but how would the game implement the GM directive to reward players for original, extraordinary and spectacular actions?
Let me try to address that with a meta answer. One thing I think is woefully missing with current online games is the ability of the player to be anything other than their specific character. That is, PCs and NPCs are usually separate and unequal. The game might supply you with an NPC that can assign you a quest/mission, but seldom is there a system in place that allows other players to assign a task, or to otherwise fill what would be an "economic" role in the real world. A system that supported producers as well as consumers would be a big win.
Not unlike moderation and meta-moderation on Slashdot, the users should be able to take a more active role in the game. So for an RPG that is more about the play than the rules, as Paranoia is, it would mean that users could be the Computer at times. Since no one person controls the Computer, it would also add to its "insane" status. The mechanics of that might be a puzzler to figure out, but once in place I think it would be real fun to be GM-for-a-day from time to time and oversee a mission as the Computer.
Now I know that the article is mainly about an update to the RPG rules themselves, but I can't help but think how awesome a computer game set in that universe would be. One of the great points of Paranoia is that you go in knowing you're probably going to die a number of times, so you get really attached not to the clones, but to the game play. There are levels of sorts, but not in such a way that the game is about leveling up, so it would still be fun for new players (and/or yourself when you've run through your clones). With the "unseen enemy" angle, you can constantly have the goals of a troubleshooter changing so it would never get stale. The article states rights have been sold for a text version, but if someone wants to make a killing they should snap up rights for a graphic version.
An ambiguous phrase, at best, in Hollywood. More to the point, I believe that the original poster was actually referring to the fact he didn't want her looking like this. Note that this, too, was easy to find with Google using "Vicki Phillips sheena". Maybe you, like the original poster, needs to take a class on how to use a search engine.
See if you can get a photograph of her sans makeup.
Trivially easy. A search on "Vicki Phillips stunt" turns up this on the first page. It has both her head shot and links to more detailed info about her. In this case, I'd say the problem wasn't on Google's end.
I go from the company with the absolute worst customer service in the world to the company with the absolute second worst customer service in the world, who just inherited the title of "worst" as the worst is now gone....
Not to, uh, sound selfish or anything, but who were you thinking of going with next?
Sorry I don't want to delete the post. Despite your alleged implications the situation, surely you're not denying that had the problem occured on a Windows platform many slashdotters would make reflex comments about the platform whether the problem lay with the coders or not?
A software problem can only lie with the coders. My point is that coders anywhere can name Windows as a cop-out, but they can't do that with a Unix (especially an open one) unless they demonstrate an actual OS bug.
I certainly don't concede your suggestion that RISC/UNIX systems are so stable that it would be clear that it was bad coding. There's lot's of examples of flaws in various *NIX OSs and physical issues on RISC servers (ask current Sun users about system quality and reliability on the low-end V series boxes)
Again, it's not about what/where flaws do or don't exist, it's about the professionalism of the coders who step forward and accept the faults in their code. The Windows camp has so often blamed MS that it's a running joke. The Unix camp simply can't blame the OS unless it's a serious issue. My point stands.
Funny, just because this ships for "industrial strength" AIX / Solaris RISC systems (see specs on pg 8), I don't see any cheap, reflexive comments about the platform.
The only thing "funny" about that is how it reflects poorly on Windows developers (bet you didn't see that coming!:-). When people have Windows problem, yeah, it's just an endless stream of "boy, isn't Microsoft putting out crap". When a Unix system has similar problem, its essentially "we screwed this up; no scapegoat to blame".
What you try to spin as something Windows coders can point to and gloat is actually something Unix coders can point at and gloat. It's called professionalism, which is something sorely lacking at Camp Microsoft these days. The fact you didn't realize that before posting means you're probably a Windows goon. How embarrassing for you. Don't you wish you could delete posts?:-)
Given that the vast majority of the games listed require Windows, how "independent" should any of them be considered? I saw one that had Linux support, which I consider odd because they didn't bother with Mac OS X support (i.e., the secondary commercial/desktop market vs. the primary free/server market). They also didn't give any hardware/software requirements, so I have to do a massive hunt for each one to find out if I can even play it before I start a 300+ demo download. Not cool.
To say someone is schizophrenic when you are not an expert in the field is libelous, in any case.
This is a good example of why the system is screwed up. The way it should be is that if you are not an expert in the field (of psychology) then it cannot be libel. In that case, you're just a guy stating your opinion and not a medical professional giving a diagnosis. What's next, I need to be a proctologist to claim the President has his head up his ass, and then I can only do so with with the x-ray as evidence?
You are indeed more likely to get roughed up wandering around London's dark streets in the small hours than in New York.
Right. Random street crime is bad for random people.
You are also more likely to get killed in New York than in London
Wrong. Murder is rarely a random crime. I would wager if you broke down the stats, your use of "you" to actually mean me (or any other random person) would likely show I am at risk of being killed equally based on lifestyle choices. In fact, if you just eliminated gang and drug-related murders, that alone might even out the numbers.
They all must run on the same system, therefore leveling the playing field off on the hardware level.
All the more reason to load up the x86 version of Darwin, which would then give you the ability to compare the same OS across processors as well as different OSes doing the same thing on different processors. Who wouldn't love to see how Darwin fairs not only compared to other PC Unix offerings, but compared to a Mac at a similar price point? Lots of interesting things they could be doing, but instead it'll probably be a lot of hand-wringing over fractions of a percentage difference between Linux distributions.
What's with the x86- and Linux-centric approach? Do we really need to see how 6 different distributions can be tweaked to behave like one another on the same $4300 piece of hardware? I'd be extremely interested to see a G5 Xserve entered into that mix, although you'd clearly have to add some unnecessary doo-dads to the Mac to bring the price over $4000 (even with hardware RAID and the inability to drop below an 80GB HD to the 18GB like the Dell has, I could only bring a single processor Xserve up to $3500). Include a PPC Linux or two while you're at it. As it stands, the results will probably be at least a 6-way yawn-fest.
We accept the "questionable" stuff because following a "better safe than sorry" philosphy regarding flagging has worked and it reduces turnaround time on potentially important transactions.
It's not a question of what you accept inwardly, it's a question of what you send outwardly. I don't know why you won't see that.
The traffic generated has been historically minimal and the benefits have far outweighed them.
Benefits to who? How to I benefit when you send me someone else's email, or report to me about your system at all?
30 auto-replies in the last 3 months barely more than 1k each.
You should not be an administrator, especially of email. Spam isn't about the size of individual messages; HTTP traffic dwarfs SMTP traffic. The issue with spam is that my inbox comes directly and every message requires me to deal with it, and the volume will obscure valued messages far more than the size. Every user you'd care to talk to would say they'd rather get 1 250K spam a day rather than 500.5K spam clogging their mailbox.
Hardly a traffic jam. Only 3 went to "forged" email addresses.
Not a traffic jam for you. Only 3 for you. Multiply your actions by hundreds of thousands of cluelessly administered machines and you're contributing to a huge problem. Just stop it! There is no justification for your bouncing.
Our email scanner will ONLY send out alert auto-replies to files it flags but can't identify as specific viruses.
So? The fact that you bounce instead of reject is the problem. It's a question of where you run your checks (i.e., after accepting the message for delivery), not what checks you run.
Over half thought it was a real virus, and clicked it to see "What would happen" or "If it would work." Please note that this was only a couple weeks after "I Love You." infected half the computers on the network, and a company wide meeting about NOT opening attachments that you weren't expecting.
And what was done to correct that behavior? Was anyone fired for such gross stupidity? Seriously, if there is no penalty for what they did, why would you expect their behavior to change at all? How is your company served by continuing to employ such people? Then again, maybe the person to be axed should be the guy that decided to put Windows on all their desktops in the first place; I hope that wasn't you!
Funny thing is, that's not the parity question you think it is. You should have asked "how many inches in a kiloinch?", but that isn't nearly as clever as you'd like. The truth is, units are mostly arbitrary for non-scientists regardless of which you choose. I mean, if you're driving across town, how significant is it really if it is X miles or Y kilometers or Z foobars?
The biggest complaint people seems to have is that there is no standard imperial name+magnitude combination (inch/mile) where there is in metric (centi/kilo+meter). The related complaint is that imperial "orders of magnitude" (between arbitrary measures, mind you) are all over the place where metric goes with 10.
I think those simply aren't overwhelming good reasons that you should expect the US to eagerly adopt the metric system. It makes sense to standardize in Europe, where there are a lot of different cultures/languages moving products around. That's just not case in the US, and likely won't be until they lose their superpower status.
There are a lot of these kinds of technologies that keep getting pushed (and failing) and I have no idea why. It seems like micropayments were thought up to solve the vendor problem of "How can we nickel and dime our customers to death?", but they never explain why the customer should be interested in that. Is the idea to sell stuff so cheap that it has nearly no value? Just give it away, damn it! There are stores with a physical presence that can manage to survive with everything under a dollar, and all these techno-jokers can't figure how how to flip a few bits to accomplish the same without taking a 15% cut? I personally think PayPal will be "good enough" technology for small(ish) payments until a) a system is devised that seriously undercuts it in cost and b) it can be funded from a PayPal account (part of the value in PayPal is that I don't spread credit card info all over the net).
Send the data to me after I sign a nondisclosure and I'll clean it for you.
Why should you have to sign an NDA? This is, after all, information they are just going to throw out there for everybody unless something smart gets done. Giving it freely to one person has to be a lot less damaging than that, and if they think you might try to munge more than email addresses, a simple scan by eye of the diff would show that.
It's not that much data anyway.
More importantly, it is data that by procedure could have been stripped as the comments were read by whatever human(s) went through them. Not doing so is essentially an admission that they didn't even bother to process the comments properly otherwise. The whole thing is just dripping with government incompetence.
I agree that GNUStep is pretty cool, but it's main problem, much to my chagrin, is that it's ugly! GNUStep looks like they took OSX, ripped out all the cool quartz stuff, and then asked, "what can we do to make this interface the ghastliest, most horridly ugly thing the world has ever seen?"
It doesn't look like a cheap whore, if that's what you mean. The primary GUI is the classic NeXT look, which de-emphasized the system widgets in favor of the content; you know, the stuff that should actually matter. Making things pretty doesn't make them usable and, regardless, that is something the developer shouldn't have to care about. If an OS X developer uses an NSMenu, it "just worked" when it ran on Windows (using the Yellow Box) and it should "just work" when running with the current GNUstep look or any future theme that might get pushed forward.
That is, the big win with GNUstep is not what you see on the screen, but the OpenStep frameworks underneath. They're what Apple saw enough value in to buy NeXT for many millions and gave them a platform to build Mac OS X from. The free implementation provided by GNUstep could similarly be a basis for Linux getting a usable desktop, too. KDE won't do that and neither will GNOME, simply because there is no interest in developers making it usable beyond scratching their own itches. OpenStep was/is about developing for users, not other developers. Continue to ignore that and you continue to work without a real Linux desktop in the future.
there'll be someone who re-invents the wheel again
With any luck, a round one this time instead of suffering with the two (main) horribly clunky desktop choices offered to Linux users now. If you really think KDE or GNOME are usable, you just haven't been around. If IBM had a clue, they'd push for more GNUstep development, which would actually give us all a shot at running some quality apps (commercially coming over from the Mac camp, of course) on Linux. A lot of things on Linux are nice, but making usable apps is simply not an itch that developers have scratched in free software.
Sign with amoral publisher/media giant to tell your story.
Profit. (That's right, people, I got to profit without a mystery step!:-)
Then they'd have some real news to write about instead of fabricating bogus issues to distract people from things that actually matter. But, really, nothing after point 1 is significant. Someone who is messed up mentally will likely act out, and I personally would rather they have a virtual environment to fill that need. Games being a whole lot of fun for a sane person at the same time is just an added bonus.
In the game Savage, some spammer thought it would be cute to use the voting system to spam us. He didn't last long (another vote kicked him from the game).
That would be an interesting direction to take things, but I think the audience is somewhat limited and less than receptive to the ad. It strikes me as something of a mix between astroturfing and product placement. Since all online advertising is suffering, I think ads in general will become more integrated into the online experience. People accuse Slashdot of posting ads as articles, so the line is already blurring between what a news site is and what is merely a front for company PR. How long, assuming it hasn't already happened, before companies simply start to sponsor "users" with names that are the corporate slogan or that happily link to the corporate site when commenting on articles? Not just in-the-sig plugs, but cleverly crafted astroturfing that is on topic, modded up, and will actually get clicks? I think that sort of thing will increase a lot in the coming year.
My predicition is that Wal-Mart abandons digital music within 18 months.
I think you're pretty much right, but I don't see a lot of the newcomers lasting until even the end of 2004 (leading to the question of what happens to the restricted music that gets purchased while they're around). The mistake I think Cringely made is noting that Apple publicly stated it uses iTMS to drive iPod sales, and Cringely thinks that means online music stores will drive the direction portable players take. He failed to note that the iPod was king before the iTMS was introduced, and Apple's use is to expand its dominance in the player market. Wal-Mart has no leadership role either in online music or in portable players. Their practice of driving smaller business into the ground simply won't work. And, really, when it gets to sub-dollar pricing, not a lot of people are going to care enough to save that dime to be short-changed not only by the WMA restrictions, but the limited "clean" selections as well.
Not by a long shot. It's hard to say this without sounding like a troll, but what most open source developers just don't get is that the hard part isn't the coding, but putting on the polish so that the app is useful to someone else. Looking at the screenshot, I can pretty much tell you that no Mac user is going to be comfortable using what clearly is not a well-designed Mac app. The fake widgets are out of place. The nested tab views (or two rows of tabs, depending on how you see it) is a terrible interface error straight out of Windows. I imagine trying to use this thing would show it to be even more clunky than the X11 version, where a user would more understand what they're getting into.
Apple gave a very public lesson on the proper way to port OSS when they did Safari. This port clearly took nothing from that lesson. I don't really want to come down on the developers who got it working, because I know the kinds of efforts involved, but I have to say that if anyone thinks this will be of real help to the average Mac user, they are very much mistaken.
Slashdot Mirror
but how would the game implement the GM directive to reward players for original, extraordinary and spectacular actions?
Let me try to address that with a meta answer. One thing I think is woefully missing with current online games is the ability of the player to be anything other than their specific character. That is, PCs and NPCs are usually separate and unequal. The game might supply you with an NPC that can assign you a quest/mission, but seldom is there a system in place that allows other players to assign a task, or to otherwise fill what would be an "economic" role in the real world. A system that supported producers as well as consumers would be a big win.
Not unlike moderation and meta-moderation on Slashdot, the users should be able to take a more active role in the game. So for an RPG that is more about the play than the rules, as Paranoia is, it would mean that users could be the Computer at times. Since no one person controls the Computer, it would also add to its "insane" status. The mechanics of that might be a puzzler to figure out, but once in place I think it would be real fun to be GM-for-a-day from time to time and oversee a mission as the Computer.
Now I know that the article is mainly about an update to the RPG rules themselves, but I can't help but think how awesome a computer game set in that universe would be. One of the great points of Paranoia is that you go in knowing you're probably going to die a number of times, so you get really attached not to the clones, but to the game play. There are levels of sorts, but not in such a way that the game is about leveling up, so it would still be fun for new players (and/or yourself when you've run through your clones). With the "unseen enemy" angle, you can constantly have the goals of a troubleshooter changing so it would never get stale. The article states rights have been sold for a text version, but if someone wants to make a killing they should snap up rights for a graphic version.
"without makeup"
An ambiguous phrase, at best, in Hollywood. More to the point, I believe that the original poster was actually referring to the fact he didn't want her looking like this. Note that this, too, was easy to find with Google using "Vicki Phillips sheena". Maybe you, like the original poster, needs to take a class on how to use a search engine.
See if you can get a photograph of her sans makeup.
Trivially easy. A search on "Vicki Phillips stunt" turns up this on the first page. It has both her head shot and links to more detailed info about her. In this case, I'd say the problem wasn't on Google's end.
I go from the company with the absolute worst customer service in the world to the company with the absolute second worst customer service in the world, who just inherited the title of "worst" as the worst is now gone....
Not to, uh, sound selfish or anything, but who were you thinking of going with next?
Sorry I don't want to delete the post. Despite your alleged implications the situation, surely you're not denying that had the problem occured on a Windows platform many slashdotters would make reflex comments about the platform whether the problem lay with the coders or not?
A software problem can only lie with the coders. My point is that coders anywhere can name Windows as a cop-out, but they can't do that with a Unix (especially an open one) unless they demonstrate an actual OS bug.
I certainly don't concede your suggestion that RISC/UNIX systems are so stable that it would be clear that it was bad coding. There's lot's of examples of flaws in various *NIX OSs and physical issues on RISC servers (ask current Sun users about system quality and reliability on the low-end V series boxes)
Again, it's not about what/where flaws do or don't exist, it's about the professionalism of the coders who step forward and accept the faults in their code. The Windows camp has so often blamed MS that it's a running joke. The Unix camp simply can't blame the OS unless it's a serious issue. My point stands.
Funny, just because this ships for "industrial strength" AIX / Solaris RISC systems (see specs on pg 8), I don't see any cheap, reflexive comments about the platform.
The only thing "funny" about that is how it reflects poorly on Windows developers (bet you didn't see that coming! :-). When people have Windows problem, yeah, it's just an endless stream of "boy, isn't Microsoft putting out crap". When a Unix system has similar problem, its essentially "we screwed this up; no scapegoat to blame".
What you try to spin as something Windows coders can point to and gloat is actually something Unix coders can point at and gloat. It's called professionalism, which is something sorely lacking at Camp Microsoft these days. The fact you didn't realize that before posting means you're probably a Windows goon. How embarrassing for you. Don't you wish you could delete posts? :-)
Given that the vast majority of the games listed require Windows, how "independent" should any of them be considered? I saw one that had Linux support, which I consider odd because they didn't bother with Mac OS X support (i.e., the secondary commercial/desktop market vs. the primary free/server market). They also didn't give any hardware/software requirements, so I have to do a massive hunt for each one to find out if I can even play it before I start a 300+ demo download. Not cool.
To say someone is schizophrenic when you are not an expert in the field is libelous, in any case.
This is a good example of why the system is screwed up. The way it should be is that if you are not an expert in the field (of psychology) then it cannot be libel. In that case, you're just a guy stating your opinion and not a medical professional giving a diagnosis. What's next, I need to be a proctologist to claim the President has his head up his ass, and then I can only do so with with the x-ray as evidence?
You are indeed more likely to get roughed up wandering around London's dark streets in the small hours than in New York.
Right. Random street crime is bad for random people.
You are also more likely to get killed in New York than in London
Wrong. Murder is rarely a random crime. I would wager if you broke down the stats, your use of "you" to actually mean me (or any other random person) would likely show I am at risk of being killed equally based on lifestyle choices. In fact, if you just eliminated gang and drug-related murders, that alone might even out the numbers.
They all must run on the same system, therefore leveling the playing field off on the hardware level.
All the more reason to load up the x86 version of Darwin, which would then give you the ability to compare the same OS across processors as well as different OSes doing the same thing on different processors. Who wouldn't love to see how Darwin fairs not only compared to other PC Unix offerings, but compared to a Mac at a similar price point? Lots of interesting things they could be doing, but instead it'll probably be a lot of hand-wringing over fractions of a percentage difference between Linux distributions.
What's with the x86- and Linux-centric approach? Do we really need to see how 6 different distributions can be tweaked to behave like one another on the same $4300 piece of hardware? I'd be extremely interested to see a G5 Xserve entered into that mix, although you'd clearly have to add some unnecessary doo-dads to the Mac to bring the price over $4000 (even with hardware RAID and the inability to drop below an 80GB HD to the 18GB like the Dell has, I could only bring a single processor Xserve up to $3500). Include a PPC Linux or two while you're at it. As it stands, the results will probably be at least a 6-way yawn-fest.
People who endorse and encourage illegal activities normally aren't very reputable.
Sorry, I just don't believe criminals.
Then you've probably been really upset about these criminal manifestos.
We accept the "questionable" stuff because following a "better safe than sorry" philosphy regarding flagging has worked and it reduces turnaround time on potentially important transactions.
It's not a question of what you accept inwardly, it's a question of what you send outwardly. I don't know why you won't see that.
The traffic generated has been historically minimal and the benefits have far outweighed them.
Benefits to who? How to I benefit when you send me someone else's email, or report to me about your system at all?
30 auto-replies in the last 3 months barely more than 1k each.
You should not be an administrator, especially of email. Spam isn't about the size of individual messages; HTTP traffic dwarfs SMTP traffic. The issue with spam is that my inbox comes directly and every message requires me to deal with it, and the volume will obscure valued messages far more than the size. Every user you'd care to talk to would say they'd rather get 1 250K spam a day rather than 500 .5K spam clogging their mailbox.
Hardly a traffic jam. Only 3 went to "forged" email addresses.
Not a traffic jam for you. Only 3 for you. Multiply your actions by hundreds of thousands of cluelessly administered machines and you're contributing to a huge problem. Just stop it! There is no justification for your bouncing.
Our email scanner will ONLY send out alert auto-replies to files it flags but can't identify as specific viruses.
So? The fact that you bounce instead of reject is the problem. It's a question of where you run your checks (i.e., after accepting the message for delivery), not what checks you run.
Over half thought it was a real virus, and clicked it to see "What would happen" or "If it would work." Please note that this was only a couple weeks after "I Love You." infected half the computers on the network, and a company wide meeting about NOT opening attachments that you weren't expecting.
And what was done to correct that behavior? Was anyone fired for such gross stupidity? Seriously, if there is no penalty for what they did, why would you expect their behavior to change at all? How is your company served by continuing to employ such people? Then again, maybe the person to be axed should be the guy that decided to put Windows on all their desktops in the first place; I hope that wasn't you!
how many inches in a mile?
Funny thing is, that's not the parity question you think it is. You should have asked "how many inches in a kiloinch?", but that isn't nearly as clever as you'd like. The truth is, units are mostly arbitrary for non-scientists regardless of which you choose. I mean, if you're driving across town, how significant is it really if it is X miles or Y kilometers or Z foobars?
The biggest complaint people seems to have is that there is no standard imperial name+magnitude combination (inch/mile) where there is in metric (centi/kilo+meter). The related complaint is that imperial "orders of magnitude" (between arbitrary measures, mind you) are all over the place where metric goes with 10.
I think those simply aren't overwhelming good reasons that you should expect the US to eagerly adopt the metric system. It makes sense to standardize in Europe, where there are a lot of different cultures/languages moving products around. That's just not case in the US, and likely won't be until they lose their superpower status.
There are a lot of these kinds of technologies that keep getting pushed (and failing) and I have no idea why. It seems like micropayments were thought up to solve the vendor problem of "How can we nickel and dime our customers to death?", but they never explain why the customer should be interested in that. Is the idea to sell stuff so cheap that it has nearly no value? Just give it away, damn it! There are stores with a physical presence that can manage to survive with everything under a dollar, and all these techno-jokers can't figure how how to flip a few bits to accomplish the same without taking a 15% cut? I personally think PayPal will be "good enough" technology for small(ish) payments until a) a system is devised that seriously undercuts it in cost and b) it can be funded from a PayPal account (part of the value in PayPal is that I don't spread credit card info all over the net).
Send the data to me after I sign a nondisclosure and I'll clean it for you.
Why should you have to sign an NDA? This is, after all, information they are just going to throw out there for everybody unless something smart gets done. Giving it freely to one person has to be a lot less damaging than that, and if they think you might try to munge more than email addresses, a simple scan by eye of the diff would show that.
It's not that much data anyway.
More importantly, it is data that by procedure could have been stripped as the comments were read by whatever human(s) went through them. Not doing so is essentially an admission that they didn't even bother to process the comments properly otherwise. The whole thing is just dripping with government incompetence.
I agree that GNUStep is pretty cool, but it's main problem, much to my chagrin, is that it's ugly! GNUStep looks like they took OSX, ripped out all the cool quartz stuff, and then asked, "what can we do to make this interface the ghastliest, most horridly ugly thing the world has ever seen?"
It doesn't look like a cheap whore, if that's what you mean. The primary GUI is the classic NeXT look, which de-emphasized the system widgets in favor of the content; you know, the stuff that should actually matter. Making things pretty doesn't make them usable and, regardless, that is something the developer shouldn't have to care about. If an OS X developer uses an NSMenu, it "just worked" when it ran on Windows (using the Yellow Box) and it should "just work" when running with the current GNUstep look or any future theme that might get pushed forward.
That is, the big win with GNUstep is not what you see on the screen, but the OpenStep frameworks underneath. They're what Apple saw enough value in to buy NeXT for many millions and gave them a platform to build Mac OS X from. The free implementation provided by GNUstep could similarly be a basis for Linux getting a usable desktop, too. KDE won't do that and neither will GNOME, simply because there is no interest in developers making it usable beyond scratching their own itches. OpenStep was/is about developing for users, not other developers. Continue to ignore that and you continue to work without a real Linux desktop in the future.
there'll be someone who re-invents the wheel again
With any luck, a round one this time instead of suffering with the two (main) horribly clunky desktop choices offered to Linux users now. If you really think KDE or GNOME are usable, you just haven't been around. If IBM had a clue, they'd push for more GNUstep development, which would actually give us all a shot at running some quality apps (commercially coming over from the Mac camp, of course) on Linux. A lot of things on Linux are nice, but making usable apps is simply not an itch that developers have scratched in free software.
Then they'd have some real news to write about instead of fabricating bogus issues to distract people from things that actually matter. But, really, nothing after point 1 is significant. Someone who is messed up mentally will likely act out, and I personally would rather they have a virtual environment to fill that need. Games being a whole lot of fun for a sane person at the same time is just an added bonus.
In the game Savage, some spammer thought it would be cute to use the voting system to spam us. He didn't last long (another vote kicked him from the game).
That would be an interesting direction to take things, but I think the audience is somewhat limited and less than receptive to the ad. It strikes me as something of a mix between astroturfing and product placement. Since all online advertising is suffering, I think ads in general will become more integrated into the online experience. People accuse Slashdot of posting ads as articles, so the line is already blurring between what a news site is and what is merely a front for company PR. How long, assuming it hasn't already happened, before companies simply start to sponsor "users" with names that are the corporate slogan or that happily link to the corporate site when commenting on articles? Not just in-the-sig plugs, but cleverly crafted astroturfing that is on topic, modded up, and will actually get clicks? I think that sort of thing will increase a lot in the coming year.
My predicition is that Wal-Mart abandons digital music within 18 months.
I think you're pretty much right, but I don't see a lot of the newcomers lasting until even the end of 2004 (leading to the question of what happens to the restricted music that gets purchased while they're around). The mistake I think Cringely made is noting that Apple publicly stated it uses iTMS to drive iPod sales, and Cringely thinks that means online music stores will drive the direction portable players take. He failed to note that the iPod was king before the iTMS was introduced, and Apple's use is to expand its dominance in the player market. Wal-Mart has no leadership role either in online music or in portable players. Their practice of driving smaller business into the ground simply won't work. And, really, when it gets to sub-dollar pricing, not a lot of people are going to care enough to save that dime to be short-changed not only by the WMA restrictions, but the limited "clean" selections as well.
. . . the hard part is over . . .
Not by a long shot. It's hard to say this without sounding like a troll, but what most open source developers just don't get is that the hard part isn't the coding, but putting on the polish so that the app is useful to someone else. Looking at the screenshot, I can pretty much tell you that no Mac user is going to be comfortable using what clearly is not a well-designed Mac app. The fake widgets are out of place. The nested tab views (or two rows of tabs, depending on how you see it) is a terrible interface error straight out of Windows. I imagine trying to use this thing would show it to be even more clunky than the X11 version, where a user would more understand what they're getting into.
Apple gave a very public lesson on the proper way to port OSS when they did Safari. This port clearly took nothing from that lesson. I don't really want to come down on the developers who got it working, because I know the kinds of efforts involved, but I have to say that if anyone thinks this will be of real help to the average Mac user, they are very much mistaken.