This is exactly true, and the first comment I've read in public that understands this. Microsoft's strength is in developing developer tools. I just returned from the PDC, and they showed off Atlas, which is an whole Javascript API. This whole Web 2.0 / Ajax / JSON / Whatever is playing into Microsofts hand. They are going to build all the fundimentals for a web based application development enviroment, put it into Visual Studio, and they keep on winning.
To be honest, their Atlas project was more robust than anything I have seen Google put out as a set of code to use in my projects.
It's not that they are resouces that can be played with. The program actually creates C# objects that can be coded against. The idea is that if you have your code written and want a new UI, you can drop in a new UI without having to modify the code you wrote as a developer.
So I can turn this tool over to the Artsy guys and I can nerd out and code an amazing application without having to worry about how it looks. Design is truely abstracted.
While I understand what you are saying the logic of your statement is as follows:
1. I have observed X. 2. X can be caused by Y. 3. Z can be Bad.
X = Storms Increasing Y = Global Warming Z = Expansion.
To complete your logial statement you need to do the following: Tie Z into X a relationship with to Y. And provide support for each point.
But one point that should be reviewed is that experts have observed that storms in this region of the world go on 25 - 30 year cycles caused by a stabilzation of the gulf stream coming in from Africia. They are unwilling to make the second step and state a causal relationship between Global Warming and the normal storm cycle.
The article stated that the pool was busy and that she jumped in and never came up, she passed out as she was entering the water. No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.
They also then probably went and tried to steal the from the citizens who went to help the king. That was the real big problem. If you notice in the stories, money exchanged hands. They were not pointing out security problems, they were thieves.
Ethics are ethics and morals are morals. Just becuase the setting is different doesn't make the morals and the ethics any different. Just becuase properity is virtual, beating someone up and stealing is still mugging and stealing.
Now granted, I think this mugging could have been dealt with from within the game (Beat the guy up, force him to only play from with one building for a couple months), but many world religions state that morals and ethics are ultimatly more enforcable from above the reality the offence occurs in, and not from within that reality. And I find it interesting that many companies, when faced with some of the same questions that religions and philosophies have had to deal with are coming to the same conculsions.
OK, So we need a new set of ethics and morality becuase the world is virtual? Or do we inherit the one from the real world? I say we inherit. It's the simpler cleaner solution.
Well, lets take the out of a virtual world and place it back in the real world.
You state: The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime.
Your argument is something like this. If I have the ability to do something I must have the right to do something.
That is not how reality works. Do you really want a system where ability does determines the right to do something.
How would you take our reality and make this work. Establish a diety which controls all this? Establish the state which can sometimes see and control others through force to comply? Or perhaps hope that people will check their own abilities against the rights of others?
IT's not the fault of the company that one of their players is an asshole. It's the assholes fault, in the end, that he is an asshole. That is how it works in reality, and in virtual realities.
On a side note, this reminds me of a programming language I use to use back in the day which had true = -1 and false = 0. The reason for this was that the last bit in a signed int was used to determine the if the number was +/-. And a boolean was an signed int of length 1. So it was -1/0 for true/false. Anyone know how common this is elsewhere?
I wonder if the United States government is using this over seas to track people we are 'interested' in, and perdict their future movement. What would also be of interest would be a diviation from that expected behaviour.
Unlike many of the other comments here, this comment gets to the heart of the issue. Non-compete agreements are usually non-enforceable and in most parts of the world. Microsoft is probably doing this to get the PR from it and to fire a warning shot a Google saying, an additional cost to hiring Microsoft employees is that we will fire of a law suit every time you try to hire one of our employees, even if we know it's not going anywhere.
Also it should be noted that in certain countries it is illeagle to possess maps over a certain level of detail. Make sure you understand the laws of the country you are going to, and work within them. If you don't then you will not only be considered a spy, you might legally be a spy, even though your intentions are noble or benign.
This is the last keyboard you would ever need. If it had a life span of say 10 years, I would be willing to spend over a $1000 for it. Like someone said elsewhere, Logitech or Microsoft NEEDS to license this idea and make it happen NOW.
"And don't try justifying it with "well, the zombies obviously aren't powered by brains, because there's some zombies without heads," because you can still kill them by shooting them in the jaw six times. I'm sure they'd also die if I shot them in the foot six times, but honestly, I'm just too bored with the game to even try."
This is a very unrealistic attitude to have. There are some packages which don't run on *nix. Also, vendors, suppliers, and partners might be Windows shops, and you need to integrate with them.
I personally don't think they can screw this up. They have decent developers and decent marketers. All they need to do is show a business case where you can save money on bandwidth and small to medium size companies would jump at this.
This, BTW, will be Microsoft Extending and embracing HTTP.
OS/Apache + Firefox should do this already. Beat Microsoft to the punch. Heck you could even include a spot for plugging and playing DRM (or not).
The process would be to automatically replace all links to files which are larger than say 256K with a Torrent-ish link. This could be done on pagebuild as it the file is served up.
You would want to build the Torrent capabilities into the browser as well, so then you would goto Firefox and build them in there as well.
If small to medium size companies can see a measurable decrease in bandwidth used then it will get used.
They wouldn't even have to put it on top of HTTP to get a large savings. Just have a Microsoft Windows Large File WebServer Edition to host all large files say over 256K. Have the Large File WebServer grab the files automatically from the site and replace the links automatically with links to the Avalanch Server.
This isn't a big deal. This isn't hard task, and it isn't a hard to roll out.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget, how can I put this in my iPod.
AJAX for games is a bad idea, makes cheating too easy.
This is exactly true, and the first comment I've read in public that understands this. Microsoft's strength is in developing developer tools. I just returned from the PDC, and they showed off Atlas, which is an whole Javascript API. This whole Web 2.0 / Ajax / JSON / Whatever is playing into Microsofts hand. They are going to build all the fundimentals for a web based application development enviroment, put it into Visual Studio, and they keep on winning.
To be honest, their Atlas project was more robust than anything I have seen Google put out as a set of code to use in my projects.
Ted
It's not that they are resouces that can be played with. The program actually creates C# objects that can be coded against. The idea is that if you have your code written and want a new UI, you can drop in a new UI without having to modify the code you wrote as a developer.
So I can turn this tool over to the Artsy guys and I can nerd out and code an amazing application without having to worry about how it looks. Design is truely abstracted.
While I understand what you are saying the logic of your statement is as follows:
1. I have observed X.
2. X can be caused by Y.
3. Z can be Bad.
X = Storms Increasing
Y = Global Warming
Z = Expansion.
To complete your logial statement you need to do the following: Tie Z into X a relationship with to Y. And provide support for each point.
But one point that should be reviewed is that experts have observed that storms in this region of the world go on 25 - 30 year cycles caused by a stabilzation of the gulf stream coming in from Africia. They are unwilling to make the second step and state a causal relationship between Global Warming and the normal storm cycle.
The article stated that the pool was busy and that she jumped in and never came up, she passed out as she was entering the water. No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.
You could also try Maxthon. IE with most of the FF features.
They also then probably went and tried to steal the from the citizens who went to help the king. That was the real big problem. If you notice in the stories, money exchanged hands. They were not pointing out security problems, they were thieves.
Ethics are ethics and morals are morals. Just becuase the setting is different doesn't make the morals and the ethics any different. Just becuase properity is virtual, beating someone up and stealing is still mugging and stealing.
Now granted, I think this mugging could have been dealt with from within the game (Beat the guy up, force him to only play from with one building for a couple months), but many world religions state that morals and ethics are ultimatly more enforcable from above the reality the offence occurs in, and not from within that reality. And I find it interesting that many companies, when faced with some of the same questions that religions and philosophies have had to deal with are coming to the same conculsions.
OK, So we need a new set of ethics and morality becuase the world is virtual? Or do we inherit the one from the real world? I say we inherit. It's the simpler cleaner solution.
Well, lets take the out of a virtual world and place it back in the real world.
You state: The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime.
Your argument is something like this. If I have the ability to do something I must have the right to do something.
That is not how reality works. Do you really want a system where ability does determines the right to do something.
How would you take our reality and make this work. Establish a diety which controls all this? Establish the state which can sometimes see and control others through force to comply? Or perhaps hope that people will check their own abilities against the rights of others?
IT's not the fault of the company that one of their players is an asshole. It's the assholes fault, in the end, that he is an asshole. That is how it works in reality, and in virtual realities.
Ted Tschopp
The Edison URL should be www.edisonnews.com. Yes, we require you to put the www on the front of it. And yes, I work for them.
On a side note, this reminds me of a programming language I use to use back in the day which had true = -1 and false = 0. The reason for this was that the last bit in a signed int was used to determine the if the number was +/-. And a boolean was an signed int of length 1. So it was -1/0 for true/false. Anyone know how common this is elsewhere?
You guys are psycho for moding this funny. There is NOTHING funny about Windows ME.
I wonder if the United States government is using this over seas to track people we are 'interested' in, and perdict their future movement. What would also be of interest would be a diviation from that expected behaviour.
Unlike many of the other comments here, this comment gets to the heart of the issue. Non-compete agreements are usually non-enforceable and in most parts of the world. Microsoft is probably doing this to get the PR from it and to fire a warning shot a Google saying, an additional cost to hiring Microsoft employees is that we will fire of a law suit every time you try to hire one of our employees, even if we know it's not going anywhere.
Ted Tschopp
The Church of Scientology buys the rights to Unix. Ok, Stop the ride, where do I get off.
Also it should be noted that in certain countries it is illeagle to possess maps over a certain level of detail. Make sure you understand the laws of the country you are going to, and work within them. If you don't then you will not only be considered a spy, you might legally be a spy, even though your intentions are noble or benign.
$200+
This is the last keyboard you would ever need. If it had a life span of say 10 years, I would be willing to spend over a $1000 for it. Like someone said elsewhere, Logitech or Microsoft NEEDS to license this idea and make it happen NOW.
From the article...
"And don't try justifying it with "well, the zombies obviously aren't powered by brains, because there's some zombies without heads," because you can still kill them by shooting them in the jaw six times. I'm sure they'd also die if I shot them in the foot six times, but honestly, I'm just too bored with the game to even try."
This is a very unrealistic attitude to have. There are some packages which don't run on *nix. Also, vendors, suppliers, and partners might be Windows shops, and you need to integrate with them.
HTML is not XML
XHTML is XML
I personally don't think they can screw this up. They have decent developers and decent marketers. All they need to do is show a business case where you can save money on bandwidth and small to medium size companies would jump at this.
This, BTW, will be Microsoft Extending and embracing HTTP.
OS/Apache + Firefox should do this already. Beat Microsoft to the punch. Heck you could even include a spot for plugging and playing DRM (or not).
The process would be to automatically replace all links to files which are larger than say 256K with a Torrent-ish link. This could be done on pagebuild as it the file is served up.
You would want to build the Torrent capabilities into the browser as well, so then you would goto Firefox and build them in there as well.
If small to medium size companies can see a measurable decrease in bandwidth used then it will get used.
They wouldn't even have to put it on top of HTTP to get a large savings. Just have a Microsoft Windows Large File WebServer Edition to host all large files say over 256K. Have the Large File WebServer grab the files automatically from the site and replace the links automatically with links to the Avalanch Server.
This isn't a big deal. This isn't hard task, and it isn't a hard to roll out.