WHat the hell is immersion anyway? I never feel like I'm a character in any game- I'm me. I'm playing a game. I don't want to feel more like I'm a pretend character, I want the gameplay mechanics to be more fun to use and the strategy level/difficulty level to be correct. If that's there, I have fun. If its not, trying to make me think I am the character won't help.
Immersion doesn't mean "I have forgotten that this is a game and I now believe that I'm Bob the Dwarf."
Immersion means "Holy shit, it's 4 AM, when did that happen?"
I know how to read a map just fine. I used to drive all over the place with nothing but a map. Drove halfway across the country... All through Canada...
But I still got a GPS. A GPS will show points of interest, that a map won't. And it can announce when my next turn is coming up, instead of me trying to glance back and forth between a map and the road.
I still carry a road atlas everywhere I go. And I've got an assortment of maps of more local areas and bigger cities I might actually wind up in. But they're generally relegated to the trunk these days, and only come out once in a while.
GPS isn't the problem.. The problem is that people don't get out, don't explore, don't learn the area around them.
Used to be that if you were lost you could walk into pretty much any gas station and get halfway-decent directions. Used to be pretty much any random denizen of a town would be able to point you towards the highway, or a restaurant, or a hotel, or a school, or whatever. That is no longer true.
We've got a new employee who grew up in this town. Lived here his whole life, except for four years of college elsewhere. I grew up 1,500 miles away from here and have only lived here for the last 10 years or so. I know more about the local area than he does. He didn't know where the civic center was. He didn't know where one of the schools was. We generally have to give him very specific directions when he goes out on a call.
The key problem, as I see it, is that folks just don't get out of their house anymore. And if they do, it's a simple trip from point A to point B, usually with directions from mapquest or a GPS routing them there.
Folks don't wander the streets. Folks don't pay attention to the scenery around them. Folks don't have a feeling for the community they live in.
There's "the inside of my house" and "everywhere else."
Technology grows, changes, advances - this is especially true in IT. If you go back a dozen years or so there was no way in hell you'd be able to run a word processor through a web page.
In the field of computers, technology also forgets things and loses major winning things, and goes off on weird stupid side-trips.
The GUIs in browsers, and their performance, is not suitable for a wide class of applications. I am familar with Google apps and am not especially impressed by them.
Distributed storage and other web services are nice, but should not necessarily be tied to a conventional browser.
Just about every single response to my post has been along the lines of "I'm looking at current hardware and software offerings and it's crap, I can't imagine things getting any better." Does nobody have any imagination anymore?
Look at the early versions of Windows, or Mac OS, or X-Windows... They were crap too.
Think back to when a computer filled an entire building and could only do simple math.
Certainly, right now, the web isn't a terribly good platform for applications. And I'm not debating that. But look at the Google Apps and compare that to what was on the web back in 1999. In only 10 years there's been incredible progress. To claim that there's no possible way the web will ever be a good platform for applications is just silly.
These days it seems absurd to talk about running Photoshop or AutoCAD through a web browser... But in another dozen years it may make perfect sense
Maybe. But I'd bet that the most computation-expensive apps will always run locally. It just doesn't make sense to add the extra round-trip to a server.
Now, maybe they'll run locally inside the browser, at the rate the Javascript engines are speeding up. We'll see.
That's assuming that you've got enough hardware to run something computation-expensive in front of you.
What if your multifunction cellphone/webcamera was able to use a fully-featured web-ish version of Photoshop?
I'm not really suggesting that it'd be a good idea to try to run Photoshop on some tiny little 3" screen... But isn't the whole point of moving things onto the server to at least partially alleviate the workload of the client? So you can have absolutely crappy hardware in front of you, and still get real work done.
The web is email, ftp, live video, instant messaging, word processing, photo galleries, forums, flash, games, television... You get the idea.
Close. Technically all that is the Internet, of which the "web" is a part. Now many parts of the Internet (a small number you enumerated) may be accessable via the web, but most are still separate parts. I've used the Internet since it was the ARPAnet, and while the great majority of its users now interact with it mainly via their browser, the "web" is but a small part of the whole in actuality.
Incorrect.
I'm not talking about HTTP. I'm talking about the web.
The web is no longer a single protocol or standard. It isn't just HTML transmitted over HTTP. The web is the collection of things that a person can do/view/use/get with a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Arguing that the web is only HTTP is like claiming that a human being is only skin, because everything else is hidden underneath.
I'm not claiming that the web is the Internet. The two are not the same thing. They are not synonymous. I can fire up a game of EVE: Online and play with other people over the Internet without ever touching my web browser.
But watching a video on YouTube is part of the web, and sending an email with Gmail is part of the web, and downloading drivers from Dell is part of the web, and chatting with someone on MySpace is part of the web - regardless of what underlying protocols actually make it happen.
So you're saying that usage of the word Web will expand over time to include lots of other things that aren't really Web? And then the common useage of the word will become accepted? No shit Sherlock. It's not a new phenomenon, but it doesn't actually change anything, and people who understand the difference between Web (HTML/HTTP) and RTSP or FTP will continue to use them appropriately.
Nope, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that if I need a driver update for my video card I go to a website, do a search, click a button, and download it. It does not matter to me what particular protocol is used behind the scenes to actually transfer the file. You can pick whichever one makes the most sense for your particular infrastructure. You could use an HTTP transfer, or FTP, or BitTorrent, or one of those weird custom downloader applications like Adobe. But, ultimately, the way I'm actually acquiring the file is over the web.
The web isn't replacing those protocols... And the word isn't being used incorrectly... The web is becoming an abstraction layer.
In general day-to-day use, it really doesn't much matter what filesystem I've got on my HDD. Sure, each one has its strengths and weaknesses... But as far as basic utility goes, the OS abstracts all that away from me. All I see is a directory full of files. I can open them with whatever I want, save them, copy them, rename them... And it really doesn't much matter whether the disk is NTFS, FAT, EXT, ZFS, a RAID, a SAN... All that underlying stuff is abstracted away.
No, we're not going back to the dumb terminal days. It's to useful to be able to do stuff without some third party dictating if/when/how we can do it.
I've got a lot of clients who are trying very hard to get back to the dumb terminal days. They're using terminal services and virtual machines to try to centralize things, instead of having data and applications floating around on individual workstations.
I've also got a number of home users who are happily using on-line data storage or backup solutions so they don't have to worry about losing data if their hardware dies.
Some stuff will move but it's going to be the same kind of non-revolution that Web 2.0 has been for normal people.
You may not have noticed... But the whole web 2.0 thing is kind of a big deal.
A big enough deal that traditional print newspapers are having a very hard time making money these days.
During the recent conflict in Iran about the only information available came from blogs, Twitter, and like kinds of web 2.0 sources.
Why? the web is not a good model to develop for, from a developer's perspective. In fact, it sucks bigtime. It's a bunch of hacks hacked toghether. The only advantages are portability (and, as you mentioned, you can have that with a local LAMP stack), and, from a vendor's point of view, control. Now from the user's point of view, that same control is a downside. If you think of open source software, the same distinction applies, and I haven't seen this kill off open source.
You're underestimating the laziness of end-users and the convenience factor.
There are some wonderfully full-featured mail clients out there, but webmail is still popular. There are some great free word processors, but folks still use Google Docs.
If all your applications and data live on the web, your client becomes truly disposable. That's what makes thin clients and terminal servers so popular. If a home user can move all their data and applications on-line, so they lose absolutely nothing when moving to a new piece of hardware or reloading the old one, they're going to jump all over it.
Keep in mind, I'm not necessarily suggesting that in a corporate environment you'd be handing your data over to someone else. Today you buy a license for some software and install it on a few dozen machines... Maybe in a few years you'll buy a license for some software and install it on a single server, and then log in to it from dozens of machines running a web browser.
The obvious benefit is to centralize storage and processing. You don't need to worry about Joe backing up the documents on his workstation because they already live on the server. You don't need to buy beefy workstations for every employee, and then see much of that power go unused, because they're all running off the server.
We're already seeing this centralization happen with terminal servers, virtual machines, and SANs. Moving it to the web would just be a means of standardizing the UI.
Why? when a cheapo, low end machine will have enough computing power to run all the fat apps anyways? I'm not saying that noone will make the transition, I can see the software maintenance cost advantage in a controlled/corporate setting, but to say that web apps will wipe out desktop apps is way wrong IMO.
Assuming, of course, that you can still get your hands on a cheapo low end machine to run all the fat apps. How easy is it to find one of those vacuum-tube based monstrosities these days? Do they have mainframes at your local Best Buy?
Folks are going to manufacture and sell whatever it is that people are buying. If everyone's buying cheap little netbooks that do little more that provide a web browser, that's what will be available.
Most software has been commoditized by open source (and other freeware), and the "oh but now it's on the cloud" argument isn't going to unspill that jar of milk.
And now we can commoditize the whole mess. Doesn't matter what kind of computer you have... Doesn't matter what browser you're running... Doesn't matter what OS you have... As long as you can load a web page, you can run the software. Even from your cell phone.
The web isn't what it used to be. The days when the web was mostly a collection of static pages are long gone. The web is dynamic, interactive, and user-driven. The web is email, ftp, live video, instant messaging, word processing, photo galleries, forums, flash, games, television... You get the idea.
Web, you keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Of the technologies you listed above, the following: email, ftp, and instant messaging all fall squarely under the term "Internet", not web (although some of them have a web front end grafted on). Arguably, live video, games, and television fall into the same category.
But that is exactly my point. The web isn't just http/html anymore.
Folks don't care that their email is actually transmitted from one server to another through SMTP. They just go to Yahoo or Google or Hotmail or whatever and type out a message. They don't care that the file is actually downloading using FTP, they just click on a link and watch a progress bar. They don't care what protocol GTalk or MySpaceIM use, they just type words and they show up on the other end. They don't care that their data is sitting in a MySQL or Oracle or MS SQL database somewhere... They just click a button, and their pictures show up. They don't care where a server is physically located, or what OS it is running, they just type in a URL and there it is!
This is nonsense. Web based applications are certainly only going to become more common... but your implication that soon everything will be over the web is silly. The right tool for the right job my friend.
I never said anything about soon.
Nor did I say that everything would be run over the web.
But technology marches on. Just as it now seems ludicrous to install a building-sized monstrosity full of vacuum tubes to add a few numbers together... It may some day seem ludicrous to tie your software and data to a single piece of hardware.
Yes, things move on. But please be aware that there is a whole class of applications that are simply inappropriate for cloud computing. For example, try any of the existing web based image editors on a large image (the sort a professional photographer routinely works with 35MB+). Although the server on the other end of the connection might be able to do the requested image manipulation, transferring a full screen window's worth of the transformed data (~4MB) over the network means this app is inherently slow compared to running it locally on even a laptop of modest speed (where displaying a full screen window from a buffer is essentially instantaneous).
Sure, currently doing editing of a large image on the web doesn't make sense. For exactly the reasons you outlined.
But 10 years ago it didn't make much sense to run a word processor on the web.
Things change.
It would seem that the logical, non-hype direction in which to move is a hybrid where some computing, the results of which are *not* large data sets, would be done remotely (i.e., in the "cloud") while computing which results in large data that must be displayed on the client (e.g., large image editing) is done locally. This suggests that augmenting existing desktop platforms with more cloud capabilities, or augmenting existing web-app platforms with local computing capabilities would be the proper superset that covers all bases.
And that is, more or less, what I'm suggesting. Not necessarily your specifics here... But that the web will evolve. That your client will evolve. And in another 10 years the web won't look a thing like it does today.
And, at that nebulous future point, it may make perfect sense to edit a 35+ MB file through a web app.
I'm not certain that's really something you get a choice in.
Really? So who is going to stop me from running all those applications that are already available out there (and open source) on my own machine? I will not adopt a web app unless it has advantages large enough to balance out the fact that it needs internet connectivity to work AND that any information I put in it is irrevocably out of my control.
Certainly you can run whatever the hell you want. And if you're content with your hardware and software as-is then you really don't need to worry about any of this. But, ultimately... In a long-term kind of view... Technology is going to do what technology does - change.
I'm sure there were sysadmins complaining that they didn't want everything to be a goddamn workstation app back in the day. I'm sure they were very happy with their mainframes and their teletypes.
Now, mainframes still have their place, and I'm not going to claim they're useless. There are certain applications where that kind of reliability is absolutely necessary. But the days when absolutely everything (including simple email and spreadsheet applications) ran off a mainframe are long gone.
Technology marches on.
In a few years you may have one hell of a time finding a boxed copy of software to purchase. You might have a very hard time finding source code to download and compile. And even if you run it off your local machine, you might find all your software running through a web UI sitting on top of a local LAMP stack.
I'm not saying this is a certainty. And I'm not saying the IT police are going to break down your door and haul away your legacy equipment. But in 10 or 20 years it might be very difficult to buy a computer that isn't just a glorified thin client.
How is this going to be different from other Linux distros and associated GUI revamp projects that have sprung up promising "we're going to be better than Windows! Really!" over the years?
Google.
Google has the manpower, money, mindset, motivation, and brand-name to potentially make this work.
From what I hear, there is this little prerequisite called "internet access".
For testing purposes I routinely run web applications from my local machine.
While this product is currently non-existent and talking about capabilities doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, there's no good reason why you wouldn't be able to run web applications from local storage if necessary.
The web isn't what it used to be. The days when the web was mostly a collection of static pages are long gone. The web is dynamic, interactive, and user-driven. The web is email, ftp, live video, instant messaging, word processing, photo galleries, forums, flash, games, television... You get the idea.
I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app.
I'm not certain that's really something you get a choice in.
Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application.
Technology grows, changes, advances - this is especially true in IT. If you go back a dozen years or so there was no way in hell you'd be able to run a word processor through a web page. Just plain was not going to happen. Now we've got Google Docs, which has some issues, but mostly works.
These days it seems absurd to talk about running Photoshop or AutoCAD through a web browser... But in another dozen years it may make perfect sense.
I don't like the Chrome browser and I don't need an OS named Chrome that is actually Linux with a lame web browser bolted on as the front end.
Would you feel better if it was Apple announcing the Safari OS? Or Mozilla announcing the Firefox OS? Or Microsoft announcing the Internet Explorer OS?
Google does search very well, but I've hated most of their other stuff. (Google Earth is one exception) I expect no different from this.
Other people, obviously, disagree.
I'm not a big fan of Google Earth. It doesn't seem to have much of a point to me. I do enjoy Gmail though, and I make use Google Docs from time to time. Enough people out there are unimpressed with Google's search to keep folks like Yahoo and Ask in business.
The fact of the matter is that an awful lot of work is done through a web UI these days. And if you can replace a full-blown computer with some kind of thin client you can, potentially, save a lot of time and money on maintenance. This is just a web-based thin client, nothing more or less.
And if Google sees success with its Chrome OS you can certainly expect to see competition appear. There's nothing preventing you from rolling out your own Linux+Firefox/Opera/whatever thin client.
One solution to this is, of course, to design the PvE encounters so that a variety of different skills are needed, and _different players have to have them_. Sure, you need a player who's good at fireballs, but he needs to be standing back and handling the horde of little monsters that will heal the boss monster if they get too close, while your guy who's good with his sword and shield gets up close and finishes off the boss. Or other scenarios like that where you need two or more players who are good with just one or two different skills, rather than one ultra-powerful player who can do everything. And each encounter will require a different combination of skills. Some skills will be useless in some encounters; sometimes a particular skill will basically be essential. Design the game to encourage specialisation and cooperation rather than individual players learning everything.
That doesn't exactly address what I was referring to... I'm not talking about a single player doing everything, but rather a perfect build for every player to use.
If you look back to something like Diablo I or Dungeon Siege (both of which allowed just about any character to learn just about any skill) you'll see that perfect builds appeared. Folks figured out that if you trained X points in this and Y points in that and Z points in something else, you did the absolute best DPS for your time/money/effort.
For your scenario:
Sure, you need a player who's good at fireballs, but he needs to be standing back and handling the horde of little monsters that will heal the boss monster if they get too close, while your guy who's good with his sword and shield gets up close and finishes off the boss.
You'd see both characters with 12 points in fireballs and 3 points in shields and 5 points in swords - or whatever. One of them would be dealing with the boss while one of them deal with the little guys. But they'd be playing essentially the same character because their skills would be identical.
Do not underestimate MMOG players. They'll analyze every single boss fight, every single monster, every single skill. They'll come out with the mathematically perfect skillset for any collection of encounters.
And each encounter will require a different combination of skills. Some skills will be useless in some encounters; sometimes a particular skill will basically be essential.
This is very difficult to do. You cannot exclude anyone from any encounter. Nor can you make any encounter rely on a single skill or ability. If you do that, people get excluded. Joe can't go because you need someone who can use a shield. Suzy has to go because she's the only person who can heal. Which, ultimately, encourages people to learn as many useful skills as possible, so they don't get excluded - which again means everyone is playing the same character.
Use your sword a lot? Sword skill goes up. Switch to a gun? Over time you lose your swords skill...
Unfortunately, systems where players can 'lose' tend to be less popular.
I remember EQ... The first time I de-leveled... "Welcome back to level ##"...so frustrating.
I'd be fine with skill decay though. Don't use it, it goes away. Makes sense, as long as the decay wasn't crazy-fast. Of course, you'd still wind up with some kind of "perfect" build... People would just have to remember to use both their swords and guns periodically, to keep them from decaying.
Relatedly, I've seen a growing trend of players saying that such games don't really take much skill at all. The standard argument is that it just boils down to "knowing how to move" or "knowing when to hit your buttons." In the MMO community, people often make references to FPS or RTS games, saying they have a higher skill cap. However, the same complaints also come from within those communities, with comments like "you just need to know the map," or "it's all about a good build order." At what point does intimate knowledge of a game's mechanics make a player skilled?
Wrong skills. They aren't talking about player skills vs. character level in game... They're talking about character's skills vs. character's level in game.
Some games use a level system. You kill rats for a while, get XP, and eventually ding you're level 2. You get more HP, you do more damage, etc.
Some games use a skill system. You swing your sword for a while, and your sword skill gets better, so you do more damage. You hide behind a shield for a while, and your shield skill gets better, so you take less damage.
Personally, I prefer a purely skill-driven system as it puts fewer restrictions on the player. You want to swing a sword and wear plate armor? Go right ahead. You change your mind and decide you want to hurl fireballs instead? Sure thing. The problem is that this almost invariably leads to some kind of "perfect" build. Someone decides that the best way to do it is to put 10 in swords, 11 in shields, and 15 in fireballs...and all of a sudden that's what everyone is playing. So you wind up with absolutely no variety. The counter to this is to make cross-training painful. Make it take enough time/effort/money/whatever to develop your sword skills that you'll have to actually choose whether you want swords or fireballs.
Player skills certainly enter into the equation... Though I don't know if I'd call them skills so much as knowledge. Someone who knows where the best place is to hunt will do better than someone who doesn't, regardless of how powerful their character is. Someone who knows what kind of damage to use against the monster will do better than someone who doesn't, regardless of how powerful their character is.
She should have been charged with cyberstalking, stalking, harassment, something. Not for violating a website's terms of service.
Harassment would probably be appropriate.
That being said, this is one of those cases where I hope the family of the victim sues her for everything she has.
Despite the outcome, what she did really wasn't that horrible.
The fact of the matter is that this girl committed suicide because a boy that she liked (who was actually not real, but she never knew that) told her that the world would be better off without her.
Yes, it's strange for a grown woman to make a MySpace (or was it FaceBook?) account just to harass a kid... But let's be realistic here - all she did is call that girl names. That kind of stuff happens on a daily basis, all over the United States. I don't see how anyone would make it through school without at least one person telling them that they should just drop dead.
So this Lori person made a fake account and said hurtful things... Would it somehow have been better if it was a real boy who was saying the hurtful things? Would it have been less fatal if it had happened in real life, instead of on-line?
My complaint isn't so much with the price as the arbitrary restrictions. If I buy XP Home and later decide I need to join that computer to a domain I need to buy a copy of XP Professional. I can't just install the right package. I'd even be willing to purchase a "domain add-on" for a reasonable price.
Instead, I have to buy a copy of XP Professional and run an install. Maybe the upgrade install will work... Maybe it wont and I'll have to start from scratch.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has no standard price. They've got discounts and deals to fit pretty much anyone and everyone - you just have to know about them. Government deals, educational deals, developer deals, big business deals...
I know much of slashdot would vehemently disagree, but for the majority of users, Windows comes 'for free' with their PC. They buy a computer from Dell or whomever and it comes with Windows, then when the buy a new PC 4 or 5 years later, it comes with Windows again. Virtually no one I know 'buys' the OS - They'll simply get a the newest / latest when they buy a new computer.
While it is certainly true that most "Joe Sixpack" home users have never actually purchased an OS... And many other people buy their OS for non-retail prices... That doesn't negate the fact that the retail pricing is excessive.
We support a lot of small/medium sized businesses, and OS licensing can be a huge expense for them. Expensive enough that it becomes cost-effective to simply replace perfectly good computers with new ones, and get the OS "for free" with the new hardware. There's something wrong with that.
Maybe $100, but that's it. An OS is basically supposed to make your computer work - not be the focus of your attention on the machine. It's supposed to more-or-less stay out of your way and let you get work done. I don't want to pay more for my OS than for the application I'm trying to run.
System Utilities should never cost more than $40.
I'd go as high as $50... But again, it's supposed to basically make your computer work and get out of the way. I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars just to keep my computer working correctly. And I sure as hell shouldn't have to pay another $50+ every year to keep getting updates... If I want the new version, I'll go out and buy it. If I just want the antivirus definitions they should be free... Or maybe some nominal fee to cover the bandwidth... $10 or so a year.
Games should never cost more than $50.
Especially not with how little gameplay you get these days... My son bought something for $60 (+tax) last week, played through it in one day over the weekend... I thought maybe he just skipped over side-quests or gave up and quit early or something... Read a review or two on-line... There's apparently about 6 hours of gameplay in the thing. WTF?!
Productivity apps can cost whatever, based on the size of their target market.
Agreed. If you actually need PhotoShop, you need PhotoShop, and it is worth your money to shell out hundreds of dollars for it. If you don't actually need PhotoShop there are plenty of perfectly good alternatives that are much cheaper if not free. The same thing goes for just about any other product... If you really need the features that Acrobat/Microsoft Office/QuickBooks/whatever offers, you can afford to pay for it. If not, use something else.
I'm glad that with Windows 7 Microsoft mostly reverted back to the kind of editions they marketed Windows XP with. It's now much more clear which one to buy when it is distinguised by Home and Professional, then Ultimate for the power user.
Personally, I'd like to see all the various flavors go away. Just sell Windows 7. Have a default load and then allow all the extra bells & whistles to be installed as add-ons.
There's no good reason why an XP/Vista/7 "Home" machine can't join a domain or run terminal services, Microsoft just decided to disable those features.
Slashdot Mirror
WHat the hell is immersion anyway? I never feel like I'm a character in any game- I'm me. I'm playing a game. I don't want to feel more like I'm a pretend character, I want the gameplay mechanics to be more fun to use and the strategy level/difficulty level to be correct. If that's there, I have fun. If its not, trying to make me think I am the character won't help.
Immersion doesn't mean "I have forgotten that this is a game and I now believe that I'm Bob the Dwarf."
Immersion means "Holy shit, it's 4 AM, when did that happen?"
It's all hype.
No smartphone is waterproof and can be easily read in direct sun while mounted to a motorcycle handlebar.
No smartphone can do what my field guide GPS can do. (Give me elevation maps... oh the iphone cant do that? sowwwy.)
No smartphone can work well on a boat at 55mph across the water and it does not interface to my autohelm.
Only a utterly complete fool would think the standalone GPS is going the way of the DoDo bird.
I think they're making the assumption that the only place a GPS is used is attached to the dashboard of a car.
I know how to read a map just fine. I used to drive all over the place with nothing but a map. Drove halfway across the country... All through Canada...
But I still got a GPS. A GPS will show points of interest, that a map won't. And it can announce when my next turn is coming up, instead of me trying to glance back and forth between a map and the road.
I still carry a road atlas everywhere I go. And I've got an assortment of maps of more local areas and bigger cities I might actually wind up in. But they're generally relegated to the trunk these days, and only come out once in a while.
GPS isn't the problem.. The problem is that people don't get out, don't explore, don't learn the area around them.
Used to be that if you were lost you could walk into pretty much any gas station and get halfway-decent directions. Used to be pretty much any random denizen of a town would be able to point you towards the highway, or a restaurant, or a hotel, or a school, or whatever. That is no longer true.
We've got a new employee who grew up in this town. Lived here his whole life, except for four years of college elsewhere. I grew up 1,500 miles away from here and have only lived here for the last 10 years or so. I know more about the local area than he does. He didn't know where the civic center was. He didn't know where one of the schools was. We generally have to give him very specific directions when he goes out on a call.
The key problem, as I see it, is that folks just don't get out of their house anymore. And if they do, it's a simple trip from point A to point B, usually with directions from mapquest or a GPS routing them there.
Folks don't wander the streets. Folks don't pay attention to the scenery around them. Folks don't have a feeling for the community they live in.
There's "the inside of my house" and "everywhere else."
The web is not the OS. The web is...the web.
The web isn't what it used to be.
Technology grows, changes, advances - this is especially true in IT. If you go back a dozen years or so there was no way in hell you'd be able to run a word processor through a web page.
In the field of computers, technology also forgets things and loses major winning things, and goes off on weird stupid side-trips.
The GUIs in browsers, and their performance, is not suitable for a wide class of applications. I am familar with Google apps and am not especially impressed by them.
Distributed storage and other web services are nice, but should not necessarily be tied to a conventional browser.
Just about every single response to my post has been along the lines of "I'm looking at current hardware and software offerings and it's crap, I can't imagine things getting any better." Does nobody have any imagination anymore?
Look at the early versions of Windows, or Mac OS, or X-Windows... They were crap too.
Think back to when a computer filled an entire building and could only do simple math.
Certainly, right now, the web isn't a terribly good platform for applications. And I'm not debating that. But look at the Google Apps and compare that to what was on the web back in 1999. In only 10 years there's been incredible progress. To claim that there's no possible way the web will ever be a good platform for applications is just silly.
Maybe. But I'd bet that the most computation-expensive apps will always run locally. It just doesn't make sense to add the extra round-trip to a server.
Now, maybe they'll run locally inside the browser, at the rate the Javascript engines are speeding up. We'll see.
That's assuming that you've got enough hardware to run something computation-expensive in front of you.
What if your multifunction cellphone/webcamera was able to use a fully-featured web-ish version of Photoshop?
I'm not really suggesting that it'd be a good idea to try to run Photoshop on some tiny little 3" screen... But isn't the whole point of moving things onto the server to at least partially alleviate the workload of the client? So you can have absolutely crappy hardware in front of you, and still get real work done.
Close. Technically all that is the Internet, of which the "web" is a part. Now many parts of the Internet (a small number you enumerated) may be accessable via the web, but most are still separate parts. I've used the Internet since it was the ARPAnet, and while the great majority of its users now interact with it mainly via their browser, the "web" is but a small part of the whole in actuality.
Incorrect.
I'm not talking about HTTP. I'm talking about the web.
The web is no longer a single protocol or standard. It isn't just HTML transmitted over HTTP. The web is the collection of things that a person can do/view/use/get with a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Arguing that the web is only HTTP is like claiming that a human being is only skin, because everything else is hidden underneath.
I'm not claiming that the web is the Internet. The two are not the same thing. They are not synonymous. I can fire up a game of EVE: Online and play with other people over the Internet without ever touching my web browser.
But watching a video on YouTube is part of the web, and sending an email with Gmail is part of the web, and downloading drivers from Dell is part of the web, and chatting with someone on MySpace is part of the web - regardless of what underlying protocols actually make it happen.
So you're saying that usage of the word Web will expand over time to include lots of other things that aren't really Web? And then the common useage of the word will become accepted? No shit Sherlock. It's not a new phenomenon, but it doesn't actually change anything, and people who understand the difference between Web (HTML/HTTP) and RTSP or FTP will continue to use them appropriately.
Nope, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that if I need a driver update for my video card I go to a website, do a search, click a button, and download it. It does not matter to me what particular protocol is used behind the scenes to actually transfer the file. You can pick whichever one makes the most sense for your particular infrastructure. You could use an HTTP transfer, or FTP, or BitTorrent, or one of those weird custom downloader applications like Adobe. But, ultimately, the way I'm actually acquiring the file is over the web.
The web isn't replacing those protocols... And the word isn't being used incorrectly... The web is becoming an abstraction layer.
In general day-to-day use, it really doesn't much matter what filesystem I've got on my HDD. Sure, each one has its strengths and weaknesses... But as far as basic utility goes, the OS abstracts all that away from me. All I see is a directory full of files. I can open them with whatever I want, save them, copy them, rename them... And it really doesn't much matter whether the disk is NTFS, FAT, EXT, ZFS, a RAID, a SAN... All that underlying stuff is abstracted away.
No, we're not going back to the dumb terminal days. It's to useful to be able to do stuff without some third party dictating if/when/how we can do it.
I've got a lot of clients who are trying very hard to get back to the dumb terminal days. They're using terminal services and virtual machines to try to centralize things, instead of having data and applications floating around on individual workstations.
I've also got a number of home users who are happily using on-line data storage or backup solutions so they don't have to worry about losing data if their hardware dies.
Some stuff will move but it's going to be the same kind of non-revolution that Web 2.0 has been for normal people.
You may not have noticed... But the whole web 2.0 thing is kind of a big deal.
A big enough deal that traditional print newspapers are having a very hard time making money these days.
During the recent conflict in Iran about the only information available came from blogs, Twitter, and like kinds of web 2.0 sources.
Why? the web is not a good model to develop for, from a developer's perspective. In fact, it sucks bigtime. It's a bunch of hacks hacked toghether. The only advantages are portability (and, as you mentioned, you can have that with a local LAMP stack), and, from a vendor's point of view, control. Now from the user's point of view, that same control is a downside. If you think of open source software, the same distinction applies, and I haven't seen this kill off open source.
You're underestimating the laziness of end-users and the convenience factor.
There are some wonderfully full-featured mail clients out there, but webmail is still popular. There are some great free word processors, but folks still use Google Docs.
If all your applications and data live on the web, your client becomes truly disposable. That's what makes thin clients and terminal servers so popular. If a home user can move all their data and applications on-line, so they lose absolutely nothing when moving to a new piece of hardware or reloading the old one, they're going to jump all over it.
Keep in mind, I'm not necessarily suggesting that in a corporate environment you'd be handing your data over to someone else. Today you buy a license for some software and install it on a few dozen machines... Maybe in a few years you'll buy a license for some software and install it on a single server, and then log in to it from dozens of machines running a web browser.
The obvious benefit is to centralize storage and processing. You don't need to worry about Joe backing up the documents on his workstation because they already live on the server. You don't need to buy beefy workstations for every employee, and then see much of that power go unused, because they're all running off the server.
We're already seeing this centralization happen with terminal servers, virtual machines, and SANs. Moving it to the web would just be a means of standardizing the UI.
Why? when a cheapo, low end machine will have enough computing power to run all the fat apps anyways? I'm not saying that noone will make the transition, I can see the software maintenance cost advantage in a controlled/corporate setting, but to say that web apps will wipe out desktop apps is way wrong IMO.
Assuming, of course, that you can still get your hands on a cheapo low end machine to run all the fat apps. How easy is it to find one of those vacuum-tube based monstrosities these days? Do they have mainframes at your local Best Buy?
Folks are going to manufacture and sell whatever it is that people are buying. If everyone's buying cheap little netbooks that do little more that provide a web browser, that's what will be available.
Most software has been commoditized by open source (and other freeware), and the "oh but now it's on the cloud" argument isn't going to unspill that jar of milk.
And now we can commoditize the whole mess. Doesn't matter what kind of computer you have... Doesn't matter what browser you're running... Doesn't matter what OS you have... As long as you can load a web page, you can run the software. Even from your cell phone.
While this product is currently non-existent
*cough*
I am aware of Google Gears. But the Chrome OS, which is what this entire discussion is about, does not yet exist.
The web isn't what it used to be. The days when the web was mostly a collection of static pages are long gone. The web is dynamic, interactive, and user-driven. The web is email, ftp, live video, instant messaging, word processing, photo galleries, forums, flash, games, television... You get the idea.
Web, you keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Of the technologies you listed above, the following: email, ftp, and instant messaging all fall squarely under the term "Internet", not web (although some of them have a web front end grafted on). Arguably, live video, games, and television fall into the same category.
But that is exactly my point. The web isn't just http/html anymore.
Folks don't care that their email is actually transmitted from one server to another through SMTP. They just go to Yahoo or Google or Hotmail or whatever and type out a message. They don't care that the file is actually downloading using FTP, they just click on a link and watch a progress bar. They don't care what protocol GTalk or MySpaceIM use, they just type words and they show up on the other end. They don't care that their data is sitting in a MySQL or Oracle or MS SQL database somewhere... They just click a button, and their pictures show up. They don't care where a server is physically located, or what OS it is running, they just type in a URL and there it is!
This is nonsense. Web based applications are certainly only going to become more common... but your implication that soon everything will be over the web is silly. The right tool for the right job my friend.
I never said anything about soon.
Nor did I say that everything would be run over the web.
But technology marches on. Just as it now seems ludicrous to install a building-sized monstrosity full of vacuum tubes to add a few numbers together... It may some day seem ludicrous to tie your software and data to a single piece of hardware.
Yes, things move on. But please be aware that there is a whole class of applications that are simply inappropriate for cloud computing. For example, try any of the existing web based image editors on a large image (the sort a professional photographer routinely works with 35MB+). Although the server on the other end of the connection might be able to do the requested image manipulation, transferring a full screen window's worth of the transformed data (~4MB) over the network means this app is inherently slow compared to running it locally on even a laptop of modest speed (where displaying a full screen window from a buffer is essentially instantaneous).
Sure, currently doing editing of a large image on the web doesn't make sense. For exactly the reasons you outlined.
But 10 years ago it didn't make much sense to run a word processor on the web.
Things change.
It would seem that the logical, non-hype direction in which to move is a hybrid where some computing, the results of which are *not* large data sets, would be done remotely (i.e., in the "cloud") while computing which results in large data that must be displayed on the client (e.g., large image editing) is done locally. This suggests that augmenting existing desktop platforms with more cloud capabilities, or augmenting existing web-app platforms with local computing capabilities would be the proper superset that covers all bases.
And that is, more or less, what I'm suggesting. Not necessarily your specifics here... But that the web will evolve. That your client will evolve. And in another 10 years the web won't look a thing like it does today.
And, at that nebulous future point, it may make perfect sense to edit a 35+ MB file through a web app.
I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app.
I'm not certain that's really something you get a choice in.
Really? So who is going to stop me from running all those applications that are already available out there (and open source) on my own machine? I will not adopt a web app unless it has advantages large enough to balance out the fact that it needs internet connectivity to work AND that any information I put in it is irrevocably out of my control.
Certainly you can run whatever the hell you want. And if you're content with your hardware and software as-is then you really don't need to worry about any of this. But, ultimately... In a long-term kind of view... Technology is going to do what technology does - change.
I'm sure there were sysadmins complaining that they didn't want everything to be a goddamn workstation app back in the day. I'm sure they were very happy with their mainframes and their teletypes.
Now, mainframes still have their place, and I'm not going to claim they're useless. There are certain applications where that kind of reliability is absolutely necessary. But the days when absolutely everything (including simple email and spreadsheet applications) ran off a mainframe are long gone.
Technology marches on.
In a few years you may have one hell of a time finding a boxed copy of software to purchase. You might have a very hard time finding source code to download and compile. And even if you run it off your local machine, you might find all your software running through a web UI sitting on top of a local LAMP stack.
I'm not saying this is a certainty. And I'm not saying the IT police are going to break down your door and haul away your legacy equipment. But in 10 or 20 years it might be very difficult to buy a computer that isn't just a glorified thin client.
How is this going to be different from other Linux distros and associated GUI revamp projects that have sprung up promising "we're going to be better than Windows! Really!" over the years?
Google.
Google has the manpower, money, mindset, motivation, and brand-name to potentially make this work.
From what I hear, there is this little prerequisite called "internet access".
For testing purposes I routinely run web applications from my local machine.
While this product is currently non-existent and talking about capabilities doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, there's no good reason why you wouldn't be able to run web applications from local storage if necessary.
The web is not the OS. The web is...the web.
The web isn't what it used to be. The days when the web was mostly a collection of static pages are long gone. The web is dynamic, interactive, and user-driven. The web is email, ftp, live video, instant messaging, word processing, photo galleries, forums, flash, games, television... You get the idea.
I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app.
I'm not certain that's really something you get a choice in.
Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application.
Technology grows, changes, advances - this is especially true in IT. If you go back a dozen years or so there was no way in hell you'd be able to run a word processor through a web page. Just plain was not going to happen. Now we've got Google Docs, which has some issues, but mostly works.
These days it seems absurd to talk about running Photoshop or AutoCAD through a web browser... But in another dozen years it may make perfect sense.
I don't like the Chrome browser and I don't need an OS named Chrome that is actually Linux with a lame web browser bolted on as the front end.
Would you feel better if it was Apple announcing the Safari OS? Or Mozilla announcing the Firefox OS? Or Microsoft announcing the Internet Explorer OS?
Google does search very well, but I've hated most of their other stuff. (Google Earth is one exception) I expect no different from this.
Other people, obviously, disagree.
I'm not a big fan of Google Earth. It doesn't seem to have much of a point to me. I do enjoy Gmail though, and I make use Google Docs from time to time. Enough people out there are unimpressed with Google's search to keep folks like Yahoo and Ask in business.
The fact of the matter is that an awful lot of work is done through a web UI these days. And if you can replace a full-blown computer with some kind of thin client you can, potentially, save a lot of time and money on maintenance. This is just a web-based thin client, nothing more or less.
And if Google sees success with its Chrome OS you can certainly expect to see competition appear. There's nothing preventing you from rolling out your own Linux+Firefox/Opera/whatever thin client.
One solution to this is, of course, to design the PvE encounters so that a variety of different skills are needed, and _different players have to have them_. Sure, you need a player who's good at fireballs, but he needs to be standing back and handling the horde of little monsters that will heal the boss monster if they get too close, while your guy who's good with his sword and shield gets up close and finishes off the boss. Or other scenarios like that where you need two or more players who are good with just one or two different skills, rather than one ultra-powerful player who can do everything. And each encounter will require a different combination of skills. Some skills will be useless in some encounters; sometimes a particular skill will basically be essential. Design the game to encourage specialisation and cooperation rather than individual players learning everything.
That doesn't exactly address what I was referring to... I'm not talking about a single player doing everything, but rather a perfect build for every player to use.
If you look back to something like Diablo I or Dungeon Siege (both of which allowed just about any character to learn just about any skill) you'll see that perfect builds appeared. Folks figured out that if you trained X points in this and Y points in that and Z points in something else, you did the absolute best DPS for your time/money/effort.
For your scenario:
Sure, you need a player who's good at fireballs, but he needs to be standing back and handling the horde of little monsters that will heal the boss monster if they get too close, while your guy who's good with his sword and shield gets up close and finishes off the boss.
You'd see both characters with 12 points in fireballs and 3 points in shields and 5 points in swords - or whatever. One of them would be dealing with the boss while one of them deal with the little guys. But they'd be playing essentially the same character because their skills would be identical.
Do not underestimate MMOG players. They'll analyze every single boss fight, every single monster, every single skill. They'll come out with the mathematically perfect skillset for any collection of encounters.
And each encounter will require a different combination of skills. Some skills will be useless in some encounters; sometimes a particular skill will basically be essential.
This is very difficult to do. You cannot exclude anyone from any encounter. Nor can you make any encounter rely on a single skill or ability. If you do that, people get excluded. Joe can't go because you need someone who can use a shield. Suzy has to go because she's the only person who can heal. Which, ultimately, encourages people to learn as many useful skills as possible, so they don't get excluded - which again means everyone is playing the same character.
Skill + Decay
Use your sword a lot? Sword skill goes up. Switch to a gun? Over time you lose your swords skill...
Unfortunately, systems where players can 'lose' tend to be less popular.
I remember EQ... The first time I de-leveled... "Welcome back to level ##" ...so frustrating.
I'd be fine with skill decay though. Don't use it, it goes away. Makes sense, as long as the decay wasn't crazy-fast. Of course, you'd still wind up with some kind of "perfect" build... People would just have to remember to use both their swords and guns periodically, to keep them from decaying.
Relatedly, I've seen a growing trend of players saying that such games don't really take much skill at all. The standard argument is that it just boils down to "knowing how to move" or "knowing when to hit your buttons." In the MMO community, people often make references to FPS or RTS games, saying they have a higher skill cap. However, the same complaints also come from within those communities, with comments like "you just need to know the map," or "it's all about a good build order." At what point does intimate knowledge of a game's mechanics make a player skilled?
Wrong skills. They aren't talking about player skills vs. character level in game... They're talking about character's skills vs. character's level in game.
Some games use a level system. You kill rats for a while, get XP, and eventually ding you're level 2. You get more HP, you do more damage, etc.
Some games use a skill system. You swing your sword for a while, and your sword skill gets better, so you do more damage. You hide behind a shield for a while, and your shield skill gets better, so you take less damage.
Personally, I prefer a purely skill-driven system as it puts fewer restrictions on the player. You want to swing a sword and wear plate armor? Go right ahead. You change your mind and decide you want to hurl fireballs instead? Sure thing. The problem is that this almost invariably leads to some kind of "perfect" build. Someone decides that the best way to do it is to put 10 in swords, 11 in shields, and 15 in fireballs...and all of a sudden that's what everyone is playing. So you wind up with absolutely no variety. The counter to this is to make cross-training painful. Make it take enough time/effort/money/whatever to develop your sword skills that you'll have to actually choose whether you want swords or fireballs.
Player skills certainly enter into the equation... Though I don't know if I'd call them skills so much as knowledge. Someone who knows where the best place is to hunt will do better than someone who doesn't, regardless of how powerful their character is. Someone who knows what kind of damage to use against the monster will do better than someone who doesn't, regardless of how powerful their character is.
...she was convicted of the wrong charges.
She should have been charged with cyberstalking, stalking, harassment, something. Not for violating a website's terms of service.
Harassment would probably be appropriate.
That being said, this is one of those cases where I hope the family of the victim sues her for everything she has.
Despite the outcome, what she did really wasn't that horrible.
The fact of the matter is that this girl committed suicide because a boy that she liked (who was actually not real, but she never knew that) told her that the world would be better off without her.
Yes, it's strange for a grown woman to make a MySpace (or was it FaceBook?) account just to harass a kid... But let's be realistic here - all she did is call that girl names. That kind of stuff happens on a daily basis, all over the United States. I don't see how anyone would make it through school without at least one person telling them that they should just drop dead.
So this Lori person made a fake account and said hurtful things... Would it somehow have been better if it was a real boy who was saying the hurtful things? Would it have been less fatal if it had happened in real life, instead of on-line?
Microsoft just decided to disable those features.
And sell those editions cheaper.
My complaint isn't so much with the price as the arbitrary restrictions. If I buy XP Home and later decide I need to join that computer to a domain I need to buy a copy of XP Professional. I can't just install the right package. I'd even be willing to purchase a "domain add-on" for a reasonable price.
Instead, I have to buy a copy of XP Professional and run an install. Maybe the upgrade install will work... Maybe it wont and I'll have to start from scratch.
How much DO Windows and Office cost?
How much are you willing to spend?
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has no standard price. They've got discounts and deals to fit pretty much anyone and everyone - you just have to know about them. Government deals, educational deals, developer deals, big business deals...
It's ridiculous.
I know much of slashdot would vehemently disagree, but for the majority of users, Windows comes 'for free' with their PC. They buy a computer from Dell or whomever and it comes with Windows, then when the buy a new PC 4 or 5 years later, it comes with Windows again. Virtually no one I know 'buys' the OS - They'll simply get a the newest / latest when they buy a new computer.
While it is certainly true that most "Joe Sixpack" home users have never actually purchased an OS... And many other people buy their OS for non-retail prices... That doesn't negate the fact that the retail pricing is excessive.
We support a lot of small/medium sized businesses, and OS licensing can be a huge expense for them. Expensive enough that it becomes cost-effective to simply replace perfectly good computers with new ones, and get the OS "for free" with the new hardware. There's something wrong with that.
An OS should never cost more than $80.
Maybe $100, but that's it. An OS is basically supposed to make your computer work - not be the focus of your attention on the machine. It's supposed to more-or-less stay out of your way and let you get work done. I don't want to pay more for my OS than for the application I'm trying to run.
System Utilities should never cost more than $40.
I'd go as high as $50... But again, it's supposed to basically make your computer work and get out of the way. I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars just to keep my computer working correctly. And I sure as hell shouldn't have to pay another $50+ every year to keep getting updates... If I want the new version, I'll go out and buy it. If I just want the antivirus definitions they should be free... Or maybe some nominal fee to cover the bandwidth... $10 or so a year.
Games should never cost more than $50.
Especially not with how little gameplay you get these days... My son bought something for $60 (+tax) last week, played through it in one day over the weekend... I thought maybe he just skipped over side-quests or gave up and quit early or something... Read a review or two on-line... There's apparently about 6 hours of gameplay in the thing. WTF?!
Productivity apps can cost whatever, based on the size of their target market.
Agreed. If you actually need PhotoShop, you need PhotoShop, and it is worth your money to shell out hundreds of dollars for it. If you don't actually need PhotoShop there are plenty of perfectly good alternatives that are much cheaper if not free. The same thing goes for just about any other product... If you really need the features that Acrobat/Microsoft Office/QuickBooks/whatever offers, you can afford to pay for it. If not, use something else.
I'm glad that with Windows 7 Microsoft mostly reverted back to the kind of editions they marketed Windows XP with. It's now much more clear which one to buy when it is distinguised by Home and Professional, then Ultimate for the power user.
Personally, I'd like to see all the various flavors go away. Just sell Windows 7. Have a default load and then allow all the extra bells & whistles to be installed as add-ons.
There's no good reason why an XP/Vista/7 "Home" machine can't join a domain or run terminal services, Microsoft just decided to disable those features.