No, he's saying that the optimal solution without patents would be to sit around waiting for someone else to dump money into developing new techniques, then trivially scoop them up and use them yourself. No one would be left in the dust. Unfortunately in that kind of situation the company that dumped money into developing new techniques gets absolutely nothing for their money because they can't leave anyone in the dust. The end result is that no one bothers to invest money into developing new techniques because there's no competitive advantage to do so.
The open-source model works well for ancillary tools where the people contributing to them and using them base more proprietory value-add businesses on top of them. Everyone contributes, everyone benefits. It's not clear to me how open-source R&D works when the topic of research *is* your business.
They didn't add programmers to a late project, they added programmers to a bunch of small, self-contained projects that hadn't been started yet. That's a very different thing.
The point of Fred Brook's argument is that if you take a project that's already late, that means it already has systemic problems of one type or another (or likely, several types at once). Adding bodies without solving the systemic problems just makes those problems grow, not go away. That's not the situation this company had and that's not what they did. Saying they "busted the mythical man-month" is just trolling.
My city of residence was covered by massive glaciers not too long ago by geologic standards. My house is built on a big pile of glacial till. I'm happy my area is warmer now than it was.
It's not a simple matter of true/false, either/or, all or nothing. People to reduce the problem to those terms are making it impossible to have rational discussion.
Yes, climate temperatures fluctuate with or without our influence. Yes, human influence is large enough and pervasive enough to alter those fluctuations. Yes, some areas of the world will benefit from further warming. Yes, some areas of the world are already at the limit of habitation/productivity because of warm temperatures and further warming may ruin them. Yes, it's always better to pollute less and have less man-made impact on the environment if we have a choice about it. Yes, we will someday run out of useful oil reserves. Yes, significantly changing our behavior may cost trillions of dollars and hurt many people. Yes, making those changes may leave us better off politically and financially in the long term.
These things are all true. Some of these facts are in tension with other facts. No simple solutions exist. We need a complex, nuanced solution. Unfortunately in these days of conservative vs. liberal sound-bite-bashing, it's impossible to discuss any complex solutions. The only choices we seem to have are "environmentalists are total frauds, burn all the oil you want" and "the world is about to end unless we impose a fascist state to dictate every detail of our lifestyles".
The freezer removes heat from the icepack and dumps it into the room (plus extra, because of the work done). Then you take the icepack out of the freezer, put it in the "room cooling" device, where it takes heat from the room and puts it back into the icepack. Net result, your room is hotter than it was before. In order to get a net cooling effect, you have to dump the heat into a separate system that you don't care about (like outside). That's why air conditioners have vents to the outside.
Um, gears aren't magical engery-creation devices. Gears are useful if you have a surplus of torque and want to transform it into rotational speed, or surplus of rotational speed into torque, but you still only get out of it what you put into it. In the case of the mythical lamp, the motion would be multipled by 160 but the apparent weight would be divided by 160, for the same net energy production.
So . . . what *are* the distinguishing characteristics that would allow a reasonable person to tell a proto board from a real bomb? Just curious, since it's apparently so easy.
Mass protests (or DoS attacks in software terms) are a problem that have been around for forever. People did them all the time in Ultima Online ten years ago, and I'm sure in other games before that. Shards don't exist to prevent mass protests. Shards exist because companies can only build so much content, and once they reach the limit of their abilities they have to start making copies of what they've already got if they want to sign up more subscriptions.
Like I said, the too-many-people-in-one-place problem is not the same as the why-can't-we-get-rid-of-shards problem. The too-many-people-in-one-place problem is *ridiculously* easy to solve if you don't mind breaking the immersion a little bit. Once X number of people enter a particular zone, just put all subsequent travelers into a queue, just like WoW does for logging in to busy shards. You could even wrap some fiction around it by having a big gate open and close and guards standing there yelling, "Halt!" There, done. If you don't want to sit in the queue, then cancel out and go somewhere else. (And you *can* go somewhere else because you have smart game designers who made sure there were multiple points of access for any important resources in the game. Right? Right?)
It's not even like that's a particularly artificial solution. In the US, most large meeting rooms in public buildings have little signs stating, "Maximum Occupancy 254". We have to do crowd control in real life, too.
Don't misunderstand my argument. I'm not saying that MMO server tech is perfect and doesn't need any improvement. Of course it would be nice if we could handle many more people in one virtual location than most games can now. Huge battles with multiple thousands of people all fighting each other at once would be great! However, we already know how to do that. It's not some mysterious unsolved problem in computer science. It's just that most game companies choose not to solve it because the solution is usually very expensive, and it's way cheaper to design the game so that people don't need to be (or simply aren't allowed to be) all in the same location at the same time. And my key point is: it has little to do with the presence or absence of shards.
Every six months or so there's some startup company that announces they've got this brilliant new idea for MMO server design and they're going to build a new MMO without shards and everyone will be able to play in the same world and it'll be so awesome!!! Virtually all of them crash and burn before getting off the ground because they misidentified the showstopping problem in that scenario; it's not server tech, it content production.
Yes, it does suck, which is an entirely different reason why huge virtual worlds (as opposed to smaller shards) are not as great an idea as people seem to think. The bigger the population of your shard, the fewer people have an opportunity to be movers and shakers. The long-term future of online roleplaying games will likely be to trend toward smaller groups, not larger. To use our two archtypal examples; in WoW there's some huge number of shards, and therefore there's a huge number of "the most powerful player/guild in the world". And every time they open a new shard there's a new opportunity for someone to make a name for themselves. On the other hand, if I start playing Eve (again), what realistic chance do I have of getting in on the intrigue and politics of the most powerful corps? None at all. There's no way I'll ever catch up to 200,000 people who were there before me. Eve would provide more entertainment for more people and possibly have more subscribers if they had, say, 10 shards of 20,000 players each, or even smaller.
Well, you can, but the problem there is that the vast majority of user-created content isn't very good and/or doesn't mesh together into a cohesive fiction. The model works with something like Second Life because it's doesn't claim to be an internally-consistent virtual world; it's just a random collection of virtual "stuff". There's obviously a market for that. But the vastly larger market (at least right now) is for internally-consistent virtual worlds with high production values, and it's a *lot* harder to get the community to build something like that for you on a large scale. It's been proven to work on a very small scale in text MUDs but the barrier to entry is a lot lower for text than it is for 3D. This may ultimately be the solution but right now no one knows how to do it well.
Yes, really. The "what to do when everyone in an MMO tries to pile into the same location in the world" problem is related to the "why can't we get rid shards and just have one big world" problem, but they're not the same problem.
Today's sharded games already have the too-many-people-in-one-place problem. That problem is not directly caused by shards or the lack of them. For instance, Ironforge in WoW is a classic example. Everyone wanted to use the same auction house to take advantage of the large buyer/seller pool, but there was only one place you could access that auction house. Blizzard eventually solved that problem by adding more auction houses and having them all access the same shared auction list, and also by sharing the/trade and/lfg channels between the major cities. People spread out because they could get their needs met elsewhere and Ironforge became managable again. The problem was solved with improved content. No technology required.
Even if you have one huge virtual world with 8 million players, you can still sidestep the too-many-people-in-one-place problem by implementing any number of different strategies. You can go the subtle route and carefully design your content to spread people out. You can go the autocratic route and simply throttle access to over-crowded areas. There are lots of clever solutions to the problem as long as your game design isn't all about large-scale battles.
So why is a game like WoW so heavily sharded? Everyone says, "Shards are so dumb! I want to play a game like WoW where everyone is in one huge world! That would be so awesome! Why can't those stupid game developers build software like the NASDAQ does?" Well, WoW is the way it is because it's not fundamentally a hardware/software problem. It's a content problem. We know how to spread people out so there aren't overcrowded areas. The showstopping problem is where to spread them out to.
WoW has some ridiculous number of quests in their world. (I lost track but it's in the thousands, I believe.) They've invested several years and probably over 100 million of dollars to build that world. Now you want them to scale up that content production by two or three orders of magnitude just so that everyone can play in the same virtual world? It ain't going to happen with the current state of the art in content production.
If your game design is all about large-scale battles (*cough*Eve*cough*) then you have an additional problem to solve, and yes, that will require a technology solution of some kind. But even then you'll still have the content-generation problem to go along with it. Games based entirely on space travel get kind of a magic free pass in this regard because everyone expects space to be big, empty, and largely the same no matter where you look. But if you want to do any other kind of genre then you're going to get stopped cold and the first thing that stops you isn't large-scale battles; it's how to generate interesting content for that huge world.
No, mainframes wouldn't particularly help with the "one world" problem.
First, you're correct - the main problem is actually content creation as I previously posted.
Second, if you peel back the "gaming" facade and just look at it in terms of software engineering, an MMO world is a pretty standard distributed computing problem. A stateless problem like, say, a web search engine can be easily partitioned to run on commodity hardware. An MMO world is a stateful problem, so it's not as easy to partition, but it can still be done if you're smart and careful. Most (all?) MMOs partition on the basis of locality in the world (I'm near a few other players and far away from all the rest). The global state needs to be kept reasonably consistent but because it's a game it has far more wiggle room than something like the NASDAQ. The point is that an MMO world benefits more from the cheap scalability of a large farm of commodity servers than it would from keeping everything together on a huge mainframe.
Of course the partitioning approach breaks down if every player in the whole virtual world decides to congregate together in the same location. The answer is usually "don't do that". Eve is somewhat unique in that regard because they encourage extremely large PvP battles in a single system, and they've been struggling to support that on their hardware. But if you can avoid having to support that particular scenario, then having one huge virtual world is mostly not a tech problem.
I see this kind of thing pop up on a regular basis, and it always missed the point. This isn't a technology problem! Speaking as someone who's actually worked on multiple massively-multiplayer games, once you've got the server tech to support 10,000 people on a server cluster, there aren't a lot of technical obstacles to scaling that up to 8,000,000 people. Every part of the server cluster can be scaled out more or less infinitely if you apply the correct (and already well-known) engineering solutions. And money, of course.
It's actually a content production problem. If you're going to put 8,000,000 people into a single virtual world, you have to have places for them all to go and not be horribly overcrowded. Ideally you want all those places to be unique, interesting, and compelling to play. The fundamental problem is that we simply don't know how to create that much content. Hand-crafted content is far too slow and expensive to produce at that scale, and auto-generated content is repetitive and boring. Eve Online manages to hold 200,000 players in a single server cluster environment only because all of its environments are the same random-generated solar systems. Once you've seen four or five systems in Eve, you've seen them all. Fortunately Eve's strength doesn't rely on the environments, it relies on PVP action. WoW couldn't get away with that.
And there's a reason for your reason, too. What's the main line of business for every single company you listed as OSS supporters? Hardware. If those companies write and distribute software, it's mostly in order to encourage better sales of their hardware. If they can get the OSS community to do that work instead of paying for it, then so much the better.
Now, what's Microsoft's main line of business? Software. What's Microsoft going to sell if all software is OSS? Nothing. That's why they oppose OSS, and those other companies support it.
You're right - not every Frontpage web component is Microsoft-branded and creates an association between the page content and MS in the reader's mind. However, many of them are. There's a bCentral banner ad control. There's an Expedia map control. There's an MSN search control. There's an MSNBC headline control.
If someone creates a web site with objectionable material - say, praising last week's terrorist actions - and plasters those Microsoft web controls all over the page, people who read that page will see Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft everywhere they look. Someone will call the news media, and the next thing you know, there are reports that Microsoft supports terrorism. If you think that's ridiculous, just think back to the wingdings episode, which I see has been revived again due to last week's events. You still think people wouldn't stoop to spreading ridiculous, out-of-context, warped FUD like that? See this link.
If you step back from the legalese that inevitably accompanies a document like a license agreement and ask yourself, "What are they TRYING to say?", it's obvious that they're not trying to restrict the types of content that people may produce. All they're trying to do is prevent implied endorsement of objectionable content by use of Microsoft-branded controls. Any attempt to read it differently probably demonstrates an over-active paranoia at work.
Yes, exactly. And note that in the text of the license, it doesn't exclude only sites that disparage MS, but also sites that contain racist content, pornography, etc, etc.
So why did MS include this restriction? So that elements that are visibly linked to Microsoft (the Frontpage logo, the MSNBC news ticker, etc) are not associated in reader's minds with content that Microsoft would rather not be associated with. Or to say it another way, MS doesn't want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that they actually endorse or support objectionable content.
The license does NOT restrict in any way what you can publish with Frontpage! It merely restricts visible elements (server-side controls and such) from being associated with objectionable content. And that seems pretty reasonable to me.
Do you suppose that CmdrTaco will update the headline to make it more accurate? Naw, this is Slashdot, MS-bashing is the #1 sport, accuracy be damned.
Let me get this straight - the problem, as you describe it, is that the apathetic Joe Average computer user won't get off his lazy butt and install Netscape or some other web browser because IE is already there and works decently enough, so there's no motivation. In other words, the customer is too happy and too satisfied with the product.
So what's your proposed solution? I guess it would have to be one of two things.
The first would be to lobotomize the default installation of Windows or make it inconvenient to use in some way so that Joe Average is forced to get off his lazy butt and make a decision about what browser he wants to use. Make the customer feel some pain so he's got the motivation to take action. In other words, ship Windows without any browser at all.
Regardless of whether you think IE could or could not be technically separated from Windows, you have to admit that Windows does use the browser for a lot of functions (the help system, the file browser, etc.) and that it makes sense to do so. So a large part of the Windows interface depends on having a browser there from the beginning. Yeah, sure, Microsoft could simply not use HTML for any part of the operating system, forever and ever, but how does that make any technical or business sense?
So Microsoft has to say, "Sorry, you can't read the help topics. Sorry, you can't view the contents of your hard drive. At least, not until you've chosen, obtained, and installed a browser of some sort. And since we can't display help topics or allow you to browse the web right now, we can't help you fix it. You're on your own. Hope it works out for you!"
Now, tell me exactly how this is good for the consumer? Remember, we're talking about Joe Average computer user here, not some tech wizard. How's he supposed to get the browser? Can't download it, 'cause there's no easy-to-use internet connectivity. Buy it in a box? Oh, good, so now we're forcing consumers spend more money all in the name of helping them. How is selling Joe a broken, non-functioning piece of software supposed to be good for him?
The other solution is for Microsoft to ship all other competing browsers right on the CD and allow the user to choose one as he's installing Windows. This approach has multiple problems. First, ever heard of bloat-ware? Everyone's always complaining about how big and fat Windows is. Can you imagine the groans and complaints if Microsoft had to include fifteen different browsers? Which brings up a related point; who chooses which browsers get to ship with Windows? Does anyone get in just for the asking? Where does it end? Which leads to yet another problem; who's responsible for testing all the interactions between the various browsers and Windows? Remember, HTML isn't just some optional component that Windows can do without. If the browser is slow, or is incompatible, or doesn't support certain tags, and the user chooses to install it, it's like cutting off a leg. Windows isn't going anywhere fast. So now Microsoft can't even control the quality and behavior of its own products. (Yeah, some people question the quality of Microsoft's products anyway, but at least right now it's Microsoft's responsibility to improve or screw up as they see fit.)
Given all of those issues, I don't see how the current situation is all that bad. Windows ships with one well-tested browser that's guaranteed to work well in the Windows user interface. If certain customers would rather use another browser for surfing the web, then they're absolutely free to install another one. IE continues to be used for the Windows interface, and the other browser is used for web surfing. If the user is satisfied with IE for web browsing, then he doesn't have to do anything. Everything just works right out of the box. How is this bad?
It's said that Open Source software is written by people with an itch to scratch. Alternative browsers are installed on Windows by people with an itch to scratch. It seems to me that you're complaining that not enough people have an itch. Where I come from, that's usually considered a good sign, not a bad one.
Have you priced the wholesale value of the hardware components that are going into the XBox? Microsoft will lose money on each hardware sale - probably well in excess of $100 a box, and probably about $3-4 billion (yes, with a B) overall. The idea is to make it up in game sales.
There's no way that any console maker can sell a console at a profit these days, considering the level of hardware that has to go into them and the price-point at which consumers expect them to be sold.
You're right, it's just a twist on in vitro fertilization. But it's also different, in that for the first time, it allows unlimited duplication of a particular genetic code. I believe that in the long term this will have the same effect on the value of human life as it's currently having on the value of intellectual property. We can debate whether or not this is a good thing, but the fact is, society is in for some radical changes.
Or to say it another way, I think there's quite a bit of significance in the commoditization of human beings. If you can stamp out as many copies of a particular genetic code as you care to make, it inevitably reduces the value of each individual copy, just the same as counterfeiting money reduces the value of the real thing. We talk about how software can be free as in speech and free as in beer, but do we really want free humans? (Yeah, I know I'm throwing meat into the shark pool here, but it's an interesting analogy, regardless of your opinion.)
One long-term ethical problem will be that clones will tend to be regarded more as property rather than people with full human rights. You said it yourself - "What if there is a fad for clones of some famous person, and everybody wants to have one?" The way you phrased this implies that a clone of a famous person might be a collectible item, like Pokemon or baseball cards or something. You may not have meant it that way, but I read that sentence and thought, "Geez, it's already starting!"
And while many people have brought up the issue of expectations, and other people have dismissed it, I really think it's a big deal. I mean, most people aren't going to have a clone made just for the heck of it. Most people who would fork out $50,000 for a clone have a very specific end product in mind. Otherwise, why not just adopt? It's cheaper and easier.
We have enough problems with yuppie parents placing impossible expectations on their children. What if those people had their expectations reinforced by some cloning outfit that promised, "Satisfaction or your money back!" What kind of pressure does that place on the kid as he's growing up? What kind of struggles with self-image and self-worth is he going to endure if he doesn't measure up to his parent's expectations? What kind of value does that assign to the kid if he doesn't perform as promised? Can he be returned for a refund? Why not?
Call me a Luddite, but I don't think our current notions of human rights will be able to withstand the next 100 years. I agree that it probably can't be stopped. God knows we've charged ahead with every technology we've ever come across, consequences be damned. But I don't think this one is going to be a good thing.
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No, he's saying that the optimal solution without patents would be to sit around waiting for someone else to dump money into developing new techniques, then trivially scoop them up and use them yourself. No one would be left in the dust. Unfortunately in that kind of situation the company that dumped money into developing new techniques gets absolutely nothing for their money because they can't leave anyone in the dust. The end result is that no one bothers to invest money into developing new techniques because there's no competitive advantage to do so.
The open-source model works well for ancillary tools where the people contributing to them and using them base more proprietory value-add businesses on top of them. Everyone contributes, everyone benefits. It's not clear to me how open-source R&D works when the topic of research *is* your business.
They didn't add programmers to a late project, they added programmers to a bunch of small, self-contained projects that hadn't been started yet. That's a very different thing.
The point of Fred Brook's argument is that if you take a project that's already late, that means it already has systemic problems of one type or another (or likely, several types at once). Adding bodies without solving the systemic problems just makes those problems grow, not go away. That's not the situation this company had and that's not what they did. Saying they "busted the mythical man-month" is just trolling.
So if a single magnestar can produce a truly massive gamma ray blast just by displacing its crust by a couple of centimeters http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/12/27/1639207/Fifth-Anniversary-of-a-Cosmic-Onslaught, what happens when two super-massive black holes finally merge?
But if your neighbors are taking the fruits of their neighbors' labor to supply themselves, then the whole system becomes fair again.
I think that's called a Ponzi scheme.
Where have the glaciers gone?
My city of residence was covered by massive glaciers not too long ago by geologic standards. My house is built on a big pile of glacial till. I'm happy my area is warmer now than it was.
It's not a simple matter of true/false, either/or, all or nothing. People to reduce the problem to those terms are making it impossible to have rational discussion.
Yes, climate temperatures fluctuate with or without our influence. Yes, human influence is large enough and pervasive enough to alter those fluctuations. Yes, some areas of the world will benefit from further warming. Yes, some areas of the world are already at the limit of habitation/productivity because of warm temperatures and further warming may ruin them. Yes, it's always better to pollute less and have less man-made impact on the environment if we have a choice about it. Yes, we will someday run out of useful oil reserves. Yes, significantly changing our behavior may cost trillions of dollars and hurt many people. Yes, making those changes may leave us better off politically and financially in the long term.
These things are all true. Some of these facts are in tension with other facts. No simple solutions exist. We need a complex, nuanced solution. Unfortunately in these days of conservative vs. liberal sound-bite-bashing, it's impossible to discuss any complex solutions. The only choices we seem to have are "environmentalists are total frauds, burn all the oil you want" and "the world is about to end unless we impose a fascist state to dictate every detail of our lifestyles".
Come on now, where's the "defectivebydesign" tag on this story? You know you want to, you're just afraid!
The freezer removes heat from the icepack and dumps it into the room (plus extra, because of the work done). Then you take the icepack out of the freezer, put it in the "room cooling" device, where it takes heat from the room and puts it back into the icepack. Net result, your room is hotter than it was before. In order to get a net cooling effect, you have to dump the heat into a separate system that you don't care about (like outside). That's why air conditioners have vents to the outside.
Apparently, it's located in the same place where 10% of the features are always broken, according to TFA.
Um, gears aren't magical engery-creation devices. Gears are useful if you have a surplus of torque and want to transform it into rotational speed, or surplus of rotational speed into torque, but you still only get out of it what you put into it. In the case of the mythical lamp, the motion would be multipled by 160 but the apparent weight would be divided by 160, for the same net energy production.
So . . . what *are* the distinguishing characteristics that would allow a reasonable person to tell a proto board from a real bomb? Just curious, since it's apparently so easy.
Mass protests (or DoS attacks in software terms) are a problem that have been around for forever. People did them all the time in Ultima Online ten years ago, and I'm sure in other games before that. Shards don't exist to prevent mass protests. Shards exist because companies can only build so much content, and once they reach the limit of their abilities they have to start making copies of what they've already got if they want to sign up more subscriptions.
Like I said, the too-many-people-in-one-place problem is not the same as the why-can't-we-get-rid-of-shards problem. The too-many-people-in-one-place problem is *ridiculously* easy to solve if you don't mind breaking the immersion a little bit. Once X number of people enter a particular zone, just put all subsequent travelers into a queue, just like WoW does for logging in to busy shards. You could even wrap some fiction around it by having a big gate open and close and guards standing there yelling, "Halt!" There, done. If you don't want to sit in the queue, then cancel out and go somewhere else. (And you *can* go somewhere else because you have smart game designers who made sure there were multiple points of access for any important resources in the game. Right? Right?)
It's not even like that's a particularly artificial solution. In the US, most large meeting rooms in public buildings have little signs stating, "Maximum Occupancy 254". We have to do crowd control in real life, too.
Don't misunderstand my argument. I'm not saying that MMO server tech is perfect and doesn't need any improvement. Of course it would be nice if we could handle many more people in one virtual location than most games can now. Huge battles with multiple thousands of people all fighting each other at once would be great! However, we already know how to do that. It's not some mysterious unsolved problem in computer science. It's just that most game companies choose not to solve it because the solution is usually very expensive, and it's way cheaper to design the game so that people don't need to be (or simply aren't allowed to be) all in the same location at the same time. And my key point is: it has little to do with the presence or absence of shards.
Every six months or so there's some startup company that announces they've got this brilliant new idea for MMO server design and they're going to build a new MMO without shards and everyone will be able to play in the same world and it'll be so awesome!!! Virtually all of them crash and burn before getting off the ground because they misidentified the showstopping problem in that scenario; it's not server tech, it content production.
Yes, it does suck, which is an entirely different reason why huge virtual worlds (as opposed to smaller shards) are not as great an idea as people seem to think. The bigger the population of your shard, the fewer people have an opportunity to be movers and shakers. The long-term future of online roleplaying games will likely be to trend toward smaller groups, not larger. To use our two archtypal examples; in WoW there's some huge number of shards, and therefore there's a huge number of "the most powerful player/guild in the world". And every time they open a new shard there's a new opportunity for someone to make a name for themselves. On the other hand, if I start playing Eve (again), what realistic chance do I have of getting in on the intrigue and politics of the most powerful corps? None at all. There's no way I'll ever catch up to 200,000 people who were there before me. Eve would provide more entertainment for more people and possibly have more subscribers if they had, say, 10 shards of 20,000 players each, or even smaller.
Well, you can, but the problem there is that the vast majority of user-created content isn't very good and/or doesn't mesh together into a cohesive fiction. The model works with something like Second Life because it's doesn't claim to be an internally-consistent virtual world; it's just a random collection of virtual "stuff". There's obviously a market for that. But the vastly larger market (at least right now) is for internally-consistent virtual worlds with high production values, and it's a *lot* harder to get the community to build something like that for you on a large scale. It's been proven to work on a very small scale in text MUDs but the barrier to entry is a lot lower for text than it is for 3D. This may ultimately be the solution but right now no one knows how to do it well.
Yes, really. The "what to do when everyone in an MMO tries to pile into the same location in the world" problem is related to the "why can't we get rid shards and just have one big world" problem, but they're not the same problem.
/trade and /lfg channels between the major cities. People spread out because they could get their needs met elsewhere and Ironforge became managable again. The problem was solved with improved content. No technology required.
Today's sharded games already have the too-many-people-in-one-place problem. That problem is not directly caused by shards or the lack of them. For instance, Ironforge in WoW is a classic example. Everyone wanted to use the same auction house to take advantage of the large buyer/seller pool, but there was only one place you could access that auction house. Blizzard eventually solved that problem by adding more auction houses and having them all access the same shared auction list, and also by sharing the
Even if you have one huge virtual world with 8 million players, you can still sidestep the too-many-people-in-one-place problem by implementing any number of different strategies. You can go the subtle route and carefully design your content to spread people out. You can go the autocratic route and simply throttle access to over-crowded areas. There are lots of clever solutions to the problem as long as your game design isn't all about large-scale battles.
So why is a game like WoW so heavily sharded? Everyone says, "Shards are so dumb! I want to play a game like WoW where everyone is in one huge world! That would be so awesome! Why can't those stupid game developers build software like the NASDAQ does?" Well, WoW is the way it is because it's not fundamentally a hardware/software problem. It's a content problem. We know how to spread people out so there aren't overcrowded areas. The showstopping problem is where to spread them out to.
WoW has some ridiculous number of quests in their world. (I lost track but it's in the thousands, I believe.) They've invested several years and probably over 100 million of dollars to build that world. Now you want them to scale up that content production by two or three orders of magnitude just so that everyone can play in the same virtual world? It ain't going to happen with the current state of the art in content production.
If your game design is all about large-scale battles (*cough*Eve*cough*) then you have an additional problem to solve, and yes, that will require a technology solution of some kind. But even then you'll still have the content-generation problem to go along with it. Games based entirely on space travel get kind of a magic free pass in this regard because everyone expects space to be big, empty, and largely the same no matter where you look. But if you want to do any other kind of genre then you're going to get stopped cold and the first thing that stops you isn't large-scale battles; it's how to generate interesting content for that huge world.
No, mainframes wouldn't particularly help with the "one world" problem.
First, you're correct - the main problem is actually content creation as I previously posted.
Second, if you peel back the "gaming" facade and just look at it in terms of software engineering, an MMO world is a pretty standard distributed computing problem. A stateless problem like, say, a web search engine can be easily partitioned to run on commodity hardware. An MMO world is a stateful problem, so it's not as easy to partition, but it can still be done if you're smart and careful. Most (all?) MMOs partition on the basis of locality in the world (I'm near a few other players and far away from all the rest). The global state needs to be kept reasonably consistent but because it's a game it has far more wiggle room than something like the NASDAQ. The point is that an MMO world benefits more from the cheap scalability of a large farm of commodity servers than it would from keeping everything together on a huge mainframe.
Of course the partitioning approach breaks down if every player in the whole virtual world decides to congregate together in the same location. The answer is usually "don't do that". Eve is somewhat unique in that regard because they encourage extremely large PvP battles in a single system, and they've been struggling to support that on their hardware. But if you can avoid having to support that particular scenario, then having one huge virtual world is mostly not a tech problem.
I see this kind of thing pop up on a regular basis, and it always missed the point. This isn't a technology problem! Speaking as someone who's actually worked on multiple massively-multiplayer games, once you've got the server tech to support 10,000 people on a server cluster, there aren't a lot of technical obstacles to scaling that up to 8,000,000 people. Every part of the server cluster can be scaled out more or less infinitely if you apply the correct (and already well-known) engineering solutions. And money, of course.
It's actually a content production problem. If you're going to put 8,000,000 people into a single virtual world, you have to have places for them all to go and not be horribly overcrowded. Ideally you want all those places to be unique, interesting, and compelling to play. The fundamental problem is that we simply don't know how to create that much content. Hand-crafted content is far too slow and expensive to produce at that scale, and auto-generated content is repetitive and boring. Eve Online manages to hold 200,000 players in a single server cluster environment only because all of its environments are the same random-generated solar systems. Once you've seen four or five systems in Eve, you've seen them all. Fortunately Eve's strength doesn't rely on the environments, it relies on PVP action. WoW couldn't get away with that.
Now, what's Microsoft's main line of business? Software. What's Microsoft going to sell if all software is OSS? Nothing. That's why they oppose OSS, and those other companies support it.
Hey, how about that! CmdrTaco did update the article!
If someone creates a web site with objectionable material - say, praising last week's terrorist actions - and plasters those Microsoft web controls all over the page, people who read that page will see Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft everywhere they look. Someone will call the news media, and the next thing you know, there are reports that Microsoft supports terrorism. If you think that's ridiculous, just think back to the wingdings episode, which I see has been revived again due to last week's events. You still think people wouldn't stoop to spreading ridiculous, out-of-context, warped FUD like that? See this link.
If you step back from the legalese that inevitably accompanies a document like a license agreement and ask yourself, "What are they TRYING to say?", it's obvious that they're not trying to restrict the types of content that people may produce. All they're trying to do is prevent implied endorsement of objectionable content by use of Microsoft-branded controls. Any attempt to read it differently probably demonstrates an over-active paranoia at work.
So why did MS include this restriction? So that elements that are visibly linked to Microsoft (the Frontpage logo, the MSNBC news ticker, etc) are not associated in reader's minds with content that Microsoft would rather not be associated with. Or to say it another way, MS doesn't want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that they actually endorse or support objectionable content.
The license does NOT restrict in any way what you can publish with Frontpage! It merely restricts visible elements (server-side controls and such) from being associated with objectionable content. And that seems pretty reasonable to me.
Do you suppose that CmdrTaco will update the headline to make it more accurate? Naw, this is Slashdot, MS-bashing is the #1 sport, accuracy be damned.
So what's your proposed solution? I guess it would have to be one of two things.
The first would be to lobotomize the default installation of Windows or make it inconvenient to use in some way so that Joe Average is forced to get off his lazy butt and make a decision about what browser he wants to use. Make the customer feel some pain so he's got the motivation to take action. In other words, ship Windows without any browser at all.
Regardless of whether you think IE could or could not be technically separated from Windows, you have to admit that Windows does use the browser for a lot of functions (the help system, the file browser, etc.) and that it makes sense to do so. So a large part of the Windows interface depends on having a browser there from the beginning. Yeah, sure, Microsoft could simply not use HTML for any part of the operating system, forever and ever, but how does that make any technical or business sense?
So Microsoft has to say, "Sorry, you can't read the help topics. Sorry, you can't view the contents of your hard drive. At least, not until you've chosen, obtained, and installed a browser of some sort. And since we can't display help topics or allow you to browse the web right now, we can't help you fix it. You're on your own. Hope it works out for you!"
Now, tell me exactly how this is good for the consumer? Remember, we're talking about Joe Average computer user here, not some tech wizard. How's he supposed to get the browser? Can't download it, 'cause there's no easy-to-use internet connectivity. Buy it in a box? Oh, good, so now we're forcing consumers spend more money all in the name of helping them. How is selling Joe a broken, non-functioning piece of software supposed to be good for him?
The other solution is for Microsoft to ship all other competing browsers right on the CD and allow the user to choose one as he's installing Windows. This approach has multiple problems. First, ever heard of bloat-ware? Everyone's always complaining about how big and fat Windows is. Can you imagine the groans and complaints if Microsoft had to include fifteen different browsers? Which brings up a related point; who chooses which browsers get to ship with Windows? Does anyone get in just for the asking? Where does it end? Which leads to yet another problem; who's responsible for testing all the interactions between the various browsers and Windows? Remember, HTML isn't just some optional component that Windows can do without. If the browser is slow, or is incompatible, or doesn't support certain tags, and the user chooses to install it, it's like cutting off a leg. Windows isn't going anywhere fast. So now Microsoft can't even control the quality and behavior of its own products. (Yeah, some people question the quality of Microsoft's products anyway, but at least right now it's Microsoft's responsibility to improve or screw up as they see fit.)
Given all of those issues, I don't see how the current situation is all that bad. Windows ships with one well-tested browser that's guaranteed to work well in the Windows user interface. If certain customers would rather use another browser for surfing the web, then they're absolutely free to install another one. IE continues to be used for the Windows interface, and the other browser is used for web surfing. If the user is satisfied with IE for web browsing, then he doesn't have to do anything. Everything just works right out of the box. How is this bad?
It's said that Open Source software is written by people with an itch to scratch. Alternative browsers are installed on Windows by people with an itch to scratch. It seems to me that you're complaining that not enough people have an itch. Where I come from, that's usually considered a good sign, not a bad one.
There's no way that any console maker can sell a console at a profit these days, considering the level of hardware that has to go into them and the price-point at which consumers expect them to be sold.
Or to say it another way, I think there's quite a bit of significance in the commoditization of human beings. If you can stamp out as many copies of a particular genetic code as you care to make, it inevitably reduces the value of each individual copy, just the same as counterfeiting money reduces the value of the real thing. We talk about how software can be free as in speech and free as in beer, but do we really want free humans? (Yeah, I know I'm throwing meat into the shark pool here, but it's an interesting analogy, regardless of your opinion.)
One long-term ethical problem will be that clones will tend to be regarded more as property rather than people with full human rights. You said it yourself - "What if there is a fad for clones of some famous person, and everybody wants to have one?" The way you phrased this implies that a clone of a famous person might be a collectible item, like Pokemon or baseball cards or something. You may not have meant it that way, but I read that sentence and thought, "Geez, it's already starting!"
And while many people have brought up the issue of expectations, and other people have dismissed it, I really think it's a big deal. I mean, most people aren't going to have a clone made just for the heck of it. Most people who would fork out $50,000 for a clone have a very specific end product in mind. Otherwise, why not just adopt? It's cheaper and easier.
We have enough problems with yuppie parents placing impossible expectations on their children. What if those people had their expectations reinforced by some cloning outfit that promised, "Satisfaction or your money back!" What kind of pressure does that place on the kid as he's growing up? What kind of struggles with self-image and self-worth is he going to endure if he doesn't measure up to his parent's expectations? What kind of value does that assign to the kid if he doesn't perform as promised? Can he be returned for a refund? Why not?
Call me a Luddite, but I don't think our current notions of human rights will be able to withstand the next 100 years. I agree that it probably can't be stopped. God knows we've charged ahead with every technology we've ever come across, consequences be damned. But I don't think this one is going to be a good thing.