Semantic attacks, and all their ilk, have only one general purpose: to mislead. However, one can be misled ONTO the correct path as well as OFF of it.
Case in point:
Warning: Cruel but syrupy anecdote begins here. This really happened many, many years ago at an outdoor event. Someone got a little overenthusiastic and fell out of a tree. He skinned his shoulder and wasn't sitting still for treatment from a woman with a first aid kit. He kept going on and on about how 'tincture of merthiolate' hurts and he doesn't want any.
I was nearby and reassured him, "Would you relax? Solution of merthiolate doesn't hurt a bit. You barely even feel it going on."
He listened, and settled down, and let her apply what she had in the bottle. And naturally, he yelped and flinched.
See, what I told him was true -- solution of merthiolate really doesn't sting any. It was, however, completely irrelevant.
He looked up at me and said, "I thought you said it wouldn't hurt!"
I told him, "Solution of merthiolate doesn'thurt. But this is tincture of merthiolate! It stings like the dickens! But if I told you that, you wouldn't've sat through it, would you?"
(Okay, show's over folks.)
I could go on about how people need to check sources, and how information is only as trustworthy as the people who post it, but that should be obvious. Anyone with practice in critical thinking should know to question sources and relevance of statements someone is trying to feed them.
But as long as people ARE going to be gullible, you might as well at least try to shepherd them in the right direction once in a while. They still won't thank you, but at least they'll be better off than they would have been had they listened to only one lie...
APPL has a long and dubious history both in the stock market and commercial press. You think everyone loves a success story? Look back over the years at every piece of doom-and-gloom that has been published about Apple. Analysts just eat that up! Nothing pulls 'em in like the rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Amazingly, nobody gives Compaq a second look.
I'll agree that the article does some unnecessary capering and twirling at the feet of OS X.
Steven Johnson is essentially drooling over eye candy. He mentions the guts a few times, but otherwise he reviews the UI in such excruciating detail that he might as well be critiquing the curtains hanging on the window near his desk.
His attitude in the article seems to be, "If it looks nifty, it must be good." And for this attitude, the link gets posted here.
However, the attitude of most/.ers seems to be, "If it's Apple, it must be bad." And for THIS attitude, posters get moderated up.
Wake up and smell that gunk in your keyboards, people! What he's talking about is the front-end of the operating system! It does none of the work of the actual operating system, it just provides you with a way to communicate with it. And under OS X, it's not even the only way to do so.
All the OS's UI is supposed to do is give you access to those things you need to adjust, hide those things you don't need to know about, and let you know in a timely fashion what's going on. Even with argument on philosophical points (what things in the environment should and shouldn't be tweaked, how buttons and icons should react when rolled over, etc.), that's what it tries to do. If you don't like it, there are tools available -- change it!
As for the core, remember, it's running that BSD-compatible Mach kernel. Given all the complaints of Mac OSses is fawning new-age drek?
(You don't suppose just seeing the word 'APPLE' in the briefing has anything to do with it?)
But anyway, getting back to the task at hand...
Cultural revolution? Not immediately, anyway. Hobbyists who aren't predisposed against it enough not to try it may be amused by it, but those people working on computers in offices daily won't be fazed; they'll just keep working on whatever they're handed. Those people whose systems this changes will notice that the horse has a new face, but all that matters is what goes on under the hood. (And that won't be many since most of them are running some flavor of Windows anyway.)
Some people will look at this, be utterly tickled by its artistry, and copy elements of the design on top of whatever front end they'll be using. (Apple will sue them if they get too close,/. will ridicule them again, etc.) UIs will get fancier for a while until someone gets the idea to strip off all the eye-candy and create something totally utilitarian as a fashion statement.
The UI is the fashion through which the function of the guts underneath is filtered. It serves an important role in that context, but it is still fashion, and comes and goes at whim.
Microsoft meddling in the affairs of one of its vassal companies? This came as no surprise to me either.
But I bet it came as a surprise to Bungie, judging by their letter to their fans. To quote:
What drove us then drives us now: to make the games we want to make, on our own terms, and in our own way.
Holding true to this vision allowed us to create the Marathon and Myth series, and has now led us to Redmond to work closely with the Xbox development team.
Here's how I figure the deal went down:
1. Bungie develops game for several platforms and makes a name for themselves. (I think the history here speaks for itself.)
2. Bungie would like to develop for the Xbox as well, and tries to get the SDKs for it. (It fits their pattern; if they have the patience to develop for Mac, PC, AND PS2, why not a fourth one?)
3. Microsoft offers to not just send over SDKs, but buy out Bungie. Part of this was probably the assurance that Bungie staff would have an opportunity to influence the design of the Xbox. (Bungie's Acquisition FAQ bears this out -- see "Why is this happening")
4. Bungie sells out to Microsoft in a fit of naivete and/or stupidity. If you haven't called up that FAQ already, do so -- read the Q&As starting with "Why do you believe Microsoft will leave you alone when there are so many documented examples of Microsoft doing shady things?" and try to hold down the bile.
What it looks like to me is that Microsoft drew Bungie into its blob-like folds on the promise of listening to them and benefitting from their talent, and proceeded to ream them.
Like this laughable line:
The existing bungie.net servers will continue to exist for the indefinite future. We are bringing the current head of the bungie.net admins along to ensure that bungie.net is maintained to our standards, and he will act as a full member of an online community team to ensure that future iterations of bungie.net are designed with the players in mind.
They probably seriously believed that when they signed over their good name. Pity them. And pity the forseeable future, which ended even before the ink was dry. And as for other promises, well, another thing they said in their FAQ was:
Will Microsoft control the content or direction of Bungie games?
No. The plan is that they'll leave us more or less alone to do what we do, and trust that the results will be worth it. They will be involved on some level at every step of the process, including conceptualization, but they will not shape the development of the games or censor content. Their interactions with us will mostly be on a business level.
In the current light, make of that what you will. To me, it looked like a cloudy day way back when they signed the contract, and now it looks like it's going to hail.
1. IT'S JUST ONE STATE And not even a state known for widespread technological development. California has a strong tech industry. Seattle has Redmond. New York is developing its own 'Silicon Alley.'
What is Maryland known for? Seafood and speeding tickets!! And while Maryland has a little tech industry, it's not California, or Seattle, or New York. Or better/worse yet, the Federal Government.
This is why it's ineffectual. And probably a good thing too because...
2. IT'S THE WRONG SOLUTION FOR THE PROBLEM
Consider the role of the courts in government: the legislative branch writes the laws, the executive branch ratifies them and sets policy, and the judicial branch only interprets and enforces them where necessary (and allegedly strikes down the bad ones).
Ladies, gentlemen, and/.ers, the problem is not just in the Judiciary. Even Judge Patel admitted that the DMCA has created a monumental legal snafu. A snafu which, I should point out, began in the Legislative branch where the laws were first written.
Creating a technically knowledgeable division in the Judicial branch is like writing an improved script to interpret the output of a program written which implements outdated (and sometimes downright wrong) algorithms.
And even if this gets to the Federal level, remember that the judges are appointed by the Executive branch, with the approval of the Legislative branch. They have always had the ability to stack the Judiciary with whatever judges they want, and have done so for the past few decades.
There is a hope in here, that a sufficiently technically knowledgeable judiciary would declare more laws unconstitutional, but there is an equally compelling dread that a panel of judges sufficiently friendly to the Congress wouldn't bother. After all, the Bill of Rights is already a shadow of its former self, if not an impediment to better paid-for government and corporate rights.
Of course not everything works yet. This is still a beta release. Nothing may have changed in the GUI or general structure, but they probably tuned it up some under the hood in order to get it working better. Something about Developer Release vs. Public Beta may have something to do with that.
MacOS X Downside: It'll demand Apple hardware to run, and demand G3+ hardware at that. There's also been talk of X not working with third party CPU plug-ins. Whether it's a matter of optimizing for Apple's specific hardware, or crippling the software on other machines isn't a big deal, unless you planned to cross-compile it. (And judging by the 'first posts,' the Lintel Hegemony is still roaming in force.)
MacOS X Upsides: People complain about how hard it is to configure a Linux system. Well here it is, folks: the people who brought user interface to personal computers are slapping a pretty front end on BSD and are not only planning on *selling* it, but intend to make *money* on it.
(Also consider: a) Apple Computer is in the habit of bundling DVD-ROMs with their systems these days. b) Apple is basing MacOS X on BSD. Therefore, c) Apple will be providing BSD-DVD drivers legally to their users.)
If you want Linux and the various *nix clones to be accepted by the public as a serious force instead of the domain of cloistered geeks, you want to do something to make it visible. KDE and Gnome are okay interfaces, but they're only distributed as far as Linux is. Here's a manufacturer of hardware AND software bundling everything together -- OS, drivers, and front end -- and giving the whole thing visibility.
If you want to pooh-pooh Apple just becuase they 'suck,' then you might be doing the *nix community a disservice. Because most people, if they turn away from Apple for whatever reason, tend to think Microsoft first, not Linux.
As someone who long ago played both Scott Adams and Infocom adventures (yes I'm THAT old), there's something to be said for both reasons for puzzle-style adventure gaming dropping off.
(Note: NOT Dying, just pining for the fjords. Go to the Interactive Fiction archives and see that a great many tools have been developed for people to write their own adventure games, and many have. It's almost open-sourcey, in fact...)
By the way, who remembers the Scott Adams adventures? What a parser those things had! Could only accept one or two whole words at a time, and any sort of mistype would befuddle the poor stupid little thing.
Infocom's parser started out good and evolved over time to be phenomenal. Under Infocom's z-machine parser, I was always tempted to write an adventure in which the player would have to 'light the light light blue light' and I have faith that the parser could have handled it, damnit!
But enough of me geezing...
On the one hand, Gamespot is right that the FPS had more sparkle, more action, more color and flash. Even the original Quake, half of whose color table was shades of 'mud,' had more pop than even the fanciest *text* adventure.
Much the same way it's advertising's job to be seen, so it is with games. They need bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies to draw players from their competitors' bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies. The text adventure, never equipped to deliver that kind of flash-bang, fell by the wayside or got replaced with the graphic versions.
(And as long as I'm going to geeze, I might as well toss in that the violence isn't the problem: it's that the videogaming industry is trying to play to an audience so infovoracious, so dependent on that flash-bang, that they could be diagnosed as attention-defecit. To further back up my point, trust me on this one: I've seen preschoolers sit down at a computer and start machine-gunning the mouse on whatever program is running, just to get the computer to do things quickly. They're not learning how to use the computer because they don't have the patience to learn. They just want to get on to the next image as quickly as possible. And come to that, the teacher in that classroom didn't have the patience to learn it either...)
On the other hand, Old Man Murray has a point too: some of the games started getting too fancy-shmancy for their own good. Some of the later adventure games, in an attempt to be more clever, completely lost their credibility.
It doesn't help that I hold Sierra, the company that put out Gabriel Knight (among others) in low esteem. It wouldn't surprise me if that disguise puzzle quoted in Murray's article was something concocted by middle management.
Games like Myst and Riven helped carve the puzzle game a new niche from the text adventure... and it helped that Myst and Riven had their own internal logic. They took thought rather than jump through hoops. And as for the genre being dead, note that Myst 3: Exile is in development... doesn't sound quite like a dead genre to me.
The Myst series isn't just a set of hoops or contrived events, but a journey set in a world with its own internal logic. Look around and explore enough, and everything is explained. But you need to do the exploring. And a little thinking.
You don't think of Myst and Riven much as interesting games because even though they have huge panoramas of beautiful scenery, they still lack the flash-bang. They provide their thrills to the whole cerebrum, not just the frontal lobes.
(Damnit, I've gotten all stream-of-consciousy again...)
And suddenly, I'm imagining a game using Unreal's FPS engine, backed with the Z-machine's gorgeously elegant parser (which is quite SMALL and could fit)...
"typical of what you'd find in most Internet-linked systems"??
Sorry, doesn't wash.
Many/.ers out there know that the Internet is very hard to secure. But they also know that it can be done with a good deal of practice and knowhow. So I'd say it's not that. I'd say it's more likely poor government performance that we're seeing there.
Ideally, the government should have the highest security and technological savvy of any entity in the country, in order to protect its citizens from threats from outside the country.
(Ideally, the government should also be protecting the rights of the citizens too rather than chipping away at them with an espresso spoon whereever any cartel like the MPAA or RIAA tells them to, but that's another rant entirely.)
So what's wrong? Either:
a) they don't have the knowhow to maintain system security, or
b) they have the knowhow, but aren't utilizing it correctly.
I'd like to see a correlation of government salaries in relation to similar positions in private industries. If they're dissimilar, and the government pays its workers less than the private sector, then I think it'll be safe to say where the talent's gone...
From what I gather (from the first few minutes of reading), The 'Fool On The Hill' column contains mostly opinion, and the other columns are intended for more factual data, never mind the gaffe that Rob Landley pulled by substituting Chaplain for Kaplan. (Bad press! Bad, bad press! No biscuit!)
Yes, I know the crux of this particular newsposting wasn't a 'Fool On The Hill' column. But this one was. Go on, look at it... it also happens to be the article pointed at in the first paragraph of the featured article...
Consider also that in the course of his checking around, he actually went to the EFF's web site.
He may be primarily concerned with economics and market forces and many of those other things that bore the average geek to sleep, but in times of crisis, accept any help from all quarters. He seems to be fully dead-set against The Old Men of the Recording Industry, and anything he does to highlight their hypocrisy and outdated attitudes is a blessing to our cause.
Who's telling the worst lie? I see a whole LOT of mouths moving!
Whether or not to believe this report (please don't laugh until I'm done, folks) depends on how much you believe the individual links in the chain (see also 'fuzzy logic'). Fortunately, this chain only has three links:
1) The Federal Bureau of Investigation: the government agency whose job it is, essentially, to spy on Americans. They do this to go after anyone planning the violent overthrow of the government or especially heinous crimes against the citizens, like mass murder, child pornography, willful drug use, copyright violations, etc.
If they give away their secrets, they lose their effectiveness. People learn how their measures work, and sidestep them in order to get away with things. And in this case, we have to consider their source code one of those secrets.
However, they want to be trusted. So they want someone to come forth and Bless This Carnivore -- (carnivore? animal? beast? The Beast? Revelations? No wonder they're changing the name! Sorry folks, couldn't help myself, got carried away there) -- so that everyone can feel safe on the Internet.
So they have two choices:
1a) Find an expert who can both comprehend the source code, verify that it does what they claim it does, and stay quiet about the details, or
1b) Lie through their teeth, provide false source code, and/or coerce the scientist of their choice to give it the thumbs up or he'll be shipped off to whatever constitutes Siberia in the United States (probably Nebraska).
2) Vinton Cerf, First Lemming, stepped forward and was counted, looked over the source code he was handed, and filed his report.
Even though he may be a suit and a corporate shill, he wants to be trusted too. If he goes along with the government too closely on this, and it is revealed later that Carnivore is indeed Opening Everybody's Mail, then he's just shot whatever credibility he had in the foot. With a Howitzer.
He also has to agree to the government's terms in order to review the Carnivore Code, and I bet they made him sign "The NDA On Steroids." (Like most non-disclosure agreements, but this one is backed by government lawyers on taxpayer money.) And in this case, it would make sense for the government to do that: this legally binds him from revealing the source code and giving away government secrets.
Given that he wants to be trusted, I would expect him to scream bloody blue blazes to every media agency in the world if the FBI turned a less-than-glowing report into an endorsement.
Unless, of course, The NDA On Steroids prevents that. If the government can keep him from talking about the source code, I bet they can keep him from revealing any details in the report too. Including the fact that his copy of the report and the FBI's published copy of the report don't jive.
If Vinton Cerf has a lawyer, and he read that clause, he'd probably do what I'd do: advise his client that signing that document would shaft him up to the sternum. Or not; that depends how much you trust Cerf's lawyer, but that's another screed. By the way: the NDA, if t exists as such, might be something available through the Freedom of Information Act... someone might want to look that up too.
So, do you trust Vinton Cerf? He's either:
2a) A scientist who reviewed the Carnivore code handed to him and honestly reported on it,
2b) A suit who wouldn't know C++ from FORTH, and handed in a report that makes him look credible. For the moment, never mind the possibility that he was duped by legal wranglings in the NDA. You'll see how that factors in just a moment.
Do you choose to trust the Vinton Cerf Carnivore report?
Where: P(x) is the probability of a given event between 0 and 1,
1a=the government is telling the truth,
1b=the government is lying,
2a=Vinton Cert knows what he's talking about,
2b=Vinton Cert doesn't know what he's talking about, and
t=The report is correct,
Then: P(t)=P(1a)*P(2a).
It doesn't matter which you trusted less... regardless, I bet you got a low number. So did I.
Sometimes I wonder if we're a little too cynical. But then I think about what it is we're being cynical about, and I have to wait until the gorge stops churning before I worry about it again.
So it'll go in this case too: either the Net will tear down the Borders, or the Borders will tear down the Net.
(This is a first post for me, by the way. Not on the topic, but for myself. Consequently, it's gotten a bit stream-of-consciousnessy on me, so moderate gently, please?)
Individual nations' governments are the biggest threat, but only in the way that Hannibal's elephants were -- large, slow-moving, ponderous creatures which didn't know better than to go where you told them. They usually only attack at the orders of someone else, be it people outraged by some form of expression (the Germans against racism, Americans against pornography, the French against any advertising that written in any language other than French) out of some diluted loyalty, and a desire to stay in power. Then there's nations like China which actively seek to strangle it; even elephants get enraged sometimes.
The Borders' best way to win is to pursue. As someone pointed out, the complete freedom to transmit whatever information you want anywhere in the world doesn't do you a whole lot of good if a team of [insert nationality] marines lands on your deep-sea-ISP and opens fire indiscriminately. And when that offshore server station is doing little things to honk off the 168+ nations of the world, don't be surprised to find Maori with grenades floating in the North Atlantic looking for yourownprivateidaho.org.
The Net's best way to win is to persevere: to continue on in the face of the pressures and adversities. According to the dictum, the Net views censorship as damage and acts to route around it. "Damage" in this case means that occasionally those enraged Albanians will take out a netbarge or two, but the net's work will continue.
A Net victory wouldn't destroy the borders, but with the people dealing with each other as equals and sharing information as peers, all those borders would become next to meaningless.
The other question is, "What are you doing with the Net?"
If you're talking about pushing goods around the world, the balance tips greatly in favor of the Borders. Someone has to produce the item in question, pick it up, ship, and drop it off at its destination. Physical entities are easy to stop at border crossings, and governments will call those couriers 'smugglers' if the item is contraband (a fancy term meaning "you can't possibly pay what we'd want to let this in here, so we're just not going to allow it"), and act to stop it. At that point, some of the world's more significant governments will join the fray, like Canada.
If the thing being traded is information or services, though, the Net has the strong advantage. Governments have proven particularly inept at grasping ideas, much less stopping them. The honest flow of information across the Net will necessitate it being kept open, despite any legal discomforts (or attempted illegal stoppages by certain governments who shall remain nameless).
Side-thought, and caveat: The 'Web Application' qualifies as a service, rather than a good. If most companies are going to go to web apps, then sooner or later 'illegal' or 'hack' web apps will crop up, and could be brought to bear to push information through tightly locked borders. tribalfloodnetwork.com, anyone...? It could spell a quick and decisive victory for the Net if the right information is pushed through, but if not, it WILL mean the two combatants will be fighting instead to the death.
Many people like to dream that the Net is an integral part of humanity's future (at least until Internet2 comes along). I look at UseNet and think "Gawds, I hope not."
(Remember what I said about 'stream-of-consciousnessiness'? Sorry about that...)
Slashdot Mirror
Semantic attacks, and all their ilk, have only one general purpose: to mislead. However, one can be misled ONTO the correct path as well as OFF of it.
Case in point:
Warning: Cruel but syrupy anecdote begins here.
This really happened many, many years ago at an outdoor event. Someone got a little overenthusiastic and fell out of a tree. He skinned his shoulder and wasn't sitting still for treatment from a woman with a first aid kit. He kept going on and on about how 'tincture of merthiolate' hurts and he doesn't want any.
I was nearby and reassured him, "Would you relax? Solution of merthiolate doesn't hurt a bit. You barely even feel it going on."
He listened, and settled down, and let her apply what she had in the bottle. And naturally, he yelped and flinched.
See, what I told him was true -- solution of merthiolate really doesn't sting any. It was, however, completely irrelevant.
He looked up at me and said, "I thought you said it wouldn't hurt!"
I told him, "Solution of merthiolate doesn'thurt. But this is tincture of merthiolate! It stings like the dickens! But if I told you that, you wouldn't've sat through it, would you?"
(Okay, show's over folks.)
I could go on about how people need to check sources, and how information is only as trustworthy as the people who post it, but that should be obvious. Anyone with practice in critical thinking should know to question sources and relevance of statements someone is trying to feed them.
But as long as people ARE going to be gullible, you might as well at least try to shepherd them in the right direction once in a while. They still won't thank you, but at least they'll be better off than they would have been had they listened to only one lie...
---
...for buying IBM, as the saying goes.
Another adage applies:
"No one ever got fired for selling Apple short."
APPL has a long and dubious history both in the stock market and commercial press. You think everyone loves a success story? Look back over the years at every piece of doom-and-gloom that has been published about Apple. Analysts just eat that up! Nothing pulls 'em in like the rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Amazingly, nobody gives Compaq a second look.
As for the stock market, they have their own wisdom...
I'll agree that the article does some unnecessary capering and twirling at the feet of OS X.
/.ers seems to be, "If it's Apple, it must be bad." And for THIS attitude, posters get moderated up.
/. will ridicule them again, etc.) UIs will get fancier for a while until someone gets the idea to strip off all the eye-candy and create something totally utilitarian as a fashion statement.
Steven Johnson is essentially drooling over eye candy. He mentions the guts a few times, but otherwise he reviews the UI in such excruciating detail that he might as well be critiquing the curtains hanging on the window near his desk.
His attitude in the article seems to be, "If it looks nifty, it must be good." And for this attitude, the link gets posted here.
However, the attitude of most
Wake up and smell that gunk in your keyboards, people! What he's talking about is the front-end of the operating system! It does none of the work of the actual operating system, it just provides you with a way to communicate with it. And under OS X, it's not even the only way to do so.
All the OS's UI is supposed to do is give you access to those things you need to adjust, hide those things you don't need to know about, and let you know in a timely fashion what's going on. Even with argument on philosophical points (what things in the environment should and shouldn't be tweaked, how buttons and icons should react when rolled over, etc.), that's what it tries to do. If you don't like it, there are tools available -- change it!
As for the core, remember, it's running that BSD-compatible Mach kernel. Given all the complaints of Mac OSses is fawning new-age drek?
(You don't suppose just seeing the word 'APPLE' in the briefing has anything to do with it?)
But anyway, getting back to the task at hand...
Cultural revolution? Not immediately, anyway. Hobbyists who aren't predisposed against it enough not to try it may be amused by it, but those people working on computers in offices daily won't be fazed; they'll just keep working on whatever they're handed. Those people whose systems this changes will notice that the horse has a new face, but all that matters is what goes on under the hood. (And that won't be many since most of them are running some flavor of Windows anyway.)
Some people will look at this, be utterly tickled by its artistry, and copy elements of the design on top of whatever front end they'll be using. (Apple will sue them if they get too close,
The UI is the fashion through which the function of the guts underneath is filtered. It serves an important role in that context, but it is still fashion, and comes and goes at whim.
Microsoft meddling in the affairs of one of its vassal companies? This came as no surprise to me either.
But I bet it came as a surprise to Bungie, judging by their letter to their fans. To quote:
What drove us then drives us now: to make the games we want to make, on our own terms, and in our own way.
Holding true to this vision allowed us to create the Marathon and Myth series, and has now led us to Redmond to work closely with the Xbox development team.
Here's how I figure the deal went down:
1. Bungie develops game for several platforms and makes a name for themselves. (I think the history here speaks for itself.)
2. Bungie would like to develop for the Xbox as well, and tries to get the SDKs for it. (It fits their pattern; if they have the patience to develop for Mac, PC, AND PS2, why not a fourth one?)
3. Microsoft offers to not just send over SDKs, but buy out Bungie. Part of this was probably the assurance that Bungie staff would have an opportunity to influence the design of the Xbox. (Bungie's Acquisition FAQ bears this out -- see "Why is this happening")
4. Bungie sells out to Microsoft in a fit of naivete and/or stupidity. If you haven't called up that FAQ already, do so -- read the Q&As starting with "Why do you believe Microsoft will leave you alone when there are so many documented examples of Microsoft doing shady things?" and try to hold down the bile.
What it looks like to me is that Microsoft drew Bungie into its blob-like folds on the promise of listening to them and benefitting from their talent, and proceeded to ream them.
Like this laughable line:
The existing bungie.net servers will continue to exist for the indefinite future. We are bringing the current head of the bungie.net admins along to ensure that bungie.net is maintained to our standards, and he will act as a full member of an online community team to ensure that future iterations of bungie.net are designed with the players in mind.
They probably seriously believed that when they signed over their good name. Pity them. And pity the forseeable future, which ended even before the ink was dry. And as for other promises, well, another thing they said in their FAQ was:
Will Microsoft control the content or direction of Bungie games?
No. The plan is that they'll leave us more or less alone to do what we do, and trust that the results will be worth it. They will be involved on some level at every step of the process, including conceptualization, but they will not shape the development of the games or censor content. Their interactions with us will mostly be on a business level.
In the current light, make of that what you will. To me, it looked like a cloudy day way back when they signed the contract, and now it looks like it's going to hail.
Two things to consider:
/.ers, the problem is not just in the Judiciary. Even Judge Patel admitted that the DMCA has created a monumental legal snafu. A snafu which, I should point out, began in the Legislative branch where the laws were first written.
1. IT'S JUST ONE STATE
And not even a state known for widespread technological development. California has a strong tech industry. Seattle has Redmond. New York is developing its own 'Silicon Alley.'
What is Maryland known for? Seafood and speeding tickets!! And while Maryland has a little tech industry, it's not California, or Seattle, or New York. Or better/worse yet, the Federal Government.
This is why it's ineffectual. And probably a good thing too because...
2. IT'S THE WRONG SOLUTION FOR THE PROBLEM
Consider the role of the courts in government: the legislative branch writes the laws, the executive branch ratifies them and sets policy, and the judicial branch only interprets and enforces them where necessary (and allegedly strikes down the bad ones).
Ladies, gentlemen, and
Creating a technically knowledgeable division in the Judicial branch is like writing an improved script to interpret the output of a program written which implements outdated (and sometimes downright wrong) algorithms.
And even if this gets to the Federal level, remember that the judges are appointed by the Executive branch, with the approval of the Legislative branch. They have always had the ability to stack the Judiciary with whatever judges they want, and have done so for the past few decades.
There is a hope in here, that a sufficiently technically knowledgeable judiciary would declare more laws unconstitutional, but there is an equally compelling dread that a panel of judges sufficiently friendly to the Congress wouldn't bother. After all, the Bill of Rights is already a shadow of its former self, if not an impediment to better paid-for government and corporate rights.
Of course not everything works yet. This is still a beta release. Nothing may have changed in the GUI or general structure, but they probably tuned it up some under the hood in order to get it working better. Something about Developer Release vs. Public Beta may have something to do with that.
MacOS X Downside: It'll demand Apple hardware to run, and demand G3+ hardware at that. There's also been talk of X not working with third party CPU plug-ins. Whether it's a matter of optimizing for Apple's specific hardware, or crippling the software on other machines isn't a big deal, unless you planned to cross-compile it. (And judging by the 'first posts,' the Lintel Hegemony is still roaming in force.)
MacOS X Upsides: People complain about how hard it is to configure a Linux system. Well here it is, folks: the people who brought user interface to personal computers are slapping a pretty front end on BSD and are not only planning on *selling* it, but intend to make *money* on it.
(Also consider: a) Apple Computer is in the habit of bundling DVD-ROMs with their systems these days. b) Apple is basing MacOS X on BSD. Therefore, c) Apple will be providing BSD-DVD drivers legally to their users.)
If you want Linux and the various *nix clones to be accepted by the public as a serious force instead of the domain of cloistered geeks, you want to do something to make it visible. KDE and Gnome are okay interfaces, but they're only distributed as far as Linux is. Here's a manufacturer of hardware AND software bundling everything together -- OS, drivers, and front end -- and giving the whole thing visibility.
If you want to pooh-pooh Apple just becuase they 'suck,' then you might be doing the *nix community a disservice. Because most people, if they turn away from Apple for whatever reason, tend to think Microsoft first, not Linux.
As someone who long ago played both Scott Adams and Infocom adventures (yes I'm THAT old), there's something to be said for both reasons for puzzle-style adventure gaming dropping off.
... doesn't sound quite like a dead genre to me.
(Note: NOT Dying, just pining for the fjords. Go to the Interactive Fiction archives and see that a great many tools have been developed for people to write their own adventure games, and many have. It's almost open-sourcey, in fact...)
By the way, who remembers the Scott Adams adventures? What a parser those things had! Could only accept one or two whole words at a time, and any sort of mistype would befuddle the poor stupid little thing.
Infocom's parser started out good and evolved over time to be phenomenal. Under Infocom's z-machine parser, I was always tempted to write an adventure in which the player would have to 'light the light light blue light' and I have faith that the parser could have handled it, damnit!
But enough of me geezing...
On the one hand, Gamespot is right that the FPS had more sparkle, more action, more color and flash. Even the original Quake, half of whose color table was shades of 'mud,' had more pop than even the fanciest *text* adventure.
Much the same way it's advertising's job to be seen, so it is with games. They need bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies to draw players from their competitors' bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies. The text adventure, never equipped to deliver that kind of flash-bang, fell by the wayside or got replaced with the graphic versions.
(And as long as I'm going to geeze, I might as well toss in that the violence isn't the problem: it's that the videogaming industry is trying to play to an audience so infovoracious, so dependent on that flash-bang, that they could be diagnosed as attention-defecit. To further back up my point, trust me on this one: I've seen preschoolers sit down at a computer and start machine-gunning the mouse on whatever program is running, just to get the computer to do things quickly. They're not learning how to use the computer because they don't have the patience to learn. They just want to get on to the next image as quickly as possible. And come to that, the teacher in that classroom didn't have the patience to learn it either...)
On the other hand, Old Man Murray has a point too: some of the games started getting too fancy-shmancy for their own good. Some of the later adventure games, in an attempt to be more clever, completely lost their credibility.
It doesn't help that I hold Sierra, the company that put out Gabriel Knight (among others) in low esteem. It wouldn't surprise me if that disguise puzzle quoted in Murray's article was something concocted by middle management.
Games like Myst and Riven helped carve the puzzle game a new niche from the text adventure... and it helped that Myst and Riven had their own internal logic. They took thought rather than jump through hoops. And as for the genre being dead, note that Myst 3: Exile is in development
The Myst series isn't just a set of hoops or contrived events, but a journey set in a world with its own internal logic. Look around and explore enough, and everything is explained. But you need to do the exploring. And a little thinking.
You don't think of Myst and Riven much as interesting games because even though they have huge panoramas of beautiful scenery, they still lack the flash-bang. They provide their thrills to the whole cerebrum, not just the frontal lobes.
(Damnit, I've gotten all stream-of-consciousy again...)
And suddenly, I'm imagining a game using Unreal's FPS engine, backed with the Z-machine's gorgeously elegant parser (which is quite SMALL and could fit)...
"typical of what you'd find in most Internet-linked systems"??
/.ers out there know that the Internet is very hard to secure. But they also know that it can be done with a good deal of practice and knowhow. So I'd say it's not that. I'd say it's more likely poor government performance that we're seeing there.
Sorry, doesn't wash.
Many
Ideally, the government should have the highest security and technological savvy of any entity in the country, in order to protect its citizens from threats from outside the country.
(Ideally, the government should also be protecting the rights of the citizens too rather than chipping away at them with an espresso spoon whereever any cartel like the MPAA or RIAA tells them to, but that's another rant entirely.)
So what's wrong? Either:
a) they don't have the knowhow to maintain system security, or
b) they have the knowhow, but aren't utilizing it correctly.
I'd like to see a correlation of government salaries in relation to similar positions in private industries. If they're dissimilar, and the government pays its workers less than the private sector, then I think it'll be safe to say where the talent's gone...
From what I gather (from the first few minutes of reading), The 'Fool On The Hill' column contains mostly opinion, and the other columns are intended for more factual data, never mind the gaffe that Rob Landley pulled by substituting Chaplain for Kaplan. (Bad press! Bad, bad press! No biscuit!)
Yes, I know the crux of this particular newsposting wasn't a 'Fool On The Hill' column. But this one was. Go on, look at it... it also happens to be the article pointed at in the first paragraph of the featured article...
Consider also that in the course of his checking around, he actually went to the EFF's web site.
He may be primarily concerned with economics and market forces and many of those other things that bore the average geek to sleep, but in times of crisis, accept any help from all quarters. He seems to be fully dead-set against The Old Men of the Recording Industry, and anything he does to highlight their hypocrisy and outdated attitudes is a blessing to our cause.
Who's telling the worst lie? I see a whole LOT of mouths moving!
Whether or not to believe this report (please don't laugh until I'm done, folks) depends on how much you believe the individual links in the chain (see also 'fuzzy logic'). Fortunately, this chain only has three links:
1) The Federal Bureau of Investigation: the government agency whose job it is, essentially, to spy on Americans. They do this to go after anyone planning the violent overthrow of the government or especially heinous crimes against the citizens, like mass murder, child pornography, willful drug use, copyright violations, etc.
If they give away their secrets, they lose their effectiveness. People learn how their measures work, and sidestep them in order to get away with things. And in this case, we have to consider their source code one of those secrets.
However, they want to be trusted. So they want someone to come forth and Bless This Carnivore -- (carnivore? animal? beast? The Beast? Revelations? No wonder they're changing the name! Sorry folks, couldn't help myself, got carried away there) -- so that everyone can feel safe on the Internet.
So they have two choices:
1a) Find an expert who can both comprehend the source code, verify that it does what they claim it does, and stay quiet about the details, or
1b) Lie through their teeth, provide false source code, and/or coerce the scientist of their choice to give it the thumbs up or he'll be shipped off to whatever constitutes Siberia in the United States (probably Nebraska).
2) Vinton Cerf, First Lemming, stepped forward and was counted, looked over the source code he was handed, and filed his report.
Even though he may be a suit and a corporate shill, he wants to be trusted too. If he goes along with the government too closely on this, and it is revealed later that Carnivore is indeed Opening Everybody's Mail, then he's just shot whatever credibility he had in the foot. With a Howitzer.
He also has to agree to the government's terms in order to review the Carnivore Code, and I bet they made him sign "The NDA On Steroids." (Like most non-disclosure agreements, but this one is backed by government lawyers on taxpayer money.) And in this case, it would make sense for the government to do that: this legally binds him from revealing the source code and giving away government secrets.
Given that he wants to be trusted, I would expect him to scream bloody blue blazes to every media agency in the world if the FBI turned a less-than-glowing report into an endorsement.
Unless, of course, The NDA On Steroids prevents that. If the government can keep him from talking about the source code, I bet they can keep him from revealing any details in the report too. Including the fact that his copy of the report and the FBI's published copy of the report don't jive.
If Vinton Cerf has a lawyer, and he read that clause, he'd probably do what I'd do: advise his client that signing that document would shaft him up to the sternum. Or not; that depends how much you trust Cerf's lawyer, but that's another screed. By the way: the NDA, if t exists as such, might be something available through the Freedom of Information Act... someone might want to look that up too.
So, do you trust Vinton Cerf? He's either:
2a) A scientist who reviewed the Carnivore code handed to him and honestly reported on it,
2b) A suit who wouldn't know C++ from FORTH, and handed in a report that makes him look credible. For the moment, never mind the possibility that he was duped by legal wranglings in the NDA. You'll see how that factors in just a moment.
Do you choose to trust the Vinton Cerf Carnivore report?
Where:
P(x) is the probability of a given event between 0 and 1,
1a=the government is telling the truth,
1b=the government is lying,
2a=Vinton Cert knows what he's talking about,
2b=Vinton Cert doesn't know what he's talking about, and
t=The report is correct,
Then:
P(t)=P(1a)*P(2a).
It doesn't matter which you trusted less... regardless, I bet you got a low number. So did I.
Sometimes I wonder if we're a little too cynical. But then I think about what it is we're being cynical about, and I have to wait until the gorge stops churning before I worry about it again.
So it'll go in this case too: either the Net will tear down the Borders, or the Borders will tear down the Net.
(This is a first post for me, by the way. Not on the topic, but for myself. Consequently, it's gotten a bit stream-of-consciousnessy on me, so moderate gently, please?)
Individual nations' governments are the biggest threat, but only in the way that Hannibal's elephants were -- large, slow-moving, ponderous creatures which didn't know better than to go where you told them. They usually only attack at the orders of someone else, be it people outraged by some form of expression (the Germans against racism, Americans against pornography, the French against any advertising that written in any language other than French) out of some diluted loyalty, and a desire to stay in power. Then there's nations like China which actively seek to strangle it; even elephants get enraged sometimes.
The Borders' best way to win is to pursue. As someone pointed out, the complete freedom to transmit whatever information you want anywhere in the world doesn't do you a whole lot of good if a team of [insert nationality] marines lands on your deep-sea-ISP and opens fire indiscriminately. And when that offshore server station is doing little things to honk off the 168+ nations of the world, don't be surprised to find Maori with grenades floating in the North Atlantic looking for yourownprivateidaho.org.
The Net's best way to win is to persevere: to continue on in the face of the pressures and adversities. According to the dictum, the Net views censorship as damage and acts to route around it. "Damage" in this case means that occasionally those enraged Albanians will take out a netbarge or two, but the net's work will continue.
A Net victory wouldn't destroy the borders, but with the people dealing with each other as equals and sharing information as peers, all those borders would become next to meaningless.
The other question is, "What are you doing with the Net?"
If you're talking about pushing goods around the world, the balance tips greatly in favor of the Borders. Someone has to produce the item in question, pick it up, ship, and drop it off at its destination. Physical entities are easy to stop at border crossings, and governments will call those couriers 'smugglers' if the item is contraband (a fancy term meaning "you can't possibly pay what we'd want to let this in here, so we're just not going to allow it"), and act to stop it. At that point, some of the world's more significant governments will join the fray, like Canada.
If the thing being traded is information or services, though, the Net has the strong advantage. Governments have proven particularly inept at grasping ideas, much less stopping them. The honest flow of information across the Net will necessitate it being kept open, despite any legal discomforts (or attempted illegal stoppages by certain governments who shall remain nameless).
Side-thought, and caveat: The 'Web Application' qualifies as a service, rather than a good. If most companies are going to go to web apps, then sooner or later 'illegal' or 'hack' web apps will crop up, and could be brought to bear to push information through tightly locked borders. tribalfloodnetwork.com, anyone...? It could spell a quick and decisive victory for the Net if the right information is pushed through, but if not, it WILL mean the two combatants will be fighting instead to the death.
Many people like to dream that the Net is an integral part of humanity's future (at least until Internet2 comes along). I look at UseNet and think "Gawds, I hope not."
(Remember what I said about 'stream-of-consciousnessiness'? Sorry about that...)