They're there. People do see it, that's why there's been the constant stream of complaints that you've seen for the past couple of years from people who tried Vista but "hated it."
Well-behaved software, once installed, doesn't fuck with anything outside of your user directory or a few common areas of the system. This is true of any system that has user accounts. (Note, that not all programs are well-behaved, and not all systems have sensible security to enforce this good behavior.)
UAC will scream at you if a program, run as a user, tries to write to c:\Program Files\*. A lot of old Windows software expected to be able to do just that: It'd write its.ini file in its program directory (for instance), and use that to keep track of settings.
But it's bad behavior. That's a system directory, not to be fucked with. So UAC, again, prompts for permission before continuing with this bad behavior, even though it's necessary for the program to work.
That UAC has never, ever annoyed you is an indication that you're a shill, or that you simply run only well-behaved software.
I suspect the latter, though, so that's why I take the time to explain why people are annoyed: Lots of very useful programs shit files all over the hard drive, because until Vista, it was implicit that they were running as Administrator and could do whatever they wanted without further prompting. That's all changed, now, and the rules are enforced (or at least prompted for). Programs are changing as well to be more compliant with these sensible rules.
I, for one, have been frustrated by UAC. But I recognize what it is, what it does, and that asking me for permission for a poorly-behaved program to behave in an uneducated fashion is a Really Important Thing even for a clued user, so I leave it on. It saved my ass once, and that's worth all the annoyances in the world.
Yeah. Pro stuff (from Nuetrik or Switchcraft or Rean or whoever) is nickel plated, almost as a rule. But then, it's not typically installed and then left in place: Even at a church or a school, the mixer is going to be reconfigured from time to time. Microphones are always being unplugged and plugged back in. A touring company shuffles cables all the time. So does a studio (except at the back of an installed, hardwired console, but then that's the one place where one occasionally sees gold connectors cropping back up in even a pro environment).
What you say is at least somewhat true: I've had gold platings flake off, which would be a real problem if it happened bridge a circuit inside of some important gear during a performance. I also had a set of cheapish gold-plated cables that corroded themselves silly (but just one set, one time). On the other hand, I've also had nickel flakes come off of Switchcraft 1/4" plugs a couple of times . . .
But I believe this regular connecting and abuse may have something more to do with it than whatever horrible process it is by which they manage to get gold to stick to brass or steel or whatever: Nickle does oxidize, slowly, but it's a hard enough material that the contamination gets removed off from all of the activity. Gold doesn't oxidize, but it's so soft that it gets contaminated with all the activity (stage dirt getting ground into it, etc). And, it eventually just gets worn completely off on the contact points from the combination of use and the crud, leaving whatever metal beneath it bare (which is probably nowhere near as gold or nickle as an exposed contact surface).
And, again, nickel is hard. It doesn't get all messed up being covered in abrasive mud, drug across a nasty stage, and then callously thrown into a box full of more stage crud night, after night. I'd say that nickel probably ends up being prettier than gold after a few years of abuse.
And it might be part psychological: It's always been that way, so it always will be. All of the pre-fab gold plated 1/4" and XLR cables that are cheaply available are readily identifiable as being shit for pro use, having skinny conductors, little shielding, and lousy jacket material, none of which is desirable in that setting. Noone wants that: it only takes one show-stopping experience with a new thing for a pro to never, ever try whatever it was again. Fool me once, etc. There are, however, a lot of places to get decent 1/4" and XLR cables with nickel plated connectors for not very much money.
It's all theory, at least on my part: I'm not a metallurgist, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I'm just a practical wire snob with some gigs and studio time under my belt as an engineer, who has a nice stereo.
And re: 12 guage solid speaker wire. For long runs between the living room receiver and the back patio, it doesn't get any cheaper or more available than 12/2 or 12/4 Romex. It's in a lot more common use than you think, particularly with long runs, and if one is having an electrician pre-wire a house for sound, they've already got lots of it on-hand.:)
I like CDs. I like the tactile nature of them. I like putting them into the machine, pressing play, and queuing a track. I like the clear, simple and informative digital display on the front. I like the liner notes that are in my hand by default while this is going on. I like that my big-ass TV isn't expected to be switched on and blinding me during all of this.
It has nothing to do with sound quality (which, if the CD is working perfectly, will obviously be identical to a proper rip played on a PC, given the same playback chain and DAC).
My love for CDs is irrational, but at least it's quantifiable.:)
I don't want to recable my system every 10 years because I used nickel-plated connectors that are trying to become one with the earth. Some of my wires are buried in places that I just don't ever want to get into again. So, I'd rather have connectors which have inoxidable contact surfaces, thanks.
And I've had cheap cables just plain fail, in normal use. The connectors have fallen apart, they've mated intermittently with other things, the center conductor breaks, and so on. The cables I build myself simply haven't failed. I've had some of them for almost 20 years.
Canare GS-6 has IIRC an 18AWG stranded center conductor, and a copper braid+conductive plastic shield, and it's my first choice. It's neither hideously expensive, nor grotesquely cheap. It's very easy to prep and solder to, and is a joy to work with. In use, it's very flexible and does not retain its shape, allowing it to be easily and neatly routed, and then rerouted over and over again without getting all kinked up. And it's strong enough to pull through conduit.
I don't (and most folks don't either, no matter what they "hear") have any runs long enough for capacitance to be an issue on line-level cabling. To me, they all sound pretty much the same, unless the cable is broken (ie, failed) in some fashion. (And, of course, series impedance is so not at all an issue with line-level consumer electronics. Nor is characteristic impedance, at these frequencies over short runs.)
I just have a preference for things that last. I buy a thing because I need the thing, and given a reasonable choice, I don't want to ever have to repair or replace that thing. So, I buy good (durable, easy) wire, and good (durable, solid center pin, gold plated) connectors. Just as I also buy well-constructed footwear, and inspect the welds on equipment before I buy it and note all of the things which are unsound in some way. And when something breaks anyway, and I have the means to repair it, I redesign that portion of it so that it can never fail in the same way again. I figure if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
That said, I don't care how clean they are. They're wires. By the time I've buried them invisibly enough that the wife is satisfied, nobody will ever see them anyway.
I'm talking 386SX class hardware, here. Sure, I overclocked it from 33 to 40MHz, but it was still just a 386SX. With no memory cache. And no FPU. And a 16-bit bus. And 2 megabytes of RAM. (And a bunky DMA controller, but povray never seemed to care much about that.)
It was years after that before I got to bask in the glory of a Pentium-class machine.
(Why did you reply to me, anyway? It's just an anecdote. And like most other anecdotes that come from someone else's personal experience: No matter what you say, I'll still be right.)
For instance: In what ways does the color of the paint influence the design of the wheels? Oh, right: It doesn't. How about the interior? Right, sure. A wing? Woo. A trim package? Oh, my. The wheels are still the same.
It's not a pizza. It's a car.
There's just not that many variations on a vehicle which have any impact on more than a couple of parts. But, if you think that it is unachievable to prerender these, please go look at Scion's current website, build a car, and write back. (Note: I haven't been there in years, myself, but I'm confident enough in my theory that I'm willing to let you to prove yourself wrong.)
I, myself, want to be wrong -- I just don't feel that I am.
This is probably so late you'll never see it, but I understand what you're saying.
However, back in the day, my ISP had a SunOS box that ran the world. There was no shell access, but they didn't shadow passwords, and username-authenticated FTP could access the whole directory tree. A little "get/etc/passwd" later, and a run of crack for just a few seconds, and I had all manner of stuff.
The statute of limitations is long past on that. But the point remains: Bad security is everywhere. Don't assume that the host has your back.
Summit, in TFA, goes on at different points about a car application -- ie, a system that one might use to preview and/or order new cars. Pick your wheels, your paint, your trim, your seats, and get a few views of the thing in short order*.
All I can think is that if it were really so important for Ford to give you a raytraced view of the car you're ordering, that the options are so limited that all of them could easily be pre-rendered and send all together. How big are a few dozen JPEGs, anyway?
Even if a few dozen JPEGs isn't enough: Don't we do this already with car manufacturer websites, using little more than bog-standard HTML and a whole bunch of prerendered images? In what way would having this stuff be rendered in real-time be any more advantageous than doing it in advance?
Do we really need some manner of fancy client-server process, with some badass cloud architecture behind it, when at the end of the day, we're only going to be shown artificat-filled progressive-JPEG still frames with a finite number of possibilities?
Everyone, please, go look at the demo video. Neat stuff, I guess, but it's boring. Office with blinds open; same office, blinds partly open. Then, closed. Office at night. Different angle. Woo. It's simple math to figure out how many options there are, and it's just as simple to see that it's easier, cheaper, and better to just go ahead and render ALL of them in advance and be done with it and just serve out static images from then on out.
If I'm really missing the point here (and I hope I am), would someone please enlighten me as to how this might actually, you know, solve a problem?
*: Just like a lot of auto manufacturer's websites already do TODAY, using only HTML, static images, and a sprinkling of javascript or (less often) flash.
I used to do some raytracing stuff with POV under MS-DOS back in the day, on hardware far slower than the 6-year-old Palm Zire that I recently retired. Nowadays, the iPhone/droid/whatever is way faster.
Was it slow? Of course. But it was nowhere near "months." Long hours, or days -- yes. Not months. Nowhere near. Especially if I were targeting something the size of a modern mobile screen, instead of the fairly high-resolution stuff I was interested in back then.
[I already moderated this article, and posting will undo all of that. Oh, well -- that's the bane of the lack of the -1, Disagree moderation . ..]
I just noticed that someone finally got a version accepted at Apple's App Store, and is hawking it for $0.99. I bought it, but haven't had time to see if it's worth a fuck.
(I'd suggest GNU Keyring on a PalmOS device, but that's just so 20th century. Nevermind the fact that it works great, and old Palm Pilots and Handspring devices are a dime a dozen in excellent condition. And that they simply take AAA batteries, which last for more than a month, instead of the daily recharge cycle of so many things these days. No, nevermind that. It's from the wrong century.)
Now I have an oh-so-sort dictionary (only 160 entries!) to feed to my favorite password-cracking program. The odds of my success just went from potentially being neigh-impossible to almost-certain.
Taking pictures of books, automatically OCR'ing them, while being portable, fairly quick, and having enough space to actually hold a useful volume of works: If you can't see the copyright issue here, then I guess you'll have to wait until some previously-non-digital printed works show up on TPB courtesy of this device for the sheer obviousness of it to shine through.
I, for one, am all for it. But, then, I'm not the copyright Nazi I was referring to.
Big Italian family. His younger kids, he's always disappearing to go to some game/practice/performance of theirs. His older kids, he helps them learn how to handle their own businesses. He's also always got all the time in the world for his employees, and always gets done what he says he will when someone asks him for something. He's not even afraid to get his hands dirty: If everyone's busy or out, and the toilet needs cleaning, he does it himself.
It is frankly amazing what he can accomplish, being just one man. I don't know that many people could pull it off so well.
But it's not all ponies-and-rainbows. He's a shrewd bastard when it comes to business, and he'd be the first to say so.
Just modulate the beam: Turn it off, and back on at a known, sane interval.
When the interval varies (due to doppler shift), measure the difference in frequency.
Done.
No DC-to-daylight processing of gee-whiz THz signals required. The the carrier frequency (the frequency of the laser beam, in this case) is not important for this to work, as long as you can reliably detect its modulation. Many of these parts must already be in use in existing LIDAR systems, so that the machine can discriminate between its own little point of light and all the background noise around it (daylight).
It's all pretty simple, old-hat tech. Plain old regular amplitude modulation, as described above, would be fine, but there's a lot of other methods which might work just as well.
I work for someone who is wealthy enough to just plain stop, right now, and live happily ever after. He easily works 60 hours a week at the office, and probably more if he takes anything home with him. We've talked about the quandary you just presented.
His answer as to why he continues to build and expand: "Because I really enjoy it." And I don't think there's much more to be said about it, except that some folks like playing football, or billiards. Some folks paint pictures for fun. And some folks build empires. It's like playing Risk, but with real assets.
Slashdot Mirror
They're there. People do see it, that's why there's been the constant stream of complaints that you've seen for the past couple of years from people who tried Vista but "hated it."
Well-behaved software, once installed, doesn't fuck with anything outside of your user directory or a few common areas of the system. This is true of any system that has user accounts. (Note, that not all programs are well-behaved, and not all systems have sensible security to enforce this good behavior.)
UAC will scream at you if a program, run as a user, tries to write to c:\Program Files\*. A lot of old Windows software expected to be able to do just that: It'd write its .ini file in its program directory (for instance), and use that to keep track of settings.
But it's bad behavior. That's a system directory, not to be fucked with. So UAC, again, prompts for permission before continuing with this bad behavior, even though it's necessary for the program to work.
That UAC has never, ever annoyed you is an indication that you're a shill, or that you simply run only well-behaved software.
I suspect the latter, though, so that's why I take the time to explain why people are annoyed: Lots of very useful programs shit files all over the hard drive, because until Vista, it was implicit that they were running as Administrator and could do whatever they wanted without further prompting. That's all changed, now, and the rules are enforced (or at least prompted for). Programs are changing as well to be more compliant with these sensible rules.
I, for one, have been frustrated by UAC. But I recognize what it is, what it does, and that asking me for permission for a poorly-behaved program to behave in an uneducated fashion is a Really Important Thing even for a clued user, so I leave it on. It saved my ass once, and that's worth all the annoyances in the world.
Yeah. Pro stuff (from Nuetrik or Switchcraft or Rean or whoever) is nickel plated, almost as a rule. But then, it's not typically installed and then left in place: Even at a church or a school, the mixer is going to be reconfigured from time to time. Microphones are always being unplugged and plugged back in. A touring company shuffles cables all the time. So does a studio (except at the back of an installed, hardwired console, but then that's the one place where one occasionally sees gold connectors cropping back up in even a pro environment).
What you say is at least somewhat true: I've had gold platings flake off, which would be a real problem if it happened bridge a circuit inside of some important gear during a performance. I also had a set of cheapish gold-plated cables that corroded themselves silly (but just one set, one time). On the other hand, I've also had nickel flakes come off of Switchcraft 1/4" plugs a couple of times . . .
But I believe this regular connecting and abuse may have something more to do with it than whatever horrible process it is by which they manage to get gold to stick to brass or steel or whatever: Nickle does oxidize, slowly, but it's a hard enough material that the contamination gets removed off from all of the activity. Gold doesn't oxidize, but it's so soft that it gets contaminated with all the activity (stage dirt getting ground into it, etc). And, it eventually just gets worn completely off on the contact points from the combination of use and the crud, leaving whatever metal beneath it bare (which is probably nowhere near as gold or nickle as an exposed contact surface).
And, again, nickel is hard. It doesn't get all messed up being covered in abrasive mud, drug across a nasty stage, and then callously thrown into a box full of more stage crud night, after night. I'd say that nickel probably ends up being prettier than gold after a few years of abuse.
And it might be part psychological: It's always been that way, so it always will be. All of the pre-fab gold plated 1/4" and XLR cables that are cheaply available are readily identifiable as being shit for pro use, having skinny conductors, little shielding, and lousy jacket material, none of which is desirable in that setting. Noone wants that: it only takes one show-stopping experience with a new thing for a pro to never, ever try whatever it was again. Fool me once, etc. There are, however, a lot of places to get decent 1/4" and XLR cables with nickel plated connectors for not very much money.
It's all theory, at least on my part: I'm not a metallurgist, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I'm just a practical wire snob with some gigs and studio time under my belt as an engineer, who has a nice stereo.
And re: 12 guage solid speaker wire. For long runs between the living room receiver and the back patio, it doesn't get any cheaper or more available than 12/2 or 12/4 Romex. It's in a lot more common use than you think, particularly with long runs, and if one is having an electrician pre-wire a house for sound, they've already got lots of it on-hand. :)
It depends.
I like CDs. I like the tactile nature of them. I like putting them into the machine, pressing play, and queuing a track. I like the clear, simple and informative digital display on the front. I like the liner notes that are in my hand by default while this is going on. I like that my big-ass TV isn't expected to be switched on and blinding me during all of this.
It has nothing to do with sound quality (which, if the CD is working perfectly, will obviously be identical to a proper rip played on a PC, given the same playback chain and DAC).
My love for CDs is irrational, but at least it's quantifiable. :)
I don't want to recable my system every 10 years because I used nickel-plated connectors that are trying to become one with the earth. Some of my wires are buried in places that I just don't ever want to get into again. So, I'd rather have connectors which have inoxidable contact surfaces, thanks.
And I've had cheap cables just plain fail, in normal use. The connectors have fallen apart, they've mated intermittently with other things, the center conductor breaks, and so on. The cables I build myself simply haven't failed. I've had some of them for almost 20 years.
Canare GS-6 has IIRC an 18AWG stranded center conductor, and a copper braid+conductive plastic shield, and it's my first choice. It's neither hideously expensive, nor grotesquely cheap. It's very easy to prep and solder to, and is a joy to work with. In use, it's very flexible and does not retain its shape, allowing it to be easily and neatly routed, and then rerouted over and over again without getting all kinked up. And it's strong enough to pull through conduit.
I don't (and most folks don't either, no matter what they "hear") have any runs long enough for capacitance to be an issue on line-level cabling. To me, they all sound pretty much the same, unless the cable is broken (ie, failed) in some fashion. (And, of course, series impedance is so not at all an issue with line-level consumer electronics. Nor is characteristic impedance, at these frequencies over short runs.)
I just have a preference for things that last. I buy a thing because I need the thing, and given a reasonable choice, I don't want to ever have to repair or replace that thing. So, I buy good (durable, easy) wire, and good (durable, solid center pin, gold plated) connectors. Just as I also buy well-constructed footwear, and inspect the welds on equipment before I buy it and note all of the things which are unsound in some way. And when something breaks anyway, and I have the means to repair it, I redesign that portion of it so that it can never fail in the same way again. I figure if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
That said, I don't care how clean they are. They're wires. By the time I've buried them invisibly enough that the wife is satisfied, nobody will ever see them anyway.
I'm unmodding by posting this, but:
Synestesia is real, and is a phenomenon that can include both hearing colors and seeing sound.
No.
I'm talking 386SX class hardware, here. Sure, I overclocked it from 33 to 40MHz, but it was still just a 386SX. With no memory cache. And no FPU. And a 16-bit bus. And 2 megabytes of RAM. (And a bunky DMA controller, but povray never seemed to care much about that.)
It was years after that before I got to bask in the glory of a Pentium-class machine.
(Why did you reply to me, anyway? It's just an anecdote. And like most other anecdotes that come from someone else's personal experience: No matter what you say, I'll still be right.)
Um.
The wheels don't reflect the paint directly. And cars, as a rule, are displayed on a neutral background.
Next?
It's not strictly binary.
For instance: In what ways does the color of the paint influence the design of the wheels? Oh, right: It doesn't. How about the interior? Right, sure. A wing? Woo. A trim package? Oh, my. The wheels are still the same.
It's not a pizza. It's a car.
There's just not that many variations on a vehicle which have any impact on more than a couple of parts. But, if you think that it is unachievable to prerender these, please go look at Scion's current website, build a car, and write back. (Note: I haven't been there in years, myself, but I'm confident enough in my theory that I'm willing to let you to prove yourself wrong.)
I, myself, want to be wrong -- I just don't feel that I am.
This is probably so late you'll never see it, but I understand what you're saying.
However, back in the day, my ISP had a SunOS box that ran the world. There was no shell access, but they didn't shadow passwords, and username-authenticated FTP could access the whole directory tree. A little "get /etc/passwd" later, and a run of crack for just a few seconds, and I had all manner of stuff.
The statute of limitations is long past on that. But the point remains: Bad security is everywhere. Don't assume that the host has your back.
Summit, in TFA, goes on at different points about a car application -- ie, a system that one might use to preview and/or order new cars. Pick your wheels, your paint, your trim, your seats, and get a few views of the thing in short order*.
All I can think is that if it were really so important for Ford to give you a raytraced view of the car you're ordering, that the options are so limited that all of them could easily be pre-rendered and send all together. How big are a few dozen JPEGs, anyway?
Even if a few dozen JPEGs isn't enough: Don't we do this already with car manufacturer websites, using little more than bog-standard HTML and a whole bunch of prerendered images? In what way would having this stuff be rendered in real-time be any more advantageous than doing it in advance?
Do we really need some manner of fancy client-server process, with some badass cloud architecture behind it, when at the end of the day, we're only going to be shown artificat-filled progressive-JPEG still frames with a finite number of possibilities?
Everyone, please, go look at the demo video. Neat stuff, I guess, but it's boring. Office with blinds open; same office, blinds partly open. Then, closed. Office at night. Different angle. Woo. It's simple math to figure out how many options there are, and it's just as simple to see that it's easier, cheaper, and better to just go ahead and render ALL of them in advance and be done with it and just serve out static images from then on out.
If I'm really missing the point here (and I hope I am), would someone please enlighten me as to how this might actually, you know, solve a problem?
*: Just like a lot of auto manufacturer's websites already do TODAY, using only HTML, static images, and a sprinkling of javascript or (less often) flash.
Whatever.
I used to do some raytracing stuff with POV under MS-DOS back in the day, on hardware far slower than the 6-year-old Palm Zire that I recently retired. Nowadays, the iPhone/droid/whatever is way faster.
Was it slow? Of course. But it was nowhere near "months." Long hours, or days -- yes. Not months. Nowhere near. Especially if I were targeting something the size of a modern mobile screen, instead of the fairly high-resolution stuff I was interested in back then.
[I already moderated this article, and posting will undo all of that. Oh, well -- that's the bane of the lack of the -1, Disagree moderation . . .]
Yes. Yes, it is.
Go read up on it some more and you'll understand that your attempt at contradiction is fallacious.
Hey, you know.
I need a good way to store passwords. And I need it to be available to me wherever I am.
Such needs come with tradeoffs.
If beer is food, and needs to be regulated as such, then it should be tax-exempt like other food items.
I still use the classic, non-AJAX comment viewer. Works just like it used to, and is very infrequent in its annoyances while moderating.
Ballot box, soap box, ammo box.
Use the first two of these to help influence elections. (And, FYI, Slashdot doesn't count for a soapbox - you'd just be preaching to the choir.)
You mean like Keepass?
I just noticed that someone finally got a version accepted at Apple's App Store, and is hawking it for $0.99. I bought it, but haven't had time to see if it's worth a fuck.
(I'd suggest GNU Keyring on a PalmOS device, but that's just so 20th century. Nevermind the fact that it works great, and old Palm Pilots and Handspring devices are a dime a dozen in excellent condition. And that they simply take AAA batteries, which last for more than a month, instead of the daily recharge cycle of so many things these days. No, nevermind that. It's from the wrong century.)
Congrats, and thanks.
Now I have an oh-so-sort dictionary (only 160 entries!) to feed to my favorite password-cracking program. The odds of my success just went from potentially being neigh-impossible to almost-certain.
Taking pictures of books, automatically OCR'ing them, while being portable, fairly quick, and having enough space to actually hold a useful volume of works: If you can't see the copyright issue here, then I guess you'll have to wait until some previously-non-digital printed works show up on TPB courtesy of this device for the sheer obviousness of it to shine through.
I, for one, am all for it. But, then, I'm not the copyright Nazi I was referring to.
Big Italian family. His younger kids, he's always disappearing to go to some game/practice/performance of theirs. His older kids, he helps them learn how to handle their own businesses. He's also always got all the time in the world for his employees, and always gets done what he says he will when someone asks him for something. He's not even afraid to get his hands dirty: If everyone's busy or out, and the toilet needs cleaning, he does it himself.
It is frankly amazing what he can accomplish, being just one man. I don't know that many people could pull it off so well.
But it's not all ponies-and-rainbows. He's a shrewd bastard when it comes to business, and he'd be the first to say so.
It all depends on what side you're on.
He didn't become wealthy by being nice to everyone, that's for sure. But he's good to his family, and is easily the best boss I've ever had.
Just modulate the beam: Turn it off, and back on at a known, sane interval.
When the interval varies (due to doppler shift), measure the difference in frequency.
Done.
No DC-to-daylight processing of gee-whiz THz signals required. The the carrier frequency (the frequency of the laser beam, in this case) is not important for this to work, as long as you can reliably detect its modulation. Many of these parts must already be in use in existing LIDAR systems, so that the machine can discriminate between its own little point of light and all the background noise around it (daylight).
It's all pretty simple, old-hat tech. Plain old regular amplitude modulation, as described above, would be fine, but there's a lot of other methods which might work just as well.
Now we have yet another device waiting to be demonized by the copyright nazis.
I work for someone who is wealthy enough to just plain stop, right now, and live happily ever after. He easily works 60 hours a week at the office, and probably more if he takes anything home with him. We've talked about the quandary you just presented.
His answer as to why he continues to build and expand: "Because I really enjoy it." And I don't think there's much more to be said about it, except that some folks like playing football, or billiards. Some folks paint pictures for fun. And some folks build empires. It's like playing Risk, but with real assets.
And exactly how does HTML5 fixes the funky network issues that cause the problems you complain about?