No claim is being made about proven oil reserves. A very specific claim (which may or may not be true, according to the blog) is being made about the rate at which it can be pumped from the ground.
U.S. oil production has been declining for decades (as predicted by people who used a similar logic to the current predictors), long before environmental concerns had a big impact on drilling. The decline continued during the period during the 1980s when large offshore leases were made by the U.S. government and the Alaska oil came on-line. (Of course, this is not necessarily an indictment of those who argued in favor of those moves, since none of them were so stupid as to claim they would reverse the decline in U.S. production.) No serious observer claims that the U.S. "stopped looking" and surely no reasonable expert has ever made the case that the decline would be reversed if we "started looking again."
I would love to get Sybert in a room full of oilmen to see their reaction when they realize he doesn't know the difference between reserves and production. Indeed, one only need look at the problems of Shell Oil in the UAR to see that some of the recent drops in reserves have come from unanticipated problems in production.
Sybert ignores the article and the blog that points to the article. Then he spouts provably false propositions about a vaguely related issue. Then he spews pure ideological nonsense about military and scientific advancement on the oil front.
...to be true. It's hard to decide which copywrong miscreant to honor. McBride, Eisner, some of the lesser-known abusers...?
No. It's not hard to decide. Who built the largest fortune in the world on stolen IP? Who turned around and became a crusader against stealing code? Who has recently launched a blizzard of phony software patents?
...taxable earnings would not be lower because they ALREADY expense options for tax purposes.
In fact, one of the proposals for remedying the problem is to simply require companies to use the same accounting methods for reporting to shareholders and the IRS. (Hint: None of them would use stock options if they had to use the same expensing methods.)
As far as MS is concerned, they stopped issuing stock options in September 2003. So, their current earnings are real. But your analysis would be valid for the '80s and '90s. In fact, your analysis would significantly understate the effect. MSFT would have been reporting losses through most of that time period had it expensed its stock options in the same manner as it expensed them on tax forms.
...in fact, Microsoft is an excellent example of how this kind of accounting distorts reported earnings.
Also: MS is an excellent example of a company which used option compensation FAR MORE than most companies (during the '80s and '90s).
Also: Beginning in September 2003, Microsoft employees began to receive shares of Microsoft stock rather than options to buy them.
Also: The issue is not how many options are outstanding. The question is whether options are expensed when issued. MS isn't issuing more.
Also: Companies that pay employees with options (including Microsoft before 2003) DO expense options when they calculate their earnings for tax purposes. It's only when they calculate them for shareholders that they lie.
While MS's financials look good today, for most of the company's history they would have been terrible without phony accounting of stock options. Through much of the '80s and '90s, a typical MSFT employee was getting $100,000 in salary and $300,000 in compensation derived from the sale of stock options. Not expensing these stock options enabled the company to list only one quarter of their actual compensation on their expense line in calculating their earnings reported to shareholders.
So, while they were showing massive profits to shareholders, their "very steady earnings" were in fact "very steady losses." In fact, these very steady losses were (quite accurately) reported to the IRS. Which is why they were paying practically no corporate income tax during those years.
...in the case of Xbox2 means G5s with Radeon 9800 Pros, running special software. As much fun as it is to imagine Microsoft giving away large numbers of high-powered Macintoshes, MS doesn't need to go this far.
In order to overcome the problem described in the editorial, the boys from Redmond need to make it easy to produce games which run on the Xbox1, the GameCube, PS2 AND the Xbox2. Giving away Macs doesn't solve the problem. What they need to give away is a development environment which allows the content creator to write games to a specific API, which includes all the basic functionality (like graphics, physics engines, easy UI creation, control functionality, and sound) and have it able to compile executables for all four consoles...preferably with the Xbox2 version looking best.
Which sounds a lot like MS's description of XNA.
When you go to a movie theater, you don't care what brand of projector is being used. Few people coming out of theaters in the '50s said, "Gosh, that Panavision sure is a step up from Cinemascope." Directors cared whether the tools they were being offered made it easier for them to do what they wanted to do.
The problem: XNA is currently vapor.
The question: Will Microsoft develop XNA to the point where it can save Xbox2 from the forces described in the editorial?
MS has an uneven history in this regard. They promised this kind of toolset for PC game developers with Win95. A lot of game companies bought into it, only to discover their games ran way too slowly on the original DirectX API. This resulted in a whole lotta scrambling to port the games back to DOS, which turned out to run faster under Win95 than DirectX-based games. So, many developers didn't believe Redmond when they made the same promise for Win98. Lo and behold, DirectX had matured and a lot of people ended up scrambling to port their DOS code to the Win98 API.
So, history doesn't tell us much, except that Microsoft can go both ways. Sometimes they deliver; sometimes they lie through their teeth.
If we look at their capacities, the potential is there. Redmond's game division has long been the producers of the best software Microsoft codes itself. And the best product MS has outside that division is VisualStudio. The synergy possible here is just what we need to create an XNA that revolutionizes the game industry.
If we look at inclinations, synergy between departments is not what MS does best. They like to have different teams competing against one another. The games division may not want to contribute all their game engines to the XNA project (because that would allow their competitors outside the company to benefit from their work). The VisualStudio people may not want to be distracted by what they see as a niche market.
Ultimately, it may be timing that determines final outcome. The premise of the editorial was all based on the assumption that Xbox2 will come out Christmas 2005, a year ahead of the PS3. That timeframe does not give MS time to get XNA out in the hands of developers in time for those developers to develop games to the XNA API in time for December 2005 release.
If, on the other hand, Xbox2 slips to a Fall 2006 release (as Microsoft products often do), then the XNA team has just enough time to get their product in the hands of developers who want to release as soon as the Xbox2 is released. Assuming MS gives them the resources they need (including cooperation from the games division).
Another thing to consider: Will MS offer XNA as a development platform for ALL game consoles only to shortchange their competitors' consoles when crunch time comes?
The life-like humans in "Polar Express" are clearly in the "uncanny valley." It's bizarre to witness waiters on the train doing exuberant Broadway musical dance routines with totally non-exuberant expressions on their faces.
I suspect this is why "Shrek" did better at the box office than the Final Fantasy movie. Not just that Shrek looked more cartoony than Aki did, but also that he had so much wider a range of expression.
Try this experiment: List your favorite characters in the FF movie in order. Then go back and watch carefully. I think you'll find that the higher they appear on your list, the greater variety of facial expressions they have. I know this works for my list.
Unfortunately the villain had the most, while the top members of the hero-team had the fewest. Aki had two: stunned surprise and determined perseverence.
Shrek beat that in any five seconds he was on screen.
In fact, my experience show almost all new technologies at Microsoft go through three distinct phases:
"Look, one of our partners has come up with a neat new technology. Let's help them and show everybody how nice we are."
"OK, that new technology has been make a lot of money. Nothing in our pipeline shows any hope of producing new revenue. Let's compete with our partners. But be sure we do it fairly. We don't want to give the M$ haters any ammunition."
"Jeez, they're kicking our butts. I guess we'll have to cheat. Hey, we don't have any features in the next OS version that are actually convince people to switch. Let's integrate it into the next Windows release."
Notice that at any give time two-thirds of the company are doing basically non-evil things. Given that their business model requires that they make all their money from the other third, they must really want to be good (or at least non-evil). Otherwise, why bother spending so much money trying the first two phases?
But this guy isn't involved in any one of those phases. When you look at MS ID card it says "Longhorn Evangelist" right below his picture. But when he slides it through the card reader going through a security checkpoint every morning, the guard sees "clueless marketing droid" on the central computer. It's his job to talk about how wonderful XAML, Avalon and WinFS are. He looks at them and says, "These would be useful in Firefox. What a coup it would be if I could convince those Open Source developers to use them."
He doesn't know that XAML and Avalon are implementations of perfectly good ideas which have been around in various forms for years. He may not even know that no one has the foggiest idea how much of WinFS will actually end up in the Longhorn release. He doesn't know that XAML and Avalon duplicate W3C specs that have been out for years. He doesn't know that all of the Mozilla family of browsers have implemented these specs for quite some time. He doesn't know that MS has been holding back the development of the Internet for two years because their browser doesn't implement these specs. He doesn't know that a lot depends on the degree to which these new technologies implement the specs.
If XAML and Avalon don't implement the old specs two questions become key: Do they do the same kind of thing better? And do they implement something which is close enough to the spec that we can all use these features (which MS has managed to deny all to all of by dominating the market with a bad browser) via some kind of CSS hack?
The clueless marketing droid has not considered these issues because it isn't his job. I'm sure there are Firefox programmers looking closely at just what will be useful in XAML, Avalon and even WinFS. But until the exact nature of the OS is set in stone no one will be committing much to revising the Firefox roadmap to incorporate the new technologies. Maybe these new technologies will make some things that have been hard to do on the Windows platform easier. But they will be things Firefox already does.
Unlike MS marketing droids, we don't have to wait until Microsoft gets it right.
...how over 50 percent of the American people could possibly believe there is still WMD in Iraq, all they need to do is read the above post.
David Kay (a big supporter of the WMD theory before the war) has made it very clear what the facts on the ground are:
They polygraphed over 40 people they knew had been involved with WMD research and production in Iraq in the past.
Every one of those 40 people said there were no WMD, no program to develop them, no infrastructure start such a program, just a few fraudsters bilking money out of an out-of-touch dictator.
We didn't believe them.
We spent 100s of millions of dollar checking out their stories.
All of their stories checked out.
We continued to throw money at the problem (Bush has a strong motivation to find them as his popularity has slipped 30 percent since they weren't found). We're now approaching the $1 billion mark.
We still haven't found WMD or the equipment to make them.
If they had them, they would have been very useful during our invasion. And they would also be very useful in the terrorist insurrection now being led by Ba'athist former intelligence agents.
Before the war, we not only claimed we knew that Iraq had WMD, we claimed we knew where they were.
When we went to those locations after the invasion, they were not there. In many cases, the locations themselves did not exist. Ahmad Chalabi's informants told us about storage caches under hospitals filled with WMD. No WMD; no storage areas; solid concrete.
Yes, I am ignoring a few web sites which posted a tiny amount of evidence which has subsequently proven to be wrong. But that is dwarfed by the overwhelming evidence being ignored by a majority of the American people. But don't tell me I'm ignoring the facts because of my certainty: Before the war, I was convinced there was WMD, too.
...is easy. (I worked for a company in Denver which did it in the early '80s because we couldn't get good data transmission from the phone company.)
The hard part in India is building your own power grid. But it's required for a call-center operation. The local grid is so unreliable that business parks have to build their own power supply systems.
...I was probably confused about it at the time. Now I've remembered my confusion instead of the accurate version. Ah, the travails of being an old man.
...of D&D. Except that Basic D&D wasn't called "basic" until after AD&D came out (for the same reason 1st Edition AD&D wasn't called that until 2nd edition came out and for the same reason that people in 1920 didn't talk about "the First World War"). As I recall, the original was not boxed until later. But I could be wrong about that since it was boxed when I first bought it.
The guy who wrote the article acts like he knows all about how D&D developed, but makes several statements which make it clear he doesn't know this chronology.
...saying what should have been obvious to everyone.
This guy has no clue about RPGs (computer or otherwise). He doesn't know the history of roleplaying games. He doesn't understand Gygax's contribution. He uses buzzwords to hint at computer knowledge, but uses them in such a nonsensical manner as to suggest he's trying to get revenge on geeks for the jokes they've played on social science journals.
I mean, look at this quote:
"...these rules have to be interpreted by a computer server client, which leads to many standards violations from a programming standpoint."
What the heck does that MEAN? I mean, know a little about client-server architectures (having written an engine designed to power a server for a game which uses such an architecture) and I have no idea what he means by "server client." All clients have to have a server, but no client is a server. So "server client" is either redundant or contradictory. And in what sense is Temple of Elemental Evil a client? I thought it was a stand-alone CRPG which played on your home computer. And, even if it was a client in some sense, what would client-ness have to do with intepreting rules. Every time I have tried to port an RPG from paper to computer (quite a few times, both successfully and unsuccessfully since I first tried it with Traveller in 1979), "intepreting rules" was the job of the programmer. And how would that lead to "standards violations" from any standpoint, let alone a programming standpoint?
Please...
The subject of this article is of intense interest to me. As I said, I have been facing the issues of porting RPG rules to computers since 1979. My first RPG was published by a major publisher in 1982. I've been playing CRPGs since they first came out. I want an intelligent article to be written on the subject so we can all discuss something that is obviously of interest to many of us. But this is not that article.
The author makes some statements about Troika's development of ToEE. Maybe we could learn something from some of them. But how can we assume they have anything to do with the game's actual development, when they're surrounded by pure gibberish? What's his source for this inside information about the development? (Assuming we can figure out what is being said among all the buzzwords. I'm not even going to try to figure it out until I have some reason to believe it would be worth trying.)
...has gone up dramatically during the Bush administration's term. That's what the article was about: how the problem is increasing.
Whether they're morally responsible for this upturn is a more debateable question.
There is no question that this kind of practice goes up when the economy is in a downturn. From the article: "At first, [the manager] bowed to orders and erased hours. Some employees began asking questions, she said, but they refused to confront management. 'They took it lying down,' she said. 'They didn't want to lose their job. Jobs are hard to find'."
Now, it's quite clear the administration did not cause the weak economy in order to help companies get away with criminal fraud, so it would be unreasonable to hold them morally responsible on those grounds. On the other hand, the GOP has long pressed for allowing employers to force some non-managerial employees to work unpaid overtime. That was blocked by Clinton. Bush signed the bill.
Hard to argue that's not deliberately trying to encourage such practices. And it's not unreasonable for a manager to assume that such an administration would be less likely to prosecute such crimes enthusiastically. Apparently such an assumption might be wrong, but hardly unreasonable.
You notice how the economy has been improving lately, but jobs are not being added at a rate which follows this improvement? Economists' standard answer to this is "increasing productivity." But the way they measure productivity counts time-shaving as "improved productivity."
The question you should be asking is: Does anyone really believe that a substantial percentage of this increasing productivity is not the result of this increase in the amount of time-shaving?
...all the people who said this same kind of thing about "The Lord of the Rings."
Even Tolkien himself suggested that all the fans had their own visions of the trilogy in their heads and any attempt to put it on film was going to fail to meet those expectations.
Many of the features Microsoft is trumpeting to promote their next operating system (in the "technology previews" they are offering) are already implemented in DHTML or in the W3C's vector-graphics standard. A big question which has remained: Would they implement these using their own standard (ala Flash)? Or would they accessible using W3C standards? Or both?
Many of us felt that MS was delaying an announcement on this because they going to follow the standards only if public opinion and market conditions forced them to. If no one forced them to follow the standards, they could sell products which made it possible for people to access features of LonghornIE which could not be accessed without buying those products. If there was a demand for standards compliance, adding that in would be relatively easy.
This CSS suggests that doesn't matter. If Microsoft implements the features through its own non-standards-compliant protocols, a standards-compliant web site could still call them with DHTML (or whatever other W3C standard they want to use) and still use the features of Longhorn's pseudobrowser via just this kind of stylesheet.
...In Shepherd Mead's hysterical novel, "The Big Ball of Wax," this idea was not only predicted, but the constellation "Pepsi" was described.
Mead's experience on Madison Avenue showed in his expectation that such advertising would remain long after its utility was gone. His main character noticed the dot over the i in the constellation "Pepsi" had moved out of place and had been over the "s" for so long no one even paid attention.
This book, which has been very hard to get for years, is a delightful sendup of the advertising culture. I consider it to be much better than Mead's better-known parody of business-advice books, "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying." While considered racy in its day, it probably wouldn't raise any eyebrows today if you created a Saturday-morning cartoon based on it.
If you take away PD, you still have the griefer problem. If you solve the griefer-harrassing-newbie problem, difficulties still remain with PD. Doing one to "solve" the other is Just Plain Bad Game Design.
The best discussion of this issue is still "Designing Virtual Worlds" in which Richard Bartle discusses all the issue quite thoroughly. He does not come up with a definitive answer, although he does suggest the MMORPG industry's consensus against PD is premature. I was surprised at how well the NYT article presented both sides for the casual reader.
...the first thing you check when somebody comes out with a new word-division algorithm: Do they break therapist correctly?
If they don't, you see if it can automatically overridden. If it can't, you never, ever use that software. The risks of lawsuits are just too monumental.
...the Federal Reserve's control of the money supply is a different thing from the government's ability to borrow money.
For the past 25 years the Fed has regulated the money supply almost exclusively for the purpose of controlling inflation. And they have proved remarkably successful at precisely that. During that time, we have seen periods where the deficit was astronomical and we have seen periods where the U.S. Government was running a sizable surplus -- none of which had the slightest effect on the ability of the Federal Reserve to regulate inflation. The monetarists have won that argument: The rate of inflation is governed by the ratio of money in circulation to the available goods. Period. It may be a tricky ratio to maintain, but Greenspan has proven it can be done.
The currency issued by the Fed is not pure fiat money. The government does not simply print money to pay its debts. The Fed prints money with which it buys securities. Those securities then back the currency, just as gold once did. They choose the most secure of securities, which today means Treasury notes. But, if the deficit was erased, they could still buy notes which could back the currency. Even if surpluses were run long enough to wipe out the entire debt (considered a real possibility just four short years ago), they could still buy Class A rated corporate debt.
This does not mean that government borrowing and the Fed's issuing of money are not related. But they are tangentially or fractionally related by a fairly complicated set of interactions (note that I am not using the term in the same sense as the morons who call the Fed "the Fractional Reserve Board"). Greenspan was absolutely correct in suggesting in "The Subjectivist" that deficit spending is a subtle form of wealth confiscation. And he was corrrect in saying gold stands in the way of that process. But notice that he said it "stands in the way" not that "prevents" the process.
The federal government is perfectly capable of engaging in deficit spending (or not engaging in deficit spending) completely independently of the Fed using monetary policy to regulate inflation.
...since it can also serve as an inexhaustible spigot of imaginary funding for federal budgets, guess how it inevitably gets used?
Neither fiat money nor borrowing money are inexhaustible spigots, as governments which have tried them to extreme have inevitably discovered. If such things are inevitable, how can you explain the surpluses of 1999 and 2000?
I once believed that misusing the power of the Fed was inevitable. Greenspan proved me wrong. I also once believed that misuse of the power to borrow was inevitable. Clinton, Gore and a GOP Congress proved that less than inevitable. But the misuse of that power has made a spectacular resurgence. I hope you will stop spreading obvious untruths and join the people who are really fighting to bring down that debt.
The longest period of sustained inflation in world economic history took place over 200 years (from approximately 1500 to 1700). It was almost solely caused by the opening of silver mines in South America and by the influx of Spanish gold.
Fiat money inflation has probably caused as much inflation, but it has been limited to specific times and places where governments let it get out of hand (countries which achieved hyperinflation by this method include post-embargo Iraq).
Most people who argue in favor of a gold-backed currency do so in the honest belief that gold is a less arbitrary standard of value. They fail to notice, however that few things are as arbitrary as the value of gold (most of which is an historical accident). Personally, I would rather use a currency that is backed by the productive capacity of a strong nation rather than by a wildly fluctuating specie. But go ahead. If you believe gold is better, buy gold. You have that option.
Just don't complain to me the next time the bottom falls out of the gold market. I once lived in a gold-mining town. I've probably seen more suffering as a result of those fluctuations than you will be able inflict on yourself by unwise investing decisions.
The wealthy tend to be more conservative. But, of course, this is by no means universal. Conservatives generally support the status quo, and the rich tend to be happy with the status quo.
A countervailing tendency is based on the fact that more highly educated people tend to be more liberal, and education tends to correlate to income. All of these are tendencies, and they get mixed up when they counter one another.
We have a rich-east-coast-liberal stereotype because some people can manipulate others politically by perpetuating it. And because some people can make lots of money telling people who want to hear it what they want to hear. You do understand that most stereotypes are inaccurate, don't you?
The very wealthy of the east coast have tended to be conservative from the very earliest days of our Republic. James Madison sought to build his political base in New York City because he felt this crowd would be won over by his conservative message. And they were. Today we have the Wall Street Journal (one of the most successful conservative publications in the world) making a very good living supplying similarly rich conservatives with what they want to hear in New York City.
If you base your logic on the assumption that stereotypes should be believed, you will come to many false conclusions. But they might well be commonly believed by those who share your biases.
Slashdot Mirror
...or at least the fine blog.
No claim is being made about proven oil reserves. A very specific claim (which may or may not be true, according to the blog) is being made about the rate at which it can be pumped from the ground.
U.S. oil production has been declining for decades (as predicted by people who used a similar logic to the current predictors), long before environmental concerns had a big impact on drilling. The decline continued during the period during the 1980s when large offshore leases were made by the U.S. government and the Alaska oil came on-line. (Of course, this is not necessarily an indictment of those who argued in favor of those moves, since none of them were so stupid as to claim they would reverse the decline in U.S. production.) No serious observer claims that the U.S. "stopped looking" and surely no reasonable expert has ever made the case that the decline would be reversed if we "started looking again."
I would love to get Sybert in a room full of oilmen to see their reaction when they realize he doesn't know the difference between reserves and production. Indeed, one only need look at the problems of Shell Oil in the UAR to see that some of the recent drops in reserves have come from unanticipated problems in production.
Sybert ignores the article and the blog that points to the article. Then he spouts provably false propositions about a vaguely related issue. Then he spews pure ideological nonsense about military and scientific advancement on the oil front.
Other than that, it's a fine post.
...to be true. It's hard to decide which copywrong miscreant to honor. McBride, Eisner, some of the lesser-known abusers...?
No. It's not hard to decide. Who built the largest fortune in the world on stolen IP? Who turned around and became a crusader against stealing code? Who has recently launched a blizzard of phony software patents?
Bill, the Weasel
...taxable earnings would not be lower because they ALREADY expense options for tax purposes.
In fact, one of the proposals for remedying the problem is to simply require companies to use the same accounting methods for reporting to shareholders and the IRS. (Hint: None of them would use stock options if they had to use the same expensing methods.)
As far as MS is concerned, they stopped issuing stock options in September 2003. So, their current earnings are real. But your analysis would be valid for the '80s and '90s. In fact, your analysis would significantly understate the effect. MSFT would have been reporting losses through most of that time period had it expensed its stock options in the same manner as it expensed them on tax forms.
...these companies are already expensing options for income tax purposes.
...in fact, Microsoft is an excellent example of how this kind of accounting distorts reported earnings.
Also: MS is an excellent example of a company which used option compensation FAR MORE than most companies (during the '80s and '90s).
Also: Beginning in September 2003, Microsoft employees began to receive shares of Microsoft stock rather than options to buy them.
Also: The issue is not how many options are outstanding. The question is whether options are expensed when issued. MS isn't issuing more.
Also: Companies that pay employees with options (including Microsoft before 2003) DO expense options when they calculate their earnings for tax purposes. It's only when they calculate them for shareholders that they lie.
While MS's financials look good today, for most of the company's history they would have been terrible without phony accounting of stock options. Through much of the '80s and '90s, a typical MSFT employee was getting $100,000 in salary and $300,000 in compensation derived from the sale of stock options. Not expensing these stock options enabled the company to list only one quarter of their actual compensation on their expense line in calculating their earnings reported to shareholders.
So, while they were showing massive profits to shareholders, their "very steady earnings" were in fact "very steady losses." In fact, these very steady losses were (quite accurately) reported to the IRS. Which is why they were paying practically no corporate income tax during those years.
...in the case of Xbox2 means G5s with Radeon 9800 Pros, running special software. As much fun as it is to imagine Microsoft giving away large numbers of high-powered Macintoshes, MS doesn't need to go this far.
In order to overcome the problem described in the editorial, the boys from Redmond need to make it easy to produce games which run on the Xbox1, the GameCube, PS2 AND the Xbox2. Giving away Macs doesn't solve the problem. What they need to give away is a development environment which allows the content creator to write games to a specific API, which includes all the basic functionality (like graphics, physics engines, easy UI creation, control functionality, and sound) and have it able to compile executables for all four consoles...preferably with the Xbox2 version looking best.
Which sounds a lot like MS's description of XNA.
When you go to a movie theater, you don't care what brand of projector is being used. Few people coming out of theaters in the '50s said, "Gosh, that Panavision sure is a step up from Cinemascope." Directors cared whether the tools they were being offered made it easier for them to do what they wanted to do.
The problem: XNA is currently vapor.
The question: Will Microsoft develop XNA to the point where it can save Xbox2 from the forces described in the editorial?
MS has an uneven history in this regard. They promised this kind of toolset for PC game developers with Win95. A lot of game companies bought into it, only to discover their games ran way too slowly on the original DirectX API. This resulted in a whole lotta scrambling to port the games back to DOS, which turned out to run faster under Win95 than DirectX-based games. So, many developers didn't believe Redmond when they made the same promise for Win98. Lo and behold, DirectX had matured and a lot of people ended up scrambling to port their DOS code to the Win98 API.
So, history doesn't tell us much, except that Microsoft can go both ways. Sometimes they deliver; sometimes they lie through their teeth.
If we look at their capacities, the potential is there. Redmond's game division has long been the producers of the best software Microsoft codes itself. And the best product MS has outside that division is VisualStudio. The synergy possible here is just what we need to create an XNA that revolutionizes the game industry.
If we look at inclinations, synergy between departments is not what MS does best. They like to have different teams competing against one another. The games division may not want to contribute all their game engines to the XNA project (because that would allow their competitors outside the company to benefit from their work). The VisualStudio people may not want to be distracted by what they see as a niche market.
Ultimately, it may be timing that determines final outcome. The premise of the editorial was all based on the assumption that Xbox2 will come out Christmas 2005, a year ahead of the PS3. That timeframe does not give MS time to get XNA out in the hands of developers in time for those developers to develop games to the XNA API in time for December 2005 release.
If, on the other hand, Xbox2 slips to a Fall 2006 release (as Microsoft products often do), then the XNA team has just enough time to get their product in the hands of developers who want to release as soon as the Xbox2 is released. Assuming MS gives them the resources they need (including cooperation from the games division).
Another thing to consider: Will MS offer XNA as a development platform for ALL game consoles only to shortchange their competitors' consoles when crunch time comes?
...should be modded "funny."
The life-like humans in "Polar Express" are clearly in the "uncanny valley." It's bizarre to witness waiters on the train doing exuberant Broadway musical dance routines with totally non-exuberant expressions on their faces.
I suspect this is why "Shrek" did better at the box office than the Final Fantasy movie. Not just that Shrek looked more cartoony than Aki did, but also that he had so much wider a range of expression.
Try this experiment: List your favorite characters in the FF movie in order. Then go back and watch carefully. I think you'll find that the higher they appear on your list, the greater variety of facial expressions they have. I know this works for my list.
Unfortunately the villain had the most, while the top members of the hero-team had the fewest. Aki had two: stunned surprise and determined perseverence.
Shrek beat that in any five seconds he was on screen.
...trying to crush the free software movement.
In fact, my experience show almost all new technologies at Microsoft go through three distinct phases:
Notice that at any give time two-thirds of the company are doing basically non-evil things. Given that their business model requires that they make all their money from the other third, they must really want to be good (or at least non-evil). Otherwise, why bother spending so much money trying the first two phases?
But this guy isn't involved in any one of those phases. When you look at MS ID card it says "Longhorn Evangelist" right below his picture. But when he slides it through the card reader going through a security checkpoint every morning, the guard sees "clueless marketing droid" on the central computer. It's his job to talk about how wonderful XAML, Avalon and WinFS are. He looks at them and says, "These would be useful in Firefox. What a coup it would be if I could convince those Open Source developers to use them."
He doesn't know that XAML and Avalon are implementations of perfectly good ideas which have been around in various forms for years. He may not even know that no one has the foggiest idea how much of WinFS will actually end up in the Longhorn release. He doesn't know that XAML and Avalon duplicate W3C specs that have been out for years. He doesn't know that all of the Mozilla family of browsers have implemented these specs for quite some time. He doesn't know that MS has been holding back the development of the Internet for two years because their browser doesn't implement these specs. He doesn't know that a lot depends on the degree to which these new technologies implement the specs.
If XAML and Avalon don't implement the old specs two questions become key: Do they do the same kind of thing better? And do they implement something which is close enough to the spec that we can all use these features (which MS has managed to deny all to all of by dominating the market with a bad browser) via some kind of CSS hack?
The clueless marketing droid has not considered these issues because it isn't his job. I'm sure there are Firefox programmers looking closely at just what will be useful in XAML, Avalon and even WinFS. But until the exact nature of the OS is set in stone no one will be committing much to revising the Firefox roadmap to incorporate the new technologies. Maybe these new technologies will make some things that have been hard to do on the Windows platform easier. But they will be things Firefox already does.
Unlike MS marketing droids, we don't have to wait until Microsoft gets it right.
...how over 50 percent of the American people could possibly believe there is still WMD in Iraq, all they need to do is read the above post.
David Kay (a big supporter of the WMD theory before the war) has made it very clear what the facts on the ground are:
Yes, I am ignoring a few web sites which posted a tiny amount of evidence which has subsequently proven to be wrong. But that is dwarfed by the overwhelming evidence being ignored by a majority of the American people. But don't tell me I'm ignoring the facts because of my certainty: Before the war, I was convinced there was WMD, too.
...is easy. (I worked for a company in Denver which did it in the early '80s because we couldn't get good data transmission from the phone company.)
The hard part in India is building your own power grid. But it's required for a call-center operation. The local grid is so unreliable that business parks have to build their own power supply systems.
...for guessing who I am.
I'm nobody particularly famous. (So, it's probably not worth trying to figure out.)
It was a pen-and-paper RPG, all too many of which were published about that time. (Although we didn't call them that back then.)
An equally-unknown-at-the-time artist named Warren Specter once illustrated a magazine article I wrote.
...I was probably confused about it at the time. Now I've remembered my confusion instead of the accurate version. Ah, the travails of being an old man.
...of D&D. Except that Basic D&D wasn't called "basic" until after AD&D came out (for the same reason 1st Edition AD&D wasn't called that until 2nd edition came out and for the same reason that people in 1920 didn't talk about "the First World War"). As I recall, the original was not boxed until later. But I could be wrong about that since it was boxed when I first bought it.
The guy who wrote the article acts like he knows all about how D&D developed, but makes several statements which make it clear he doesn't know this chronology.
...saying what should have been obvious to everyone.
This guy has no clue about RPGs (computer or otherwise). He doesn't know the history of roleplaying games. He doesn't understand Gygax's contribution. He uses buzzwords to hint at computer knowledge, but uses them in such a nonsensical manner as to suggest he's trying to get revenge on geeks for the jokes they've played on social science journals.
I mean, look at this quote:
What the heck does that MEAN? I mean, know a little about client-server architectures (having written an engine designed to power a server for a game which uses such an architecture) and I have no idea what he means by "server client." All clients have to have a server, but no client is a server. So "server client" is either redundant or contradictory. And in what sense is Temple of Elemental Evil a client? I thought it was a stand-alone CRPG which played on your home computer. And, even if it was a client in some sense, what would client-ness have to do with intepreting rules. Every time I have tried to port an RPG from paper to computer (quite a few times, both successfully and unsuccessfully since I first tried it with Traveller in 1979), "intepreting rules" was the job of the programmer. And how would that lead to "standards violations" from any standpoint, let alone a programming standpoint?
Please...
The subject of this article is of intense interest to me. As I said, I have been facing the issues of porting RPG rules to computers since 1979. My first RPG was published by a major publisher in 1982. I've been playing CRPGs since they first came out. I want an intelligent article to be written on the subject so we can all discuss something that is obviously of interest to many of us. But this is not that article.
The author makes some statements about Troika's development of ToEE. Maybe we could learn something from some of them. But how can we assume they have anything to do with the game's actual development, when they're surrounded by pure gibberish? What's his source for this inside information about the development? (Assuming we can figure out what is being said among all the buzzwords. I'm not even going to try to figure it out until I have some reason to believe it would be worth trying.)
...has gone up dramatically during the Bush administration's term. That's what the article was about: how the problem is increasing.
Whether they're morally responsible for this upturn is a more debateable question.
There is no question that this kind of practice goes up when the economy is in a downturn. From the article: "At first, [the manager] bowed to orders and erased hours. Some employees began asking questions, she said, but they refused to confront management. 'They took it lying down,' she said. 'They didn't want to lose their job. Jobs are hard to find'."
Now, it's quite clear the administration did not cause the weak economy in order to help companies get away with criminal fraud, so it would be unreasonable to hold them morally responsible on those grounds. On the other hand, the GOP has long pressed for allowing employers to force some non-managerial employees to work unpaid overtime. That was blocked by Clinton. Bush signed the bill.
Hard to argue that's not deliberately trying to encourage such practices. And it's not unreasonable for a manager to assume that such an administration would be less likely to prosecute such crimes enthusiastically. Apparently such an assumption might be wrong, but hardly unreasonable.
You notice how the economy has been improving lately, but jobs are not being added at a rate which follows this improvement? Economists' standard answer to this is "increasing productivity." But the way they measure productivity counts time-shaving as "improved productivity."
The question you should be asking is: Does anyone really believe that a substantial percentage of this increasing productivity is not the result of this increase in the amount of time-shaving?
...griefers couldn't get into the Beta?
...all the people who said this same kind of thing about "The Lord of the Rings."
Even Tolkien himself suggested that all the fans had their own visions of the trilogy in their heads and any attempt to put it on film was going to fail to meet those expectations.
Then along came a guy named Peter Jackson.
...is the impact this will have on Longhorn.
Many of the features Microsoft is trumpeting to promote their next operating system (in the "technology previews" they are offering) are already implemented in DHTML or in the W3C's vector-graphics standard. A big question which has remained: Would they implement these using their own standard (ala Flash)? Or would they accessible using W3C standards? Or both?
Many of us felt that MS was delaying an announcement on this because they going to follow the standards only if public opinion and market conditions forced them to. If no one forced them to follow the standards, they could sell products which made it possible for people to access features of LonghornIE which could not be accessed without buying those products. If there was a demand for standards compliance, adding that in would be relatively easy.
This CSS suggests that doesn't matter. If Microsoft implements the features through its own non-standards-compliant protocols, a standards-compliant web site could still call them with DHTML (or whatever other W3C standard they want to use) and still use the features of Longhorn's pseudobrowser via just this kind of stylesheet.
...In Shepherd Mead's hysterical novel, "The Big Ball of Wax," this idea was not only predicted, but the constellation "Pepsi" was described.
Mead's experience on Madison Avenue showed in his expectation that such advertising would remain long after its utility was gone. His main character noticed the dot over the i in the constellation "Pepsi" had moved out of place and had been over the "s" for so long no one even paid attention.
This book, which has been very hard to get for years, is a delightful sendup of the advertising culture. I consider it to be much better than Mead's better-known parody of business-advice books, "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying." While considered racy in its day, it probably wouldn't raise any eyebrows today if you created a Saturday-morning cartoon based on it.
...are two separate (though related) problems.
If you take away PD, you still have the griefer problem. If you solve the griefer-harrassing-newbie problem, difficulties still remain with PD. Doing one to "solve" the other is Just Plain Bad Game Design.
The best discussion of this issue is still "Designing Virtual Worlds" in which Richard Bartle discusses all the issue quite thoroughly. He does not come up with a definitive answer, although he does suggest the MMORPG industry's consensus against PD is premature. I was surprised at how well the NYT article presented both sides for the casual reader.
...make the rest look bad.
...the first thing you check when somebody comes out with a new word-division algorithm: Do they break therapist correctly?
If they don't, you see if it can automatically overridden. If it can't, you never, ever use that software. The risks of lawsuits are just too monumental.
...the Federal Reserve's control of the money supply is a different thing from the government's ability to borrow money.
For the past 25 years the Fed has regulated the money supply almost exclusively for the purpose of controlling inflation. And they have proved remarkably successful at precisely that. During that time, we have seen periods where the deficit was astronomical and we have seen periods where the U.S. Government was running a sizable surplus -- none of which had the slightest effect on the ability of the Federal Reserve to regulate inflation. The monetarists have won that argument: The rate of inflation is governed by the ratio of money in circulation to the available goods. Period. It may be a tricky ratio to maintain, but Greenspan has proven it can be done.
The currency issued by the Fed is not pure fiat money. The government does not simply print money to pay its debts. The Fed prints money with which it buys securities. Those securities then back the currency, just as gold once did. They choose the most secure of securities, which today means Treasury notes. But, if the deficit was erased, they could still buy notes which could back the currency. Even if surpluses were run long enough to wipe out the entire debt (considered a real possibility just four short years ago), they could still buy Class A rated corporate debt.
This does not mean that government borrowing and the Fed's issuing of money are not related. But they are tangentially or fractionally related by a fairly complicated set of interactions (note that I am not using the term in the same sense as the morons who call the Fed "the Fractional Reserve Board"). Greenspan was absolutely correct in suggesting in "The Subjectivist" that deficit spending is a subtle form of wealth confiscation. And he was corrrect in saying gold stands in the way of that process. But notice that he said it "stands in the way" not that "prevents" the process.
The federal government is perfectly capable of engaging in deficit spending (or not engaging in deficit spending) completely independently of the Fed using monetary policy to regulate inflation.
Neither fiat money nor borrowing money are inexhaustible spigots, as governments which have tried them to extreme have inevitably discovered. If such things are inevitable, how can you explain the surpluses of 1999 and 2000?
I once believed that misusing the power of the Fed was inevitable. Greenspan proved me wrong. I also once believed that misuse of the power to borrow was inevitable. Clinton, Gore and a GOP Congress proved that less than inevitable. But the misuse of that power has made a spectacular resurgence. I hope you will stop spreading obvious untruths and join the people who are really fighting to bring down that debt.
I would dearly love to be proven wrong again.
...and this example is a part of the reason why.
The longest period of sustained inflation in world economic history took place over 200 years (from approximately 1500 to 1700). It was almost solely caused by the opening of silver mines in South America and by the influx of Spanish gold.
Fiat money inflation has probably caused as much inflation, but it has been limited to specific times and places where governments let it get out of hand (countries which achieved hyperinflation by this method include post-embargo Iraq).
Most people who argue in favor of a gold-backed currency do so in the honest belief that gold is a less arbitrary standard of value. They fail to notice, however that few things are as arbitrary as the value of gold (most of which is an historical accident). Personally, I would rather use a currency that is backed by the productive capacity of a strong nation rather than by a wildly fluctuating specie. But go ahead. If you believe gold is better, buy gold. You have that option.
Just don't complain to me the next time the bottom falls out of the gold market. I once lived in a gold-mining town. I've probably seen more suffering as a result of those fluctuations than you will be able inflict on yourself by unwise investing decisions.
...it's also easier to be conservative.
The wealthy tend to be more conservative. But, of course, this is by no means universal. Conservatives generally support the status quo, and the rich tend to be happy with the status quo.
A countervailing tendency is based on the fact that more highly educated people tend to be more liberal, and education tends to correlate to income. All of these are tendencies, and they get mixed up when they counter one another.
We have a rich-east-coast-liberal stereotype because some people can manipulate others politically by perpetuating it. And because some people can make lots of money telling people who want to hear it what they want to hear. You do understand that most stereotypes are inaccurate, don't you?
The very wealthy of the east coast have tended to be conservative from the very earliest days of our Republic. James Madison sought to build his political base in New York City because he felt this crowd would be won over by his conservative message. And they were. Today we have the Wall Street Journal (one of the most successful conservative publications in the world) making a very good living supplying similarly rich conservatives with what they want to hear in New York City.
If you base your logic on the assumption that stereotypes should be believed, you will come to many false conclusions. But they might well be commonly believed by those who share your biases.