Victor: The seats are stuffed with eagle down, and the dashboard is made form the beaks of a thousand eagles. Also, there are some eagles under the floorboards
Amy: That's an awful lot of eagle.
Victor: Yes, and yet (sighs)
Amy: What's wrong?
Victor: It is just, the luxury edition has so much more eagle. It saddens me to think of you missing out.
Also keep in mind that Ford started out producing luxury vehicles that were more expensive than the competition. The Model T didn't come until years after the company was founded. And even when it did come out, it took years of refining the assembly process as well as various other cost-cutting steps (to include paying generous wages and decreasing work hours - which also helped increase sales to Ford's own employees) to drive the price of the Model T to it's infamously affordable level.
I don't have time to go through lists of facts. Responsible media is there to collate the information for me.
At some point in your life, you better do your own fact checking. Especially if it is a subject that is important to you. Media outlets get things wrong; and they get it wrong often.
What, like those are opposite poles? This is the sort of knee-jerk I've tried to warn you against. Responsible media includes an element of self-censorship. If you're Australian, you probably haven't noticed that newspapers don't like showing shots of dead bodies.
The problem here is that the story is about censorship. The intent is to prove the very serious allegation that the Australian Government is either incompetent or lying about what actions they're taking. That's quite a charge and it takes more than a "trust me." Which is what has gotten the Government in trouble to begin with.
If the issue is whether people are being killed or, even worse, bodies are being mutilated it may take public record of these events to prove it. I'm not saying everyone must be forced to view photos of dead bodies. But those interested in doing fact checking may require the ability to review the facts on their own.
There is a requirement for "self censorship" for the sake of decency. I agree. However, there is a limit to how far that censorship should go.
That's the very idea of responsible media. It's not drowning us in facts or evidence, it's giving us the right information to understand the situation. One single link to a legal website would've been enough to discredit the firewall. Responsibility would say, if you don't want to see something, you shouldn't show it to others. They could easily have said "at least x per cent of links are to benign sites such as blah, blah, blah", because most links clearly state what's behind them.
Again - you need the facts, drowning or not, to make an informed decision. One link is one link. Does it really mean x per cent? Or is this some snow job by someone with an axe to grind against the Government or censorship? If you get to see the activist's data, you can determine if he's a nut-job or not.
I'm not making some knee-jerk reaction. I used to have your kind of view, it's just information. Now, I understand more about what we need and I understand more about my own culture and even the place of culture in real life. It isn't necessary for all information to be out there. People aren't computers and we don't behave like them. The only similarity, really, is that we both process information and can use it to control our actions.
It's a pity you haven't been able to hold on to some of that idealism as you've aged. So few do. But those that do tend to be true patriots.
I understand the danger of some information. Google around for my posts on Slashdot defending why child pornography is rightfully illegal. But I also understand the need to limit how much information we make illegal.
I don't mistake people for computers. I see computers as tools for people and any information handled by a computer is ultimately serving a person. And I understand that the fundimental guarantees to freedom are endangered by those too willing to induce controls such as censorship for the bennefit of society; that such chipping away at our freedoms must be stringently guarded against.
You imply that this is a knee-jerk reaction. I in turn would accuse your support for censorship as being a knee-jerk reaction to what you personally find objectionable.
Amazing how that works. If you are planning on running an operating system you CHECK for compatibility before you buy it. What an amazing concept. Or you could just buy a preloaded system and have zero problems.
Way back when WinXP was the exciting, new product coming from Microsoft, I was in the market for a laptop on the cheap. I went to the Compaq refurb outlet to see what I could get my hands on. Got a decent deal on a cheap laptop that came with WinME (ick) and I could opt for WinXP. I would have none of that as I had a license for Win2K Pro sitting around ready to go.
Pain in the ass. Compaq didn't support Win2K on that particular model. And while I knew Win2K wasn't stellar on laptops, I knew it should at least run the hardware involved. And it did with a lot of jumping through hoops. Mandrake (my Linux distro of choice back then) was fire-and-forget easy.
This isn't an example of "OMG Linux wins!" Rather, it's a nice reminder how many layers are involved in making Windows appear to be the trivial choice for any given chunk of hardware. It's not a given.
Just for giggles... my current laptop runs Ubuntu fairly flawlessly (the nVidia driver sometimes produces artifacts when docked). The Windows partition came with the laptop and plays nice within VMWare (although WinXP gets pissy if I jump between VMWare and raw metal too often).
At work: I am using ubuntu on a full blown windows network. I'm talking exchange (no IMAP), SMB shares, etc (standard office environment). Evolution using OWA has a lot of problems, but it works. Changing your preferences a bit (Set Inline forwarding, Outlook style replies, etc) will make it emulate an Outlook install. It crashes pretty often, but thats probably because it has to interface with OWA rather than connecting directly with IMAP. Been running this setup for quite some time. I keep a file smb.credentials (rw-------)for easy rdesktop.
As always, Your Mileage May Vary.
I'm in a similar situation. Evolution worked very well for me (no crashes). Then we migrated to Exchange 2007 this month. No more OWA fun for me. The consultants hired for the migration had no clue of how to handle anything but Outlook. I had to shuffle around to get IMAP, LDAP, email relaying, etc. working. I have to resort to a web browser to get at a calendar. I'm looking forward to the much-mentioned MAPI plugin.
Most everything else works well on my native desktop. I can browse around using the default Gnome environment. I tend to smbmount (or sshfs mount:P) remote directories I'm working in. OpenOffice has worked out well.
Occasionally I have to resort to VMWare to run "java" apps. or "web pages" that won't work in anything but a Windows environment.
"Responsible media" reduces things to sound-bytes and incomplete, and often completely misunderstood, information. If you really want to understand what's going on, it takes getting past "responsible media" to get the real information and make an informed decision.
The parent's example is quantifying the information. You can see line by line what this list is doing. Specifying the "kiddie porn" links shows specific cases of where the list apparently hit it's mark just as well as classifying other links shows where they don't - or where the analyst is unsure. This isn't irresponsible - it's factual.
Your example is playing games. Either you're not providing solid numbers, evidence to substantiate your claims, or you're calling attention to the gaps by not labeling them. In any of these cases, you're being ineffective.
You're too aggressive about soliciting those donations. Just like I don't respond to beggars in game, I don't respond to begging add-ons in game.
Too aggressive? The only place I can think of that requests donations is the initial login / mod load scroll. I don't remember seeing it elsewhere (although I do want to say that I've seen a message in the config panel somewhere - I can't remember for sure).
I should note that I don't donate to QH. I'm not keen to pay for any WoW addon. I'll write bug reports, recommend it to friends and guildmates, etc. But money doesn't enter in to it.
I'm sure Ralph Yarro can be a respectable, even charming fellow. However, his grasp of SCO's legal situation was drastically flawed. Likewise, his grasp of the "vexing problem" of pornography as demonstrated by CP80 is also drastically flawed. I'm not seeing much so far that supports the idea that the guy has any technical understanding.
I should also note that Ralph Yarro's concern for the "effect of porn on the lives of young university students" would be better directed towards an upbringing where these kids are ill prepared to deal with the vices of the real world around them. There is no need to concern himself with whether those same vices should or should not be made available to the rest of us.
Too many times I've seen people express an opinion, and they got modded into invisibility because it happens to be an unpopular opinion. I've grown tired of that censorship. We should learn to tolerate everyone's viewpoint, even if we disagree with it. IDIC.
I like the idea of being able to see who modded posts. While I support the ability to post anonymously, I'm not sure anonymity offers the same advantages in moderating.
At the same time, I like the moderation system. It exists not for a need to censor unpopular opinions but rather because of the nature of the Internet (I think this is where the infamous Penny Arcade strip goes). Modderation is a way for the community to deal with the community.
It gets abused. It gets misused. But it also handles some of the clutter. A big difference in this form of "censorship" is that even the worse modded posts are still there for your viewing if you're so inclined. I occasionally am. Rarely am I rewarded for the effort.
We should be able to tolerate other's viewpoints in so far as we respect the right to have them and, in the right context, express them. However, this toleration does not mean we must also accept them. Especially when such viewpoints are not always honest.
I believe this moderation system does tolerate opinions while doing a fare job at maintaining signal-to-noise ratios (to varying degrees of success). Dissenting views are still available to be read even if moderation is abused. And I've often seen dissenting views get positive moderation as well.
Just a little less fake than talking to dead relatives of people in a studio audience. But not necessarily less than people seeing ghosts in various buildings / sites around the world.
But the caterpillar is called an inchworm. Look - the category isn't about earthworms (or any other long, soft-bodied critters). It's about computer code. Picking an inchworm as a graphical representation of that code is just as valid as any other "worm" imagery.
I understand the curiosity factor if you didn't know the image was an inchworm and instead you wondered what catapillers have to do with computer worms. But now that the correlation has been demonstrated, any further complaint is just being intentionally obtuse.
Maybe I'm being picky here, but why does Slashdot's icon for this story depict a caterpillar? Don't the editors know the difference between a caterpillar and a worm?
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Computers, for most of us, exist to accomplish other tasks. The users really don't care about the underlying architecture, or how comp sci awesome it might be, they just care about feature parity when big chunks are replaced.
Sadly, many developers never figure this part out.
The problem is that we NEED someone to care about the underlying architecture. If nobody does, the system fails.
Yeah, sure - most users see computers as magic black boxes. But they wouldn't exist if everyone just sat around looking at a box and wishing for rainbows and unicorns (although you might get some nice books / movies). Someone's got to open the box and figure out what's going to go in to it to make it do the things people will take for granted tomorrow.
The danger is in extremes. Change too much and you have an unusable system that's never functional as it's always in preparation. Change too little and you have no improvement. End users should realize that they, ultimately, benefit from change - for every thing that they couldn't do without today, there's someone who remembers when it didn't exist (mortality and history permitting). But developers must realize that the changes they're implementing are future targets and they need to consider the method that gets people to those targets while the changes are being worked out.
The other dozen or two players will balance out your erratic behavior. Or, you'll undo the damage you did by reconnecting to the server after whatever knocked you off is handled.
This isn't about a server getting a high score or tracking points it is owed. This is about providing a tool that can provide an impression of the server's "quality" at a glance.
The internet, which had been around for quite sometime, became omnipresent because it offered something which rapidly drew wide interest, and that was the multimedia offered by the the web.
Not at all. Email was the killer app. And that wasn't multi-media.
I remember trying to get an Internet connection in '91. It wasn't to be had where I was. I had to "borrow" a link from the local university. I got involved with an outfit opening up an ISP in the area. And while firing up Netscape got folks really happy, it was email that got the subscription. Folks wanted to be able to email their kids off at college. We were in a military town with a base who was on a constant deployment schedule (myself included). Military families bought subscriptions as soon as they realized email was (almost) instant compared to the 2 weeks it took for snail-mail to make it across the pond and into sandland.
Now, to be sure, for me... the 'web was a killer app as well. I remember being all giddy over clicking a link that had a.au in it's URL (and not paying LD charges). This was the realization of Clarcke's 2010. And then I was pulling up images of all matter of content - from magazines to hobbies to... well.. other interests.
But all of this would be window dressing if it wasn't for the fact that I can email anyone no matter what service provider they use. And when I want to bring up Megacorp Hobby's web page to order supplies to do a project I read about on some enthusiast's private underwater basket weaving fan site... I don't have to worry about the provider then either.
The underpinnings to this all is ubiquity. I had a lot of these features during the years I used CompuServe, et. al. And services like Sierra Network were pushing the graphics / multi-media angle. But none of them hooked me up with a fan site in Australia.
You know - you're right. There was all that fear about MSN eating AOL's lunch; the unfair advantage MS would have putting a MSN shortcut on the desktop. And then there was the Internet.
There are two concepts here. The first is the uniqueness of the individual. The second is the idea who's time has come.
I agree that history shows that there are certain ideas who's time has come. There are examples of certain revolutionary changes being worked on from different angles. And with hindsight, we can see that the change was only a matter of time.
But saying anyone could have brought about these changes sounds an awful lot like arm-chair quarter-backing; "yeah - I could have done that." There are individuals who're just in the right place at the right time. There are individuals who PUT themselves in the right place at the right time. And there are some individuals who are very unique in their understanding of something.
I agree so far as technology in general gets this black-box mythology surrounding it and the public tends to see those who shape it as some kind of dark wizard. However, I've also found that when you pull back the veil and look at what people were doing and the events involved, you still find some pretty amazing history. Sure, the story sometimes reveals that events were more important than the individual. But sometimes you still find some really amazing individuals.
Eventually, maybe, but exposure drives demand; if it had stalled long-enough for, say, cable and phone companies to deliver substantial non-free interactive multimedia outside of the context of the web first, its very likely that nothing socially like the current web would have existed any time near now, even if many of the individual features that are important about the web were available in one form or another on some networked electonic system that was widely available elsewhere.
You have plenty proprietary network examples; CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, Sierra Network, AOL. Some are certainly more multi-media than others. But the common issue is that they were all their own digital islands. That worked well for decades. Until the Internet consumed public consciousness (and AOL launched the September that never ended).
The power of the 'web isn't in multi-media delivery. That's not to say it isn't important. But there is a more fundimental feature; ubiquity. For all the features the previous online services provided, they stopped as soon as you wanted to talk to someone who wasn't in that service.
This is further defined by the true killer application of the Internet; email. Email was almost exclusively text at that point (and already popular within the aforementioned online services). It largely remains about text today (despite occasional HTML-and-image laden "special messages" from various commercial entities).
Slashdot Mirror
Victor: The seats are stuffed with eagle down, and the dashboard is made form the beaks of a thousand eagles. Also, there are some eagles under the floorboards
Amy: That's an awful lot of eagle.
Victor: Yes, and yet (sighs)
Amy: What's wrong?
Victor: It is just, the luxury edition has so much more eagle. It saddens me to think of you missing out.
Ford Thundercougarfalconbird!
Also keep in mind that Ford started out producing luxury vehicles that were more expensive than the competition. The Model T didn't come until years after the company was founded. And even when it did come out, it took years of refining the assembly process as well as various other cost-cutting steps (to include paying generous wages and decreasing work hours - which also helped increase sales to Ford's own employees) to drive the price of the Model T to it's infamously affordable level.
You can round the list off to the nearest unicorn.
I don't have time to go through lists of facts. Responsible media is there to collate the information for me.
At some point in your life, you better do your own fact checking. Especially if it is a subject that is important to you. Media outlets get things wrong; and they get it wrong often.
What, like those are opposite poles? This is the sort of knee-jerk I've tried to warn you against. Responsible media includes an element of self-censorship. If you're Australian, you probably haven't noticed that newspapers don't like showing shots of dead bodies.
The problem here is that the story is about censorship. The intent is to prove the very serious allegation that the Australian Government is either incompetent or lying about what actions they're taking. That's quite a charge and it takes more than a "trust me." Which is what has gotten the Government in trouble to begin with.
If the issue is whether people are being killed or, even worse, bodies are being mutilated it may take public record of these events to prove it. I'm not saying everyone must be forced to view photos of dead bodies. But those interested in doing fact checking may require the ability to review the facts on their own.
There is a requirement for "self censorship" for the sake of decency. I agree. However, there is a limit to how far that censorship should go.
That's the very idea of responsible media. It's not drowning us in facts or evidence, it's giving us the right information to understand the situation. One single link to a legal website would've been enough to discredit the firewall. Responsibility would say, if you don't want to see something, you shouldn't show it to others. They could easily have said "at least x per cent of links are to benign sites such as blah, blah, blah", because most links clearly state what's behind them.
Again - you need the facts, drowning or not, to make an informed decision. One link is one link. Does it really mean x per cent? Or is this some snow job by someone with an axe to grind against the Government or censorship? If you get to see the activist's data, you can determine if he's a nut-job or not.
I'm not making some knee-jerk reaction. I used to have your kind of view, it's just information. Now, I understand more about what we need and I understand more about my own culture and even the place of culture in real life. It isn't necessary for all information to be out there. People aren't computers and we don't behave like them. The only similarity, really, is that we both process information and can use it to control our actions.
It's a pity you haven't been able to hold on to some of that idealism as you've aged. So few do. But those that do tend to be true patriots.
I understand the danger of some information. Google around for my posts on Slashdot defending why child pornography is rightfully illegal. But I also understand the need to limit how much information we make illegal.
I don't mistake people for computers. I see computers as tools for people and any information handled by a computer is ultimately serving a person. And I understand that the fundimental guarantees to freedom are endangered by those too willing to induce controls such as censorship for the bennefit of society; that such chipping away at our freedoms must be stringently guarded against.
You imply that this is a knee-jerk reaction. I in turn would accuse your support for censorship as being a knee-jerk reaction to what you personally find objectionable.
Amazing how that works. If you are planning on running an operating system you CHECK for compatibility before you buy it. What an amazing concept. Or you could just buy a preloaded system and have zero problems.
Way back when WinXP was the exciting, new product coming from Microsoft, I was in the market for a laptop on the cheap. I went to the Compaq refurb outlet to see what I could get my hands on. Got a decent deal on a cheap laptop that came with WinME (ick) and I could opt for WinXP. I would have none of that as I had a license for Win2K Pro sitting around ready to go.
Pain in the ass. Compaq didn't support Win2K on that particular model. And while I knew Win2K wasn't stellar on laptops, I knew it should at least run the hardware involved. And it did with a lot of jumping through hoops. Mandrake (my Linux distro of choice back then) was fire-and-forget easy.
This isn't an example of "OMG Linux wins!" Rather, it's a nice reminder how many layers are involved in making Windows appear to be the trivial choice for any given chunk of hardware. It's not a given.
Just for giggles... my current laptop runs Ubuntu fairly flawlessly (the nVidia driver sometimes produces artifacts when docked). The Windows partition came with the laptop and plays nice within VMWare (although WinXP gets pissy if I jump between VMWare and raw metal too often).
At work:
I am using ubuntu on a full blown windows network. I'm talking exchange (no IMAP), SMB shares, etc (standard office environment). Evolution using OWA has a lot of problems, but it works. Changing your preferences a bit (Set Inline forwarding, Outlook style replies, etc) will make it emulate an Outlook install. It crashes pretty often, but thats probably because it has to interface with OWA rather than connecting directly with IMAP. Been running this setup for quite some time. I keep a file smb.credentials (rw-------)for easy rdesktop.
As always, Your Mileage May Vary.
I'm in a similar situation. Evolution worked very well for me (no crashes). Then we migrated to Exchange 2007 this month. No more OWA fun for me. The consultants hired for the migration had no clue of how to handle anything but Outlook. I had to shuffle around to get IMAP, LDAP, email relaying, etc. working. I have to resort to a web browser to get at a calendar. I'm looking forward to the much-mentioned MAPI plugin.
Most everything else works well on my native desktop. I can browse around using the default Gnome environment. I tend to smbmount (or sshfs mount :P) remote directories I'm working in. OpenOffice has worked out well.
Occasionally I have to resort to VMWare to run "java" apps. or "web pages" that won't work in anything but a Windows environment.
"Responsible media" reduces things to sound-bytes and incomplete, and often completely misunderstood, information. If you really want to understand what's going on, it takes getting past "responsible media" to get the real information and make an informed decision.
The parent's example is quantifying the information. You can see line by line what this list is doing. Specifying the "kiddie porn" links shows specific cases of where the list apparently hit it's mark just as well as classifying other links shows where they don't - or where the analyst is unsure. This isn't irresponsible - it's factual.
Your example is playing games. Either you're not providing solid numbers, evidence to substantiate your claims, or you're calling attention to the gaps by not labeling them. In any of these cases, you're being ineffective.
You're too aggressive about soliciting those donations. Just like I don't respond to beggars in game, I don't respond to begging add-ons in game.
Too aggressive? The only place I can think of that requests donations is the initial login / mod load scroll. I don't remember seeing it elsewhere (although I do want to say that I've seen a message in the config panel somewhere - I can't remember for sure).
I should note that I don't donate to QH. I'm not keen to pay for any WoW addon. I'll write bug reports, recommend it to friends and guildmates, etc. But money doesn't enter in to it.
I'm sure Ralph Yarro can be a respectable, even charming fellow. However, his grasp of SCO's legal situation was drastically flawed. Likewise, his grasp of the "vexing problem" of pornography as demonstrated by CP80 is also drastically flawed. I'm not seeing much so far that supports the idea that the guy has any technical understanding.
I should also note that Ralph Yarro's concern for the "effect of porn on the lives of young university students" would be better directed towards an upbringing where these kids are ill prepared to deal with the vices of the real world around them. There is no need to concern himself with whether those same vices should or should not be made available to the rest of us.
Too many times I've seen people express an opinion, and they got modded into invisibility because it happens to be an unpopular opinion. I've grown tired of that censorship. We should learn to tolerate everyone's viewpoint, even if we disagree with it. IDIC.
I like the idea of being able to see who modded posts. While I support the ability to post anonymously, I'm not sure anonymity offers the same advantages in moderating.
At the same time, I like the moderation system. It exists not for a need to censor unpopular opinions but rather because of the nature of the Internet (I think this is where the infamous Penny Arcade strip goes). Modderation is a way for the community to deal with the community.
It gets abused. It gets misused. But it also handles some of the clutter. A big difference in this form of "censorship" is that even the worse modded posts are still there for your viewing if you're so inclined. I occasionally am. Rarely am I rewarded for the effort.
We should be able to tolerate other's viewpoints in so far as we respect the right to have them and, in the right context, express them. However, this toleration does not mean we must also accept them. Especially when such viewpoints are not always honest.
I believe this moderation system does tolerate opinions while doing a fare job at maintaining signal-to-noise ratios (to varying degrees of success). Dissenting views are still available to be read even if moderation is abused. And I've often seen dissenting views get positive moderation as well.
This happens to be about Cisco marketing. Microsoft is mentioned in the same breath as VMWare. So why are you so obsessed with Microsoft?
Is this the point where you explain how Microsoft has Real Ultimate Power?
You know, not everything that mentions Microsoft is about Microsoft. Neither is everything that mentions Microsoft a chance to play the martyr card.
Just a little less fake than talking to dead relatives of people in a studio audience. But not necessarily less than people seeing ghosts in various buildings / sites around the world.
But the caterpillar is called an inchworm. Look - the category isn't about earthworms (or any other long, soft-bodied critters). It's about computer code. Picking an inchworm as a graphical representation of that code is just as valid as any other "worm" imagery.
I understand the curiosity factor if you didn't know the image was an inchworm and instead you wondered what catapillers have to do with computer worms. But now that the correlation has been demonstrated, any further complaint is just being intentionally obtuse.
Maybe I'm being picky here, but why does Slashdot's icon for this story depict a caterpillar? Don't the editors know the difference between a caterpillar and a worm?
It's an inchworm.
Okay, then the ball's in your court. From what point of view is this law effective?
Jack Thompson. He'll use this to get PR millage and rail against his critics.
Netflix. Silverlight. And a series of tubes.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Computers, for most of us, exist to accomplish other tasks. The users really don't care about the underlying architecture, or how comp sci awesome it might be, they just care about feature parity when big chunks are replaced.
Sadly, many developers never figure this part out.
The problem is that we NEED someone to care about the underlying architecture. If nobody does, the system fails.
Yeah, sure - most users see computers as magic black boxes. But they wouldn't exist if everyone just sat around looking at a box and wishing for rainbows and unicorns (although you might get some nice books / movies). Someone's got to open the box and figure out what's going to go in to it to make it do the things people will take for granted tomorrow.
The danger is in extremes. Change too much and you have an unusable system that's never functional as it's always in preparation. Change too little and you have no improvement. End users should realize that they, ultimately, benefit from change - for every thing that they couldn't do without today, there's someone who remembers when it didn't exist (mortality and history permitting). But developers must realize that the changes they're implementing are future targets and they need to consider the method that gets people to those targets while the changes are being worked out.
The other dozen or two players will balance out your erratic behavior. Or, you'll undo the damage you did by reconnecting to the server after whatever knocked you off is handled.
This isn't about a server getting a high score or tracking points it is owed. This is about providing a tool that can provide an impression of the server's "quality" at a glance.
Obama: I have this great idea. I'm going to have a Cabinet that's free and clear of corruption!
Aide: Ummm... Mr. President? About that. We might have a problem coming up with a list of Candidates...
Many Googlians died to bring you these satellite images.
The internet, which had been around for quite sometime, became omnipresent because it offered something which rapidly drew wide interest, and that was the multimedia offered by the the web.
Not at all. Email was the killer app. And that wasn't multi-media.
I remember trying to get an Internet connection in '91. It wasn't to be had where I was. I had to "borrow" a link from the local university. I got involved with an outfit opening up an ISP in the area. And while firing up Netscape got folks really happy, it was email that got the subscription. Folks wanted to be able to email their kids off at college. We were in a military town with a base who was on a constant deployment schedule (myself included). Military families bought subscriptions as soon as they realized email was (almost) instant compared to the 2 weeks it took for snail-mail to make it across the pond and into sandland.
Now, to be sure, for me... the 'web was a killer app as well. I remember being all giddy over clicking a link that had a .au in it's URL (and not paying LD charges). This was the realization of Clarcke's 2010. And then I was pulling up images of all matter of content - from magazines to hobbies to... well.. other interests.
But all of this would be window dressing if it wasn't for the fact that I can email anyone no matter what service provider they use. And when I want to bring up Megacorp Hobby's web page to order supplies to do a project I read about on some enthusiast's private underwater basket weaving fan site... I don't have to worry about the provider then either.
The underpinnings to this all is ubiquity. I had a lot of these features during the years I used CompuServe, et. al. And services like Sierra Network were pushing the graphics / multi-media angle. But none of them hooked me up with a fan site in Australia.
You know - you're right. There was all that fear about MSN eating AOL's lunch; the unfair advantage MS would have putting a MSN shortcut on the desktop. And then there was the Internet.
There are two concepts here. The first is the uniqueness of the individual. The second is the idea who's time has come.
I agree that history shows that there are certain ideas who's time has come. There are examples of certain revolutionary changes being worked on from different angles. And with hindsight, we can see that the change was only a matter of time.
But saying anyone could have brought about these changes sounds an awful lot like arm-chair quarter-backing; "yeah - I could have done that." There are individuals who're just in the right place at the right time. There are individuals who PUT themselves in the right place at the right time. And there are some individuals who are very unique in their understanding of something.
I agree so far as technology in general gets this black-box mythology surrounding it and the public tends to see those who shape it as some kind of dark wizard. However, I've also found that when you pull back the veil and look at what people were doing and the events involved, you still find some pretty amazing history. Sure, the story sometimes reveals that events were more important than the individual. But sometimes you still find some really amazing individuals.
Eventually, maybe, but exposure drives demand; if it had stalled long-enough for, say, cable and phone companies to deliver substantial non-free interactive multimedia outside of the context of the web first, its very likely that nothing socially like the current web would have existed any time near now, even if many of the individual features that are important about the web were available in one form or another on some networked electonic system that was widely available elsewhere.
You have plenty proprietary network examples; CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, Sierra Network, AOL. Some are certainly more multi-media than others. But the common issue is that they were all their own digital islands. That worked well for decades. Until the Internet consumed public consciousness (and AOL launched the September that never ended).
The power of the 'web isn't in multi-media delivery. That's not to say it isn't important. But there is a more fundimental feature; ubiquity. For all the features the previous online services provided, they stopped as soon as you wanted to talk to someone who wasn't in that service.
This is further defined by the true killer application of the Internet; email. Email was almost exclusively text at that point (and already popular within the aforementioned online services). It largely remains about text today (despite occasional HTML-and-image laden "special messages" from various commercial entities).