Agreed, but if they are that much more advanced than us (and also seeking to harm or exploit us), then we're ppretty much screwed anyway.
I dunno about that. Mankind has sort of stopped evolving, don't you think? I mean, our technology has reached the point where debilitating diseases and deformities that would otherwise render a person a genetic dead end are quite survivable. When you've got obvious errors like boys in bubbles and gentry with unclottable blood walking around without a care in the world, you've got a very low chance that the next best species is gonna be able to pop up out of nowhere. Not to mention that most human societies allow a man to only take one wife, thus decreasing the effect of the desirable male. So maybe once a species gets to a certain point of effectiveness in dealing with his environment, genetics just kind of shut off, and let the organism coast around with his or her big monkey brain doing all of the important adaptations for survival.
Maybe there is no society more advanced then ours technologically, either. Maybe all life in the universe reaches a stasis point where it's just smart enough to make a ton of cool technology, and then it sits on that technology trying to figure itself out until it blows itself up, poisons its environment or uses up so much of its natural resources it can't take it anymore. Maybe the technological renaissance only lasts a few hundred years, then society settles back down into a subsistence mode, doing only what it needs to do to survive and not broadcasting clever "hey, ho, what's up" messages on the interstellar band.
Do you also think Public Enemy is hateful and racist?
Absolutely. The whole point of PE was inverse racism and hatred of the racial status quo. Just because you agree with a form of racism or hatred doesn't mean it isn't racial or hateful...saying "the black man must stand strong and proud against his detractors" is invoking the concept of race as strongly as anything that's come out of David Duke's mouth. How about Flava's lyric "Ask James Cagney, he beat up on a man when he found he was a Fagney, that's my boy?"
I love PE. I love that they have the balls to be hypocrites when they have to -- the song continues, "they don't play games, they're the real McCoy." Now, I'm a fucking white kid from the suburbs, I have hardly anything in common with the target audience of these songs. But I respect what PE represents: musicians fighting for what they believe in from within a system that considered them a novelty. So I bought the record, with hundred of thousands of other white folks, the whole time realizing it wasn't "for" us. I buy a lot of Kool Keith's stuff too, which I'm sure pisses him off.
My point was, if you have a theoretical service that was "against hate and racism," you sure as shit can't contain stuff like Brujeria or PE or Ted Nugent. Or Neil Young, he once had some idiotic line about not wanting homosexuals to touch his groceries. This is as retarded as those European censorship laws banning Naziism...Naziism is a bad thing, but banning it is worse.
There are a number of large islands east of Texas that could do without a booster rocket crashing on them. East of Florida is ocean. It's a bigger target.
Let's see...big ocean in the direction countering the motion of the earth to catch those solid state rockets? Relatively warm weather for year round launches? Lots of flat, inexpensive land?
Florida's really the place to go. Where else you gonna put this this?
At which point Apple will be miles down the field.
Seriously, this it the first market they've had in a long time -- probably ever -- where they aren't dropping the ball, where they're convincing people in their superiority and where they keep making changes, adding artists and features people want and like.
This affiliate program is a good example. AirTunes is another. iPod Mini, Party Shuffle, iMixes...these are all new features just this year WMP can't touch. What they've got waiting in the wings, who knows...but Microsoft can't win by "catching up." They're going to have to make a moonshot to compete.
You know, anonymouse coward, AAC isn't an Apple format. It's an MPEG format. It's the next generation of lossy audio compression, meant to replace MP3. Therefore, it should sound better bitrate for bitrate, and indeed due to superior modeling often sounds better at vastly lower bitrates.
I mean, it's fun to bash Apple and all, but Apple didn't make this. AAC sounds good whether you're listening with Winamp 5 on Windows XP, on an Expanium CD-ROM, or a Nokia N-Gage.
Shit, this is brilliant. Do you remember, back in the day, when Penny Arcade would have an MP3 link at the bottom of every news post? Tycho could bring it back...as a link to iTunes. Shit, I put a "soundtrack" entry at the top of every journal entry, maybe I could make my own links, get my 5 or 6 viewers to fund my website...
I guess part of the idea here is that the artist can now get 15-19% (I heard more like a quarter per song, btw...I don't trust downhillbattle's numbers) by pushing people to iTunes through their websites.
I dunno about that hate or racism thing...This is one of the most hateful and racist bands I know of, and they're on iTunes (they sing in spanish about killing white men, I've been told it's a joke but that doesn't change the content).
Incidentally, 16,000 songs or 1600 albums would not be that hard to move if you were, say, a popular artist with a link on your website. For some people with really shitty RIAA deals (making $.20 per song as it is), this $.05 per song could spell a 25% increase in profits. So the artists will push people to buy through iTunes...meaning more iTunes music sold, more iPods sold, more money for artists, and more proof to the RIAA that digital delivery can work, damnit.
Thank you. I am tired of people like the grandparent who think that the form page has to be downloaded via SSL for submitted information to be secure. SSL takes a fair amount of processing and therefore is a big performance hit for a website. Requiring all forms as well as their submissions to be in SSL is a silly waste of overhead. SSL pages should be very lightweight, image free deals that say "We got your data" or "Here is the secret we need you to have." In certain cases, such as political forums, SSL should be an option for all pages...but what's the point in encrypting the transfer of a blank form? And if you're going to assume that little lock icon in the corner is proof of anything, you're inviting trouble if the form you submit it TO is not encrypted.
This is why IE pops up all those "navigating to an unencrypted page" messages we instantly turn off...
There's also the issue of putting a DRM wrapper on user ripped files.
Windows Media Player does this by default. iTunes doesn't do it at all; in fact, I think the default format may still be MP3. Even iTMS files are just plain jane AAC "wrapped" with this FairPlay encryption.
Though I'd quickly change this to 160 kbit AAC, it's much much nicer at modeling percussive music like rock than anything MP3 can do. Stereo sounds nicer too, wider. It can almost trick you into thinking you're listening to a CD, especially when you realize you can hear the pick on the guitar string and fingers sliding behind the vocalist.
I don't know how WMP sounds, but something about relying on some company's cool idea for audio when there's another format available which is the actual successor to MP3 (with all the industry support that implies) seems dumb to me. Not as dumb as going with a format like Vorbis that only has the support of a couple hundred nerds seems, but hey, I'm a sucker for expert groups.
When was the last time Adobe or Macromedia created something new?
Are you serious? Adobe CS had at least a half dozen new features I can't do without now that I have them, none of which The Gimp has (support for XCF and other raw formats, automatic histogram duplication, colour map adjustment (make photo A's colors and intensities look like photo B), layer composites, etc). Sorry if these don't seem earth shattering, but they cut down on workflow and make nice images quicker.
The only exclusive features the Gimp has are "terrible interface which puts all the menu items on all windows, even where they don't make sense," "crashing randomly without saving changes first," or maybe "console you don't want and can't close without closing the program which also doesn't save your work or give you the option to not close everything." The drawing and path features aren't photoshop like, but they're still clones (of similar features from CorelDraw and FDP). About the only thing original is Script-Fu, and I don't know what the fuck that is.
There are good image manipulation programs that aren't Photoshop like -- IrfanView and iPhoto are both good, so's the software that comes with the Sigma SD-9 -- but I don't have a problem with a program choosing to use a layer interface or a toolbar. I expect that. I also expect an effective graphics program might try and implement some features that artists, photographers or designers would want -- and the Gimp doesn't do that. Instead, it is a program aimed at people who want to make a bunch of ugly embossed buttons very quickly.
Well, I kind of figured the game environment would find some way to abstract the hardware to the point that supportability of any particular platform wouldn't an issue. Imagine a Java-like virtual machine designed for fast execution of floating point math, vector/SIMD processing and fast direct OpenGL/SVT/OpenAL execution...
You missed the fact that the OSS community learned its marketing tactics from their hated enemy. So expect volleys of FUD and unsubstantiatable claims.
Of course artists aren't willing to work for an Open Source project. The whole point of OSS is fostering a community and right now the community isn't attracting a whole lot of artists.
But it's getting better. There are many areas of OSS that are steadily attracting creative people because of the flexibility they offer -- programs like Blender and packages like Postnuke have fewer hassles than comparable commercial offerings, even if their interfaces aren't up to par. Remember, artists don't mind working hard for little money (anybody who's ever cleaned an airbrush or developed a photograph knows what I'm talking about), they just aren't likely to do so unless they care about the cause.
Want some beautiful Open Source games? Attract game artists with flexible and powerful open source tools that do something NEW -- not merely clones of packages they already have (*cough* The Gimp).
To make a game these days, you need an engine, content, and a set of tools to make the content work with the engine.
Open source mods only need to make the content, which makes them much easier to negociate than writing a game from scratch. They also don't have to DESIGN the engine or the tools or the interface for either, something OSS (without commercial support) has classically had difficulties with.
That's because any hobbiest clever enough to come up with a great, original idea is also clever enough to try and get paid for it.
If you write something completely commercially unviable, like a direct clone of a game that's been out for thirty years, you almost have to give it away.
Back in my emulation days, crummy emulators were almost always free, while the really great ones (Magic Engine, for example) were shareware. When the crummy ones got to the same level of greatness, many of them would turn commercial, too. A community is a great thing if you don't have the knowledge or time individually to create a polished product...but if you create something new and fantastic and desirable on your own, you may as well ask for money. It's the eternal trade off: do you accept the burden of responsibility with a little cash, or do you give up reimbursement in exchange for the technical assistance of the community?
There's also the issue that many creative people are more interested in creating then dealing with the technical hassles often associated with OSS. I've noticed that the average shareware game for the Mac is prettier and more innovative (in terms of interface, usually) than the average Windows game. And I've never seen a Linux-only game I was interested in playing (Angband and Nettrek excepted, but only due to nostalgia)...the ones I've played were visually flat and uninspired.
Of course, the development of cross-platform game environments could change all that. If you can develop a game that looks good on a mac but will run on Linux/Windows/etc, why the hell not do so?
ASP -- the technology -- is different from ASP the business model. An ASP -- Application Service Provider -- enables businesses to have web and client server applications without having to host their own servers or build their own pages. Furthermore, ASP -- the technology -- is no better or worse than PHP -- they're just alternate forms of scripting to build dynamic HTML, and ASP is much better at interacting with COM (very important when you have modern VB/MFC apps you want to put a web front on). Conversely, PHP is better when used with Apache.
Web development (which looks like what you quoted because that's what I was talking about, duh) uses many of the same technologies as client server programming. The difference is that the server controls EVERYTHING. A smart client has a certain amount of autonomy, which is useful. If a web server crashes, chances are you'll lose your web session and the work you were doing. If an application server crashes, you can usually queue your changes locally and resubmit them when it comes back up.
if you want something to be accessed by people all over the place and be database driven, you still have yet to convince me
Try comparing an online HTML based game with an online Java client game. The client will not only be faster and more enjoyable to play, the server running it will be more robust. Internet applications are the same way...for small things, like posting this, the Internet is painless. For writing anything bigger, I want a damn client. I have a 1.25 GHz Altivec processor, goddamnit, I don't want to have to wait 30 seconds for a web response to tell me i formatted my SSN improperly.
Please do not kill the messenger. I am only reporting what I have seen over the course of the past 18 years using computers with people of all levels of ability, and because life does not always think before it exists, it sometimes does not make sense to the brilliant and anonymous cowards of slashdot.
My mentor with Parkinsons taught ombudsman classes at a middle school. The middle school's budget had purchased a number of new Windows 3.1 machines, which had two button mice. This guy did not carry around a trackball, which would have been a wierd thing to lash to the side of a wheelchair, and if he had, he could not roll behind the computer, detach the mouse, attach the trackpad, and roll to the front every time he wanted to help us out. Sometimes the convenience of using public terminals outweighed the ease of us crowding around his laptop which did, indeed, have a trackball.
The college I went to had a Students with Disabilities lab that I proctored on occasion. It chose mice over trackballs because a mouse is easier for many people to control than the small ball. They did have a large, Coleco style trackball on one station which, interestingly enough, only had one mouse button.
Anyhow, I guess the point here is, Apple's one button philosophy is the easiest way to handle it, more buttons != superior functionality, and "News for Nerds" != "Information for people who think before posting."
Web programming is NOT client-server programming, because you do not program the client. Instead, you issue a set client a series of cues on how it should interact with your server, which handles data processing as well as flow control.
The main difference between client-server programming and web programming is the role the client plays. A dumb client like a web browser responds in one way which is pre-ordained, and thus is unreliable in verifying data and presenting the user with information. The role of formatting and display is the responsibility of the server, and this cuts into the responsiveness of the UI. A smart client KNOWS what data it's going to receive, knows how to display it, and knows what data it's going to send back. This knowledge allows it to perform important pre-processing before the server is even contacted, which means less crosstalk, better response times and a more pleasant experience. It's also less stress on the server and if done right can mean greater supportability.
This is also discounting the fact that the web has no great way of performing many-to-many relationships, or loading information dynamically without replacing the current context. Can you imagine if every time you tried to write a bullet point in Word, the whole program closed and reopened?
As for "quick, easy changes occurring more easily:" dude, I used to be the backend programmer for a website ASP. I wrote a series of client tools to speed up what the customers considered an arduous, almost unbearable process: updating their website every morning with fresh content. Simply moving the interface from a web site (which was damned responsive, mind you) to a Java client dropped the time to load a manifest of articles from an average of 2 hours to an average of 45 minutes -- and it handled MS Word codes much better. Adopting a static Word aware client along with a Quark XPress scraping tool (try doing THAT on a fucking web page) brought it down to 15 minutes or proofreading. I don't remember smoking any crack when I did these tests, but it must have been the type of crack that gets you a nice fat raise.
You say he can press keyboard keys with a single finger; he can press the single mouse button; what is so hard about one more button on the mouse?
Try it. The key to clicking a mouse is stability. If you just try to press the button with your finger, you'll cause the mouse to slide downwards, thus bringing it off target. I have seen folks with disabilities who have to hold the mouse with one hand while they click with the other, to prevent pressing the wrong button. Man, we have it easy when it comes to HID...any slight dificiency of motor control or vision and computers become a massive inconvenience...
The Macintosh uses context menus now more than ever. Even the built-in Mac OS X apps (Mail, Text Edit, Finder, etc.) support them extensively.
Oh, you didn't quite understand what I meant. YES, the mac has context menus, and has since OS 8.5. The difference between the mac and the PC is that anything in a context menu is also accessible via the main menu, or at least it's supposed to be -- it's one of the items stressed heavily in the HI Guidelines. There are a few exceptional features (like the menu on web links, which would be hard to include in the main menu with any real context since you don't SELECT web links), but nearly everything is in the main menu. The idea is that context menus are supposed to make functions easier, not to be the only means of operation. People have different paradigms of use, and the Mac tries hard to let them stick to THEIR WAY rather than learn some theoretical RIGHT WAY.
For database driven apps, it's pretty much the best way to go.
Actually, it pretty much isn't. The web is a TERRIBLE interface for inputting mass amounts of data, is unreliable for smart clients and is much more difficult to support than a good client-server app. Unless you're faced with the possibility of a ton of heterogeneous clients making their own updates (such as a forum site or auction house), your best bet is to use a small footprint client for database management and save the website for more communal tasks. The web is really great at displaying data...that's what it was designed for.
As for storing an app on a million different boxes and updating constantly...this is 2004, Holmes. If you can't figure out how to get a client to update itself via the internet, consider going into an MIS field because you aren't cut out to be a programmer.
Finally, designing for portability and compatibility is quite often anathema to usability. If you want to make a ton of quick, easy changes in a reliable manner, stay the hell away from the web!
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, but if they are that much more advanced than us (and also seeking to harm or exploit us), then we're ppretty much screwed anyway.
I dunno about that. Mankind has sort of stopped evolving, don't you think? I mean, our technology has reached the point where debilitating diseases and deformities that would otherwise render a person a genetic dead end are quite survivable. When you've got obvious errors like boys in bubbles and gentry with unclottable blood walking around without a care in the world, you've got a very low chance that the next best species is gonna be able to pop up out of nowhere. Not to mention that most human societies allow a man to only take one wife, thus decreasing the effect of the desirable male. So maybe once a species gets to a certain point of effectiveness in dealing with his environment, genetics just kind of shut off, and let the organism coast around with his or her big monkey brain doing all of the important adaptations for survival.
Maybe there is no society more advanced then ours technologically, either. Maybe all life in the universe reaches a stasis point where it's just smart enough to make a ton of cool technology, and then it sits on that technology trying to figure itself out until it blows itself up, poisons its environment or uses up so much of its natural resources it can't take it anymore. Maybe the technological renaissance only lasts a few hundred years, then society settles back down into a subsistence mode, doing only what it needs to do to survive and not broadcasting clever "hey, ho, what's up" messages on the interstellar band.
Do you also think Public Enemy is hateful and racist?
Absolutely. The whole point of PE was inverse racism and hatred of the racial status quo. Just because you agree with a form of racism or hatred doesn't mean it isn't racial or hateful...saying "the black man must stand strong and proud against his detractors" is invoking the concept of race as strongly as anything that's come out of David Duke's mouth. How about Flava's lyric "Ask James Cagney, he beat up on a man when he found he was a Fagney, that's my boy?"
I love PE. I love that they have the balls to be hypocrites when they have to -- the song continues, "they don't play games, they're the real McCoy." Now, I'm a fucking white kid from the suburbs, I have hardly anything in common with the target audience of these songs. But I respect what PE represents: musicians fighting for what they believe in from within a system that considered them a novelty. So I bought the record, with hundred of thousands of other white folks, the whole time realizing it wasn't "for" us. I buy a lot of Kool Keith's stuff too, which I'm sure pisses him off.
My point was, if you have a theoretical service that was "against hate and racism," you sure as shit can't contain stuff like Brujeria or PE or Ted Nugent. Or Neil Young, he once had some idiotic line about not wanting homosexuals to touch his groceries. This is as retarded as those European censorship laws banning Naziism...Naziism is a bad thing, but banning it is worse.
There are a number of large islands east of Texas that could do without a booster rocket crashing on them. East of Florida is ocean. It's a bigger target.
Let's see...big ocean in the direction countering the motion of the earth to catch those solid state rockets? Relatively warm weather for year round launches? Lots of flat, inexpensive land?
Florida's really the place to go. Where else you gonna put this this?
eventually MS will catch up.
At which point Apple will be miles down the field.
Seriously, this it the first market they've had in a long time -- probably ever -- where they aren't dropping the ball, where they're convincing people in their superiority and where they keep making changes, adding artists and features people want and like.
This affiliate program is a good example. AirTunes is another. iPod Mini, Party Shuffle, iMixes...these are all new features just this year WMP can't touch. What they've got waiting in the wings, who knows...but Microsoft can't win by "catching up." They're going to have to make a moonshot to compete.
You know, anonymouse coward, AAC isn't an Apple format. It's an MPEG format. It's the next generation of lossy audio compression, meant to replace MP3. Therefore, it should sound better bitrate for bitrate, and indeed due to superior modeling often sounds better at vastly lower bitrates.
I mean, it's fun to bash Apple and all, but Apple didn't make this. AAC sounds good whether you're listening with Winamp 5 on Windows XP, on an Expanium CD-ROM, or a Nokia N-Gage.
Not to mention the fact that if you were willing to sell non-DRM mp3 or aac files, your stuff would be compatible with the iPod.
It should not be Apple's imperative to sell you the keys to their porsche just because you aren't willing to take the bus.
Shit, this is brilliant. Do you remember, back in the day, when Penny Arcade would have an MP3 link at the bottom of every news post? Tycho could bring it back...as a link to iTunes. Shit, I put a "soundtrack" entry at the top of every journal entry, maybe I could make my own links, get my 5 or 6 viewers to fund my website...
I guess part of the idea here is that the artist can now get 15-19% (I heard more like a quarter per song, btw...I don't trust downhillbattle's numbers) by pushing people to iTunes through their websites.
I dunno about that hate or racism thing...This is one of the most hateful and racist bands I know of, and they're on iTunes (they sing in spanish about killing white men, I've been told it's a joke but that doesn't change the content).
Incidentally, 16,000 songs or 1600 albums would not be that hard to move if you were, say, a popular artist with a link on your website. For some people with really shitty RIAA deals (making $.20 per song as it is), this $.05 per song could spell a 25% increase in profits. So the artists will push people to buy through iTunes...meaning more iTunes music sold, more iPods sold, more money for artists, and more proof to the RIAA that digital delivery can work, damnit.
Thank you. I am tired of people like the grandparent who think that the form page has to be downloaded via SSL for submitted information to be secure. SSL takes a fair amount of processing and therefore is a big performance hit for a website. Requiring all forms as well as their submissions to be in SSL is a silly waste of overhead. SSL pages should be very lightweight, image free deals that say "We got your data" or "Here is the secret we need you to have." In certain cases, such as political forums, SSL should be an option for all pages...but what's the point in encrypting the transfer of a blank form? And if you're going to assume that little lock icon in the corner is proof of anything, you're inviting trouble if the form you submit it TO is not encrypted.
This is why IE pops up all those "navigating to an unencrypted page" messages we instantly turn off...
There's also the issue of putting a DRM wrapper on user ripped files.
Windows Media Player does this by default. iTunes doesn't do it at all; in fact, I think the default format may still be MP3. Even iTMS files are just plain jane AAC "wrapped" with this FairPlay encryption.
Though I'd quickly change this to 160 kbit AAC, it's much much nicer at modeling percussive music like rock than anything MP3 can do. Stereo sounds nicer too, wider. It can almost trick you into thinking you're listening to a CD, especially when you realize you can hear the pick on the guitar string and fingers sliding behind the vocalist.
I don't know how WMP sounds, but something about relying on some company's cool idea for audio when there's another format available which is the actual successor to MP3 (with all the industry support that implies) seems dumb to me. Not as dumb as going with a format like Vorbis that only has the support of a couple hundred nerds seems, but hey, I'm a sucker for expert groups.
You mean it's compatible with Rhapsody ?!?
When was the last time Adobe or Macromedia created something new?
Are you serious? Adobe CS had at least a half dozen new features I can't do without now that I have them, none of which The Gimp has (support for XCF and other raw formats, automatic histogram duplication, colour map adjustment (make photo A's colors and intensities look like photo B), layer composites, etc). Sorry if these don't seem earth shattering, but they cut down on workflow and make nice images quicker.
The only exclusive features the Gimp has are "terrible interface which puts all the menu items on all windows, even where they don't make sense," "crashing randomly without saving changes first," or maybe "console you don't want and can't close without closing the program which also doesn't save your work or give you the option to not close everything." The drawing and path features aren't photoshop like, but they're still clones (of similar features from CorelDraw and FDP). About the only thing original is Script-Fu, and I don't know what the fuck that is.
There are good image manipulation programs that aren't Photoshop like -- IrfanView and iPhoto are both good, so's the software that comes with the Sigma SD-9 -- but I don't have a problem with a program choosing to use a layer interface or a toolbar. I expect that. I also expect an effective graphics program might try and implement some features that artists, photographers or designers would want -- and the Gimp doesn't do that. Instead, it is a program aimed at people who want to make a bunch of ugly embossed buttons very quickly.
Well, I kind of figured the game environment would find some way to abstract the hardware to the point that supportability of any particular platform wouldn't an issue. Imagine a Java-like virtual machine designed for fast execution of floating point math, vector/SIMD processing and fast direct OpenGL/SVT/OpenAL execution...
You missed the fact that the OSS community learned its marketing tactics from their hated enemy. So expect volleys of FUD and unsubstantiatable claims.
Of course artists aren't willing to work for an Open Source project. The whole point of OSS is fostering a community and right now the community isn't attracting a whole lot of artists.
But it's getting better. There are many areas of OSS that are steadily attracting creative people because of the flexibility they offer -- programs like Blender and packages like Postnuke have fewer hassles than comparable commercial offerings, even if their interfaces aren't up to par. Remember, artists don't mind working hard for little money (anybody who's ever cleaned an airbrush or developed a photograph knows what I'm talking about), they just aren't likely to do so unless they care about the cause.
Want some beautiful Open Source games? Attract game artists with flexible and powerful open source tools that do something NEW -- not merely clones of packages they already have (*cough* The Gimp).
To make a game these days, you need an engine, content, and a set of tools to make the content work with the engine.
Open source mods only need to make the content, which makes them much easier to negociate than writing a game from scratch. They also don't have to DESIGN the engine or the tools or the interface for either, something OSS (without commercial support) has classically had difficulties with.
That's because any hobbiest clever enough to come up with a great, original idea is also clever enough to try and get paid for it.
If you write something completely commercially unviable, like a direct clone of a game that's been out for thirty years, you almost have to give it away.
Back in my emulation days, crummy emulators were almost always free, while the really great ones (Magic Engine, for example) were shareware. When the crummy ones got to the same level of greatness, many of them would turn commercial, too. A community is a great thing if you don't have the knowledge or time individually to create a polished product...but if you create something new and fantastic and desirable on your own, you may as well ask for money. It's the eternal trade off: do you accept the burden of responsibility with a little cash, or do you give up reimbursement in exchange for the technical assistance of the community?
There's also the issue that many creative people are more interested in creating then dealing with the technical hassles often associated with OSS. I've noticed that the average shareware game for the Mac is prettier and more innovative (in terms of interface, usually) than the average Windows game. And I've never seen a Linux-only game I was interested in playing (Angband and Nettrek excepted, but only due to nostalgia)...the ones I've played were visually flat and uninspired.
Of course, the development of cross-platform game environments could change all that. If you can develop a game that looks good on a mac but will run on Linux/Windows/etc, why the hell not do so?
ASP -- the technology -- is different from ASP the business model. An ASP -- Application Service Provider -- enables businesses to have web and client server applications without having to host their own servers or build their own pages. Furthermore, ASP -- the technology -- is no better or worse than PHP -- they're just alternate forms of scripting to build dynamic HTML, and ASP is much better at interacting with COM (very important when you have modern VB/MFC apps you want to put a web front on). Conversely, PHP is better when used with Apache.
Web development (which looks like what you quoted because that's what I was talking about, duh) uses many of the same technologies as client server programming. The difference is that the server controls EVERYTHING. A smart client has a certain amount of autonomy, which is useful. If a web server crashes, chances are you'll lose your web session and the work you were doing. If an application server crashes, you can usually queue your changes locally and resubmit them when it comes back up.
if you want something to be accessed by people all over the place and be database driven, you still have yet to convince me
Try comparing an online HTML based game with an online Java client game. The client will not only be faster and more enjoyable to play, the server running it will be more robust. Internet applications are the same way...for small things, like posting this, the Internet is painless. For writing anything bigger, I want a damn client. I have a 1.25 GHz Altivec processor, goddamnit, I don't want to have to wait 30 seconds for a web response to tell me i formatted my SSN improperly.
Please do not kill the messenger. I am only reporting what I have seen over the course of the past 18 years using computers with people of all levels of ability, and because life does not always think before it exists, it sometimes does not make sense to the brilliant and anonymous cowards of slashdot.
My mentor with Parkinsons taught ombudsman classes at a middle school. The middle school's budget had purchased a number of new Windows 3.1 machines, which had two button mice. This guy did not carry around a trackball, which would have been a wierd thing to lash to the side of a wheelchair, and if he had, he could not roll behind the computer, detach the mouse, attach the trackpad, and roll to the front every time he wanted to help us out. Sometimes the convenience of using public terminals outweighed the ease of us crowding around his laptop which did, indeed, have a trackball.
The college I went to had a Students with Disabilities lab that I proctored on occasion. It chose mice over trackballs because a mouse is easier for many people to control than the small ball. They did have a large, Coleco style trackball on one station which, interestingly enough, only had one mouse button.
Anyhow, I guess the point here is, Apple's one button philosophy is the easiest way to handle it, more buttons != superior functionality, and "News for Nerds" != "Information for people who think before posting."
Web programming is NOT client-server programming, because you do not program the client. Instead, you issue a set client a series of cues on how it should interact with your server, which handles data processing as well as flow control.
The main difference between client-server programming and web programming is the role the client plays. A dumb client like a web browser responds in one way which is pre-ordained, and thus is unreliable in verifying data and presenting the user with information. The role of formatting and display is the responsibility of the server, and this cuts into the responsiveness of the UI. A smart client KNOWS what data it's going to receive, knows how to display it, and knows what data it's going to send back. This knowledge allows it to perform important pre-processing before the server is even contacted, which means less crosstalk, better response times and a more pleasant experience. It's also less stress on the server and if done right can mean greater supportability.
This is also discounting the fact that the web has no great way of performing many-to-many relationships, or loading information dynamically without replacing the current context. Can you imagine if every time you tried to write a bullet point in Word, the whole program closed and reopened?
As for "quick, easy changes occurring more easily:" dude, I used to be the backend programmer for a website ASP. I wrote a series of client tools to speed up what the customers considered an arduous, almost unbearable process: updating their website every morning with fresh content. Simply moving the interface from a web site (which was damned responsive, mind you) to a Java client dropped the time to load a manifest of articles from an average of 2 hours to an average of 45 minutes -- and it handled MS Word codes much better. Adopting a static Word aware client along with a Quark XPress scraping tool (try doing THAT on a fucking web page) brought it down to 15 minutes or proofreading. I don't remember smoking any crack when I did these tests, but it must have been the type of crack that gets you a nice fat raise.
You say he can press keyboard keys with a single finger; he can press the single mouse button; what is so hard about one more button on the mouse?
Try it. The key to clicking a mouse is stability. If you just try to press the button with your finger, you'll cause the mouse to slide downwards, thus bringing it off target. I have seen folks with disabilities who have to hold the mouse with one hand while they click with the other, to prevent pressing the wrong button. Man, we have it easy when it comes to HID...any slight dificiency of motor control or vision and computers become a massive inconvenience...
The Macintosh uses context menus now more than ever. Even the built-in Mac OS X apps (Mail, Text Edit, Finder, etc.) support them extensively.
Oh, you didn't quite understand what I meant. YES, the mac has context menus, and has since OS 8.5. The difference between the mac and the PC is that anything in a context menu is also accessible via the main menu, or at least it's supposed to be -- it's one of the items stressed heavily in the HI Guidelines. There are a few exceptional features (like the menu on web links, which would be hard to include in the main menu with any real context since you don't SELECT web links), but nearly everything is in the main menu. The idea is that context menus are supposed to make functions easier, not to be the only means of operation. People have different paradigms of use, and the Mac tries hard to let them stick to THEIR WAY rather than learn some theoretical RIGHT WAY.
For database driven apps, it's pretty much the best way to go.
Actually, it pretty much isn't. The web is a TERRIBLE interface for inputting mass amounts of data, is unreliable for smart clients and is much more difficult to support than a good client-server app. Unless you're faced with the possibility of a ton of heterogeneous clients making their own updates (such as a forum site or auction house), your best bet is to use a small footprint client for database management and save the website for more communal tasks. The web is really great at displaying data...that's what it was designed for.
As for storing an app on a million different boxes and updating constantly...this is 2004, Holmes. If you can't figure out how to get a client to update itself via the internet, consider going into an MIS field because you aren't cut out to be a programmer.
Finally, designing for portability and compatibility is quite often anathema to usability. If you want to make a ton of quick, easy changes in a reliable manner, stay the hell away from the web!