese translation widget that MS might provide. the server passing along the traffic can remain willfully ignorant of any possible translation issues and keeps complexity of its logic down.
you may maintain this is a 'Bad Patent'(tm), and indeed babelfish is curiously close in function and it's use in procedure, to this patent.
in UO/PSO/etc the server handles translation without automatic user request.
therefore, those 'prior art' examples are not relevant.
remember, it's -procedure- and -method- that are patentable. not -functionality-.
you CAN'T patent 'translation' (and this patent isn't trying to). you CAN patent a non-obvious implimentation of it.
they're not muslims any more than david koresh was a christian.
they're taking advantage of impressionable, desperate people in a bleak situation. similar to the catholic cults in africa - but with greater resources.
total fuckwits - but they're not representative of 'muslims' in general.
my pocket prognosticater says that tablets and their variants are the future.
the pen interface is way more intuitive than the keyboard for most people - and the majority of people's use of the computer doesn't really require a full keyboard/mouse. not when you consider how well the tablets do handwriting recognition nowadays (unless you have 2nd grade handwriting).
having to open the clamshell and support the box on a surface or your knees is unnecessary now. fighting with the eraser-nubby style mouse pointer or short-lived touchpads is gone as well. the cumbersome aspects of the laptop go the way of the cumbersome aspects of the desktop.
come on folks, what security and military tools -dont- have plausible uses to violate the rights of US citizens?
all intelligence gathering tools, and military technologies could be used against americans, this can't be a surprise. there are satellites that can track movement across the globe from the comfort of space - can these infringe on our rights? sure. are they being used to? i'm not so sure.
yes, yes, i know that it sounds like a bad attitude toward an erosion of our rights - but c'mon folks: the new world politics, cut defense and intelligence spending and the lack of 'cloak and dagger' type intelligence is what got us into this mess.
not to mention that urban combat, asymmetric warfare, protracted conflict after the end of 'conventional military operations', and rogue nation states are the most serious threats in this new political world climate. (see: postwar afghanistan, postwar iraq, palestine/israel).
asking the US not to continue to develop technology to protect its interests against these threats (as is the right of all nations) - is like asking it to have unilaterally stopped producing nukes during the cold war arms race. sure, maybe nothing will come of an inability to react effectively to the threat - but the risk of inaction is too great.
if you don't keep up with your enemies tactics and methods, you will invite increased pressure and cement their resolve.
historians have noted that the US won the cold war primarily by outspending the soviet union. and why back off a tried and true tactic?
they 'bet' on graphical, because their users were very happy with command line, and everyone -hated-windows 1.0 : it was a huge bet for them to freeze dos at 6.22 and make everyone upgrade. he didn't mean a 'bet' as in "we dont know if a gui's going to work" a 'bet' as in "we dont know if we'll lose all our customers on this one".
they have never innovated. they've assimilated and incorporated. and they just keep growing. (no borg analogy intended).
try to be accurate when knocking blizzard. i agree that 2 million isn't much anymore in terms of huge blockbusters, but it's still a good sales effort from the business side.
my problem with blizzard is that they just dont innovate. they tack on one new feature and ship the same game. (diablo2 was diablo with a skill tree - war3 was war2 with heros)
it was not surprising to me that the team that came up with the original war3 concept (the removal of resource gathering, the focus on -keeping your units alive- rather than zerging) left shortly after the suits reassigned their priorities and then had other developers bastardize their vision.
http://www.game2extreme.com/news/article.cfm?art ic leid=1174
BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT® ANNOUNCES
WARCRAFT® III: THE FROZEN THRONE(TM) IRVINE, Calif. - JANUARY 22, 2003 - Blizzard Entertainment®, a division of Vivendi Universal Games, announced today plans for Warcraft® III: The Frozen Throne(TM), the expansion set to the fastest selling PC game ever*, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos(TM). Since the game's release in July 2002, Warcraft III has now surpassed 2 million units sold worldwide. *
there most likely are cameras in the changing rooms where you shop. they get to see you in your natural glory. granted you keep your underwear on, but look again at the picture. it just looks like the broad is wearing spandex. no nipples, no hair, strong color tint. this is much less intrusive that what we already accept.
if the airports were officially privately held - we wouldn't be having this discussion. but since there's a bizarre local government / major airline collusion occurring in the airline industry - we have this dilemma.
as with the changing room cameras in stores - you can simply opt out of this scrutiny. don't shop there. similarly - you have the option not to fly, or to fly out of a smaller airport that can't afford such expensive screening devices and subjects you to a pat-down and a wanding. Flight is a privilege in our country not a right.
in my opinion - we've been putting up with this level of invasion of our privacy for much smaller problems. i dont see how a blue-tinted hairless, low resolution, ken-doll-style reproduction of your image is worth getting all bent out of shape over.
yeah, it's a shame that the world has come to this, but until they can find a way to project our skeletal images onto a walk-by screen (ala Total Recall) without cooking us in short order with the current technology, i'm prepared to deal with the interim solution.
if they just put the monitor in a curtained-off booth, that'd be enough privacy for me. hell, i have less privacy when i try on pants at the store. like i care if they can see my junk.
they have the authority to strip search you on nothing more than a hunch - so how different is this really?
i do remember reading an article talking about this some time back and they were thinking of using a computer generated genderless wireframe and then transfer any hits from the backscatter onto that image, instead of showing the viewer the actual person in the scanner.
and just how is it that humanity can justify growing a human body and then essentially reformatting it for use by the rich - but doesn't want to touch the subject of copying?
jeebus - we can't even use waste from abortions to try to cure nerve damage here in america, yet in the future we can grow entire humans and then destroy their sentience and/or soul?
real technology has shown us that a clone is not the original, nor is it a soulless, mindless husk - but an equally viable and unique individual.
this book makes the machines in the matrix look humane. at least they let the grown human live out a life in their pod.
the only thing we have to fear...
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 1
the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
the famous line that could only be spoken by someone who lived in a world where he didn't have to fear the government tracking his every move and action through every consumer product with an RFID tag - silently amassing data about his most secret incestual bestial foot fetish to be used at a later date in a mcCarthy-ist purge of incestual bestial foot fetishists.
of course roosevelt was the walrus. i could be the walrus, and i'd still have to be afraid of an incestual bestial foot fetishist purge.
customer service is always the best when you're a customer dealing with a small business. it's probably why you guys have a fanatic following.
while i applaud your product and services, i just never really got into your game. maybe it was because back in the day i had a slower computer and dialup - and the loot-frenzy and crowding was mindboggling.
but, i'm looking at that site thinking i just might drop in and see how things are now, under the sole management of the people who loved making/running the game. $11/mo to find out how far you guys have come is certainly more reasonable than $50 + $15/mo to find out how far Sony hasn't.
UO is the game i remember the most fondly. early UO that is. i left fairly early still - but beta was beautiful (outside of the towns, which were a CF). the resource system, the player economy, the monster ecology - great stuff.
then they ripped out the resource system because they didn't count on people hoarding raw material. and then they ripped out the ecology because it meant orcs and bandits would fight, and thats less monsters for the powercrowd.
and the thing that makes me most interested in giving this game a shot (when the player vehicles come out) is that in the negative reviews of SWG, you could replace 'SWG' with 'UO' and it sounds just like the UO beta boards.
i can't fight forever i dont want to have to go back to town i have too many choices with my character and me and my powerbuddies all chose the same narrow jack-of-all-trades skill progression there aren't any 'spawns' in the eq sense. i have to wander. i dont get loot from non-sentient creatures, just resources. playermade stuff is better than what i get off sandpeople.
granted there are legitimate gripes in this game (combat does sound like it needs work, and the no player vehicles is bound to make things too boring) but overall... it sounds like the big sandbox that i prefer my games to be.
not 'kill blue foozle x10, level, kill green foozle x20, level, kill orange foozle x40, etc' ad nauseum.
the box costs $50 with one free month simply because that is what the paying customer is apparently ok with.
the monthly flat fees started at $10/mo in UO and have gone up as the customer still doesn't seem fazed. (many Meridian59 players, paying by the hour, were racking up $30/mo with regularity : don't be surprised when EQ2 is ~$16/mo at it's cheapest).
theoretically the monthly fee is to cover the costs of running the game - but with a well publicized profit margin of ~40% on EQ subscriptions (or $5 per month per addict), one realizes that the true purpose of the monthly fee is to make the kinds of money that publishers are after with these types of games. I doubt that SWG is so clear cut as Sony makes the box and LucasArts runs the servers. As I understand it, GMS and customer service are still employed by SOE, and it would be moronic of lucasarts (shrewd businesspeople if nothing else) to try to run their own servers and ignore SOEs infrastructure and experienced teams.
Besides, as time goes on, the costs of servers, bandwidth, the backup media, tech support, and the software needed to run these server farms goes down. As time goes on, the ongoing costs -drop- (i'd like to see the cost difference between that first server farm for UO and their most recent farms in Asia).
The only publisher that seems to come close to 'getting' massmogs and truly -deserve- that monthly fee, is Microsoft with Asheron's Call 1. new content, new features, monthly events - all included in the subscription price.
However, they also seemed to have seen what the customer expects and demands, and have such have fallen back on a shoddier experience with AC2, and a lack of the same quality in ongoing experience. (customers aren't penalizing these companies for bad launches, products, and experiences enough yet, apparently)
if only a company would fix the overall cost of playing (both in time and money) they could hit that casual niche and make a game worth playing.
how to release a massmog that underpromised, overdelivered and was reasonably stable at launch.
I mean, cmon. -microsoft- of all game developers has done it right -twice- now with the Asheron's Call series, and hitherto unknown Mythic Entertainment pulled it off with Dark Age of Camelot.
in my unprofessional opinion - this game is not going to strike a fire in the casual gamer market like they hope. any casual gamer will immediately be turned off by having their wookie bounty hunter continually chased all over tatooine by some fscking crab smaller than his head. the casual gamer doesn't want to spend 100 hours getting to the point where he can hunt banthas or dewbacks or sandpeople. they want to do fun stuff now.
not to mention travel. everything was laid out assuming you'd be able to get your own speeder bike or landspeeder, or bum a ride from someone. but now player-vehicles are out until god-knows-when, and the result is that the town to town running makes EQ's seem reasonable.
if star wars was an action game like planetside, that could maybe catch on - if only sony wasn't pricing it out of the realm of reasonability. $12/mo for a FPS?
SWG looks like a market dissappointment in the same vein as Sims Online.
java is a solid technical option that's being managed into the ground by Sun, much like the rest of its other assets.
java is absolutely fantastic for a good number of applications. however, its number 1 design goal was write once, run anywhere. and that doesn't happen.
maybe 'betamax' was going a bit far - i perhaps should have compared it to laserdisc. still superior in a niche, and loved by the hard core, but not a solution for the mass market - for distributing to a disparate client base.
interestingly enough, it has been surmised that laserdiscs failure was due in large part to Sony's tight control over what content they would allow on their media. so perhaps it really is the better analogy to good technology managed into the ground.
didn't the mindshare concept die with the dot com'ies?
i mean, counting eyeballs, mindshare... weren't these things that marketroids just sold us when we had money and no idea where to put it, and so those best at marketing directed us to nice approachable terms that reflected the 'newness' of the market, and inevitably led back to lining their pockets with our money?
'mom' failing to find a way to write a document seems to me to be a failure of the program-centric interface - rather than something 'task-centric'.
why didn't they just have a 'compose' button or something on the interface? eg compose->[email | IM | local document | code] eg browse->[my documents | internet | network] and then launch an app accordingly. WHAM! mindshare problem solved.
'mom' didn't even immediately assume there was a 'start' button if you notice. which should tell you that she doesn't immediately assume that's how desktops should work. she wanted/needed to write a document, and when she discovered lindows 'L' was apparently set up to mimic the windows 'start' she -then- figured that Office must have been there somewhere. because it was trying to be just like her trusty old windows box.
don't fall into the 'mindshare' trap. windows is most vulnerable -because- it takes experience and training to know how to use it and predict how new apps/features should behave.
mindshare indicates the problem is insurmountable marketing challenges (education and exposure)- and if you'll notice, the only solution to the 'mindshare' is... marketing. rather like shamans of old, creating the boogeyman so they can be the savior.
java was created to be a write once, run anywhere solution. because of corporate politics and competition, it just doesn't pull it off.
depending on your install base, it can sometimes get by, but more often than not, platform specific code, design, and testing is required - and that puts the kabosh on the development gains.
and that's even ignoring the cost of supporting the various platforms VMs and the VM distribution problem on windows machines of late.
(sun won its suit against microsoft that it was unfairly squeezing out the java vm - then promptly sued microsoft for posting the microsoft jvm on windowsupdate.com because the license from sun didn't explicitly allow that. they won the suit and for some time windows users just couldn't get their hands on a vm. and if that doesn't decimate any gains from using java, i don't know what does)
nice idea, solid effort on the technological end -but it's going the way of betamax and solaris.
Slashdot Mirror
as is the case with most computer patents, you have to -read- them to determine their fitness. the short description can't possibly hold all the pertinent details.
this pending patent covers their particular modular translation service, residing at a user-preference-designated network address (whether it be one device or a plurality of devices).
furthermore - the method states that a message comes from a sender, through the communication server directly to a recipient (no translation whatsoever to this point). the recipient's machine then automatically sends a translation request to the translation server specified in their stored preferences, and the result of that translation request is displayed.
the uniqueness of this system is that someone could set their preferences to point at a 3rd party translation service that perhaps gives better results than the stock german->japanese translation widget that MS might provide. the server passing along the traffic can remain willfully ignorant of any possible translation issues and keeps complexity of its logic down.
you may maintain this is a 'Bad Patent'(tm), and indeed babelfish is curiously close in function and it's use in procedure, to this patent.
in UO/PSO/etc the server handles translation without automatic user request.
therefore, those 'prior art' examples are not relevant.
remember, it's -procedure- and -method- that are patentable. not -functionality-.
you CAN'T patent 'translation' (and this patent isn't trying to). you CAN patent a non-obvious implimentation of it.
they're not muslims any more than david koresh was a christian.
they're taking advantage of impressionable, desperate people in a bleak situation. similar to the catholic cults in africa - but with greater resources.
total fuckwits - but they're not representative of 'muslims' in general.
for electronically announced and judged t-shirt design competitions.
bezos helped me fill out the paperwork.
human-made solar sails were not only good enough for inter-system travel, but they were speedy as all hell too.
that count dooku guy must be using his evil midichlorians to break the laws of physics.
(as if super jumping, telekinesis, and finger lightning weren't outrageous enough. he really slaps physics in the face with those sails)
i must be old, but i remember when we out and out called it 'Devil's Night'.
of course, i live outside detroit - the city that was regularly nearly burned to the ground every day before halloween for years and years.
of course, now criminals dont want to be downtown at night, so it's been getting 'better'.
for pop culture reference: see 'The Crow'.
what on earth would you do with a carbine rifle that small?
i guess even nanites are set to participate in the arms race.
my pocket prognosticater says that tablets and their variants are the future.
the pen interface is way more intuitive than the keyboard for most people - and the majority of people's use of the computer doesn't really require a full keyboard/mouse. not when you consider how well the tablets do handwriting recognition nowadays (unless you have 2nd grade handwriting).
having to open the clamshell and support the box on a surface or your knees is unnecessary now. fighting with the eraser-nubby style mouse pointer or short-lived touchpads is gone as well. the cumbersome aspects of the laptop go the way of the cumbersome aspects of the desktop.
now if only i could play unreal 2k3 on it...
i don't know who i should be cheering for.
obvious patent-happy amazon and the dmca? or gates and, indirectly, m$ world domination.
this ground my finite state machine to a halt.
come on folks, what security and military tools -dont- have plausible uses to violate the rights of US citizens?
all intelligence gathering tools, and military technologies could be used against americans, this can't be a surprise. there are satellites that can track movement across the globe from the comfort of space - can these infringe on our rights? sure. are they being used to? i'm not so sure.
yes, yes, i know that it sounds like a bad attitude toward an erosion of our rights - but c'mon folks: the new world politics, cut defense and intelligence spending and the lack of 'cloak and dagger' type intelligence is what got us into this mess.
not to mention that urban combat, asymmetric warfare, protracted conflict after the end of 'conventional military operations', and rogue nation states are the most serious threats in this new political world climate. (see: postwar afghanistan, postwar iraq, palestine/israel).
asking the US not to continue to develop technology to protect its interests against these threats (as is the right of all nations) - is like asking it to have unilaterally stopped producing nukes during the cold war arms race. sure, maybe nothing will come of an inability to react effectively to the threat - but the risk of inaction is too great.
if you don't keep up with your enemies tactics and methods, you will invite increased pressure and cement their resolve.
historians have noted that the US won the cold war primarily by outspending the soviet union. and why back off a tried and true tactic?
they 'bet' on graphical, because their users were very happy with command line, and everyone -hated-windows 1.0 : it was a huge bet for them to freeze dos at 6.22 and make everyone upgrade. he didn't mean a 'bet' as in "we dont know if a gui's going to work" a 'bet' as in "we dont know if we'll lose all our customers on this one".
they have never innovated. they've assimilated and incorporated. and they just keep growing. (no borg analogy intended).
sc is copyprotected too...
or are you suggesting the type of protection on d2 was preventing your machine from running it?
try to be accurate when knocking blizzard. i agree that 2 million isn't much anymore in terms of huge blockbusters, but it's still a good sales effort from the business side.
t ic leid=1174
my problem with blizzard is that they just dont innovate. they tack on one new feature and ship the same game. (diablo2 was diablo with a skill tree - war3 was war2 with heros)
it was not surprising to me that the team that came up with the original war3 concept (the removal of resource gathering, the focus on -keeping your units alive- rather than zerging) left shortly after the suits reassigned their priorities and then had other developers bastardize their vision.
http://www.game2extreme.com/news/article.cfm?ar
BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT® ANNOUNCES
WARCRAFT® III: THE FROZEN THRONE(TM)
IRVINE, Calif. - JANUARY 22, 2003 - Blizzard Entertainment®, a division of Vivendi Universal Games, announced today plans for Warcraft® III: The Frozen Throne(TM), the expansion set to the fastest selling PC game ever*, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos(TM). Since the game's release in July 2002, Warcraft III has now surpassed 2 million units sold worldwide. *
there most likely are cameras in the changing rooms where you shop. they get to see you in your natural glory. granted you keep your underwear on, but look again at the picture. it just looks like the broad is wearing spandex. no nipples, no hair, strong color tint. this is much less intrusive that what we already accept.
if the airports were officially privately held - we wouldn't be having this discussion.
but since there's a bizarre local government / major airline collusion occurring in the airline industry - we have this dilemma.
as with the changing room cameras in stores - you can simply opt out of this scrutiny. don't shop there. similarly - you have the option not to fly, or to fly out of a smaller airport that can't afford such expensive screening devices and subjects you to a pat-down and a wanding. Flight is a privilege in our country not a right.
in my opinion - we've been putting up with this level of invasion of our privacy for much smaller problems. i dont see how a blue-tinted hairless, low resolution, ken-doll-style reproduction of your image is worth getting all bent out of shape over.
yeah, it's a shame that the world has come to this, but until they can find a way to project our skeletal images onto a walk-by screen (ala Total Recall) without cooking us in short order with the current technology, i'm prepared to deal with the interim solution.
they said 'digital' copies. which means no brain. they imply (reviewer may be wrong) that there is no physical augmentation.
and i think you'd be hard pressed to produce a body without at least a brainstem.
if they just put the monitor in a curtained-off booth, that'd be enough privacy for me. hell, i have less privacy when i try on pants at the store. like i care if they can see my junk.
they have the authority to strip search you on nothing more than a hunch - so how different is this really?
i do remember reading an article talking about this some time back and they were thinking of using a computer generated genderless wireframe and then transfer any hits from the backscatter onto that image, instead of showing the viewer the actual person in the scanner.
and just how is it that humanity can justify growing a human body and then essentially reformatting it for use by the rich - but doesn't want to touch the subject of copying?
jeebus - we can't even use waste from abortions to try to cure nerve damage here in america, yet in the future we can grow entire humans and then destroy their sentience and/or soul?
real technology has shown us that a clone is not the original, nor is it a soulless, mindless husk - but an equally viable and unique individual.
this book makes the machines in the matrix look humane. at least they let the grown human live out a life in their pod.
the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
the famous line that could only be spoken by someone who lived in a world where he didn't have to fear the government tracking his every move and action through every consumer product with an RFID tag - silently amassing data about his most secret incestual bestial foot fetish to be used at a later date in a mcCarthy-ist purge of incestual bestial foot fetishists.
of course roosevelt was the walrus. i could be the walrus, and i'd still have to be afraid of an incestual bestial foot fetishist purge.
customer service is always the best when you're a customer dealing with a small business. it's probably why you guys have a fanatic following.
while i applaud your product and services, i just never really got into your game. maybe it was because back in the day i had a slower computer and dialup - and the loot-frenzy and crowding was mindboggling.
but, i'm looking at that site thinking i just might drop in and see how things are now, under the sole management of the people who loved making/running the game. $11/mo to find out how far you guys have come is certainly more reasonable than $50 + $15/mo to find out how far Sony hasn't.
UO is the game i remember the most fondly.
early UO that is. i left fairly early still - but beta was beautiful (outside of the towns, which were a CF). the resource system, the player economy, the monster ecology - great stuff.
then they ripped out the resource system because they didn't count on people hoarding raw material. and then they ripped out the ecology because it meant orcs and bandits would fight, and thats less monsters for the powercrowd.
and the thing that makes me most interested in giving this game a shot (when the player vehicles come out) is that in the negative reviews of SWG, you could replace 'SWG' with 'UO' and it sounds just like the UO beta boards.
i can't fight forever
i dont want to have to go back to town
i have too many choices with my character and me and my powerbuddies all chose the same narrow jack-of-all-trades skill progression
there aren't any 'spawns' in the eq sense. i have to wander.
i dont get loot from non-sentient creatures, just resources.
playermade stuff is better than what i get off sandpeople.
granted there are legitimate gripes in this game (combat does sound like it needs work, and the no player vehicles is bound to make things too boring) but overall... it sounds like the big sandbox that i prefer my games to be.
not 'kill blue foozle x10, level, kill green foozle x20, level, kill orange foozle x40, etc' ad nauseum.
the box costs $50 with one free month simply because that is what the paying customer is apparently ok with.
the monthly flat fees started at $10/mo in UO and have gone up as the customer still doesn't seem fazed. (many Meridian59 players, paying by the hour, were racking up $30/mo with regularity : don't be surprised when EQ2 is ~$16/mo at it's cheapest).
theoretically the monthly fee is to cover the costs of running the game - but with a well publicized profit margin of ~40% on EQ subscriptions (or $5 per month per addict), one realizes that the true purpose of the monthly fee is to make the kinds of money that publishers are after with these types of games. I doubt that SWG is so clear cut as Sony makes the box and LucasArts runs the servers. As I understand it, GMS and customer service are still employed by SOE, and it would be moronic of lucasarts (shrewd businesspeople if nothing else) to try to run their own servers and ignore SOEs infrastructure and experienced teams.
Besides, as time goes on, the costs of servers, bandwidth, the backup media, tech support, and the software needed to run these server farms goes down. As time goes on, the ongoing costs -drop- (i'd like to see the cost difference between that first server farm for UO and their most recent farms in Asia).
The only publisher that seems to come close to 'getting' massmogs and truly -deserve- that monthly fee, is Microsoft with Asheron's Call 1. new content, new features, monthly events - all included in the subscription price.
However, they also seemed to have seen what the customer expects and demands, and have such have fallen back on a shoddier experience with AC2, and a lack of the same quality in ongoing experience. (customers aren't penalizing these companies for bad launches, products, and experiences enough yet, apparently)
if only a company would fix the overall cost of playing (both in time and money) they could hit that casual niche and make a game worth playing.
how to release a massmog that underpromised, overdelivered and was reasonably stable at launch.
I mean, cmon. -microsoft- of all game developers has done it right -twice- now with the Asheron's Call series, and hitherto unknown Mythic Entertainment pulled it off with Dark Age of Camelot.
in my unprofessional opinion - this game is not going to strike a fire in the casual gamer market like they hope. any casual gamer will immediately be turned off by having their wookie bounty hunter continually chased all over tatooine by some fscking crab smaller than his head. the casual gamer doesn't want to spend 100 hours getting to the point where he can hunt banthas or dewbacks or sandpeople. they want to do fun stuff now.
not to mention travel. everything was laid out assuming you'd be able to get your own speeder bike or landspeeder, or bum a ride from someone. but now player-vehicles are out until god-knows-when, and the result is that the town to town running makes EQ's seem reasonable.
if star wars was an action game like planetside, that could maybe catch on - if only sony wasn't pricing it out of the realm of reasonability. $12/mo for a FPS?
SWG looks like a market dissappointment in the same vein as Sims Online.
java is a solid technical option that's being managed into the ground by Sun, much like the rest of its other assets.
java is absolutely fantastic for a good number of applications. however, its number 1 design goal was write once, run anywhere. and that doesn't happen.
maybe 'betamax' was going a bit far - i perhaps should have compared it to laserdisc. still superior in a niche, and loved by the hard core, but not a solution for the mass market - for distributing to a disparate client base.
interestingly enough, it has been surmised that laserdiscs failure was due in large part to Sony's tight control over what content they would allow on their media. so perhaps it really is the better analogy to good technology managed into the ground.
didn't the mindshare concept die with the dot com'ies?
... weren't these things that marketroids just sold us when we had money and no idea where to put it, and so those best at marketing directed us to nice approachable terms that reflected the 'newness' of the market, and inevitably led back to lining their pockets with our money?
... marketing. rather like shamans of old, creating the boogeyman so they can be the savior.
i mean, counting eyeballs, mindshare
'mom' failing to find a way to write a document seems to me to be a failure of the program-centric interface - rather than something 'task-centric'.
why didn't they just have a 'compose' button or something on the interface?
eg compose->[email | IM | local document | code]
eg browse->[my documents | internet | network]
and then launch an app accordingly. WHAM! mindshare problem solved.
'mom' didn't even immediately assume there was a 'start' button if you notice. which should tell you that she doesn't immediately assume that's how desktops should work. she wanted/needed to write a document, and when she discovered lindows 'L' was apparently set up to mimic the windows 'start' she -then- figured that Office must have been there somewhere. because it was trying to be just like her trusty old windows box.
don't fall into the 'mindshare' trap. windows is most vulnerable -because- it takes experience and training to know how to use it and predict how new apps/features should behave.
mindshare indicates the problem is insurmountable marketing challenges (education and exposure)- and if you'll notice, the only solution to the 'mindshare' is
java was created to be a write once, run anywhere solution. because of corporate politics and competition, it just doesn't pull it off.
depending on your install base, it can sometimes get by, but more often than not, platform specific code, design, and testing is required - and that puts the kabosh on the development gains.
and that's even ignoring the cost of supporting the various platforms VMs and the VM distribution problem on windows machines of late.
(sun won its suit against microsoft that it was unfairly squeezing out the java vm - then promptly sued microsoft for posting the microsoft jvm on windowsupdate.com because the license from sun didn't explicitly allow that. they won the suit and for some time windows users just couldn't get their hands on a vm. and if that doesn't decimate any gains from using java, i don't know what does)
nice idea, solid effort on the technological end -but it's going the way of betamax and solaris.
brick moves to BRAC ?
bic moves to BAC ?
wic moves to wiggity wiggity WAC ?
or something...