They did not crack down on spammers for spamming, but for selling a bogus product, as someone else correctly pointed out.
Technical measures alone will not cut it, we'll need legislation as well to outlaw spam, and get those laws adopted in as many countries as we can. You'll want a good lock on your door and laws to make burglary a crime...
One of those head-smackers... "why didn't I think of that?".
Someone may well have thought of it before... someone may even have tried to whip one up in his basement, but Kamen took the idea and turned it into a commercial product.
That takes a special kind of human being. A friend of mine is a little like that: he keeps a small recorder on him (and under his bed) and dictates ideas he gets to himself. He may wake up one night thinking "What if I printed ads for companies on those flexible magnetic sheets, slap them on cabs and pay the cabbie a sum for the privilege?" (In Holland cabs generally have no ads on them). Next morning he starts making phone calls, to buddies in advertising firms, to cab companies, to printers, ect. etc. He spends an enormous amount of energy, and 49 out of 50 times it comes to nothing. It's that successful nr. 50 that counts though.
You have to admire people like that, having the drive to follow through on an idea and getting a company off the ground. Me, I am much to lazy for that... I'd wake up with an idea, think "Hmm neat" and go back to sleep.
The sad part is that apparently one of the reasons they stopped the Buran program was a relatively minor glitch, and politics. The following story comes someone who has worked in the Russian aviation authorities and one of the design bureaus. It may be complete bollocks.
[rumour]
Apparently the Buran did a very short dive on the glide path to the runway, the quickly correcting itself. It was the Russian equivalent of the FAA that demanded to know why that happened before they'd approve Buran.
After an investigation they found that it was likely that one of the transmitters guiding Buran on an approach path, had failed. But no one could be sure, and apparently this report has circled offices and organisations for a while, with no one daring to sign the thing in cas ethe report turning out to be wrong. There was an attempt to have a whole department sign the thing collectively, but it came to nothing, and the project was delayed.
[/rumour]
Without this glitch they might well have continued the Buran programme, with success even. The basics of the Buran might have been copied from the US Shuttle design, but the overall design of the Buran is supposed to be much better, being the work of smallish groups of engineers and designers working closely together, rather than the gazillion design committees working individually on every Shuttle subsystem, leading to a horrible design. (Feynman wrote something about this in one of his books). Also, Buran was capable of lifting a far larger payload than the shuttle, and it could be piggybacked onto a Proton for an even larger payload.
By the way, the shuttle is almost completely automated as well.
"Your post rightfully says that all inventions belong to public, on loan to owners, not the other way around!"
Not so. All inventions and works of art belong to the creators. If they choose not to share them with us, that is their unalienable right, an the public has no right to demand that these inventions be shared.
However when the inventor or artist chooses to share his invention, it becomes "public domain" by default, more or less, and anyone can freely copy or use it. By "freely" I mean that there is no physical impedence to using someone else's work or invention, however "we the public" have put into place laws that places legal restrictions on such use, so that the artist receives fair benefit for his work, and the inventor is compensated for his toil. It is us, the public, that decide what compensation is fair, and what is a good length of time for the creator to retain special rights on his work.
But to say that inventions belong to the public and are merely on loan to the owners, is a horrible statement with far-reaching philosophical consequences.
If you're into SMS, you might do well to remember that company: I believe that Logica and CMG (now LogicaCMG) together have 85-90% of the world market for SMS software.
Rubbish. To do the groundbreaking stuff, most people still need solid fundamentals to begin with, just as in music and the other arts. All good art studies begin by drilling the classics and fundamentals, and this book might (although I cannot speak from experience) provide a basis for drawing Manga.
To produce exceptional work without having studied the basics first can be done... by a few rare, extraordinary people. Us mere mortals cannot do without drilling first, and when we try anyway... well there are some unfortunate examples to be found in any art form. Spare me from that stuff please
I mean how many MMOGs do we really need to waste our silly little lives away?
Infinitely many! Seriously, the MMORPG market is beginning to diversify, with games available or being released soon, catering to different tastes and playstyles. If the trend continues, I see the following things happening:
1) MMORPG's become more mainstream. The Sims and Star Wars Galaxies may set off this trend and expand the market for MMORPG's.
2) Each individual MMORPG will have less subscribers than they have now, and it will become increasingly difficult to obtain customers. That means that they may have to cater for smaller niche markets rather than trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This is good news: people are more likely to find an MMORPG they like, rather than having a choice from 5 or so games, all trying to be everything to everyone.
3) With each individual MMORPG appealing to smaller groups, revenues will drop sharply. However I suspect that MMORPGs for small groups can be run profitably, especially if a company runs more than one of them and shares resources such as billing, customer care, server facilities and possibly the servers and game code as well. Remember: some of today's MMORPGs are obscenely profitable. For a while, EA has been faltering, and Ultima Online by itself was the only thing keeping the company afloat (EA even admitted as much in one of the quarterly reports). These things will be profitable for less people.
"The gameplay differences between so called "MMORPGs" and games like Doom, Quake, and Unreal are negligible at best. FPS + chargen doth not an RPG make."
Depends on the game, and the people you play with. I heard of a few roleplaying groups in Dark Age of Camelot, and I know from experience that roleplaying is alive and well in Ultima Online. I can't speak for Everquest but I suspect there are roleplayers in there as well. These game do not at all compare to FPS games.
It is true that the current MMORPG's focus, as stated, on player status rather than storylines that would support roleplaying. In the current MMORPG's, roleplayers have to make up their own story, which is fun but of course limited by the game engine, since players do not have the same powers as the Game Masters.
It'll be interesting to see how this develop... but I foresee a problem, well a potential one at least: in a world where the storyline and RP are what is supposed to keep the players in, those players may well want frequent content updates and active Dungeon Masters. And those may be expensive to provide... compare that to Ultima or Everquest where the games practically run themselves. I'll definitely give it a go though, I always found the Myst worlds interesting, but they lacked one thing: people!
"So, you lose any and all nuance (short of maybe a guy mooning you or collapsing)"
What the hell kind of company are you working for?!
Re:So, try and run a real meeting.
on
Metaverse Launched?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"Get ten to twenty "avatars" and sit them around a virtual conference room table. Now have them start "talking" and all of these baloons start popping up. First off, can you see all of them? If you're on one side of the table how do you see the balloons of the people on your side while watching for balloons of people on the other side?"
I can see where watching 20 people at once in a first-person view will be all but impossible. Does "There" have a 3rd person view? UO does, one can easily put 20 people around a large table where everyone can see everyone else, thanks to the isometric overhead viewpoint.
Ultima Online has a neat solution for overlappen texts of multiple persons speaking at once. If two texts overlap, the one typed in last moves to the foreground, the older text moves to the background and fades a bit. You can bring the other text forward by moving your mouse over it, but even with two or three texts overlapping, it is often quite possible to read all three. If it isn't just move your mouse over the text that is obscured. This system works surprisingly well even in busy areas, and I am surprised no other game or program has copied it.
"Great, now who's the poor soul who has to type the transcript of this whole meeting. How are they making sure they get things in the right chronological order. (Certain comments won't make any sense unless they follow the comment they were built upon.)"
As for minutes, Ultima optionally keeps a log of all text you see on your screen, even noting who said what. Instant minutes! This should be easy to add to "There" and I suspect that users will ask for such a feature at some point, just as they already have IRC and ICQ logs.
"This sounds like a usable interface for 2 or 3 people working together, but it'll break down real quick as the numbers increase."
I have held meetings in Ultima with as much as 15 people, not business related but about in-game matters. It was a proper meeting nonetheless and proceeded very smoothly. Of course all participants were used to the interface already, which helped.
"(Also, one of the joys of IRC was that you could go AFK to take care of something quickly and then go back and read the 'conversation' that happened while you were out.)"
Ultima also has an on-screen log window that will store a few minutes' worth of babbling.
The concept of virtual meetings with avatars is sound, I'd say, and I am speaking from experience. Whether or not "There" will measure up, I don't know.
It's all about chatting, not about gaming. And chatting has already to be proven a very popular pastime, even with people who don't use the Internet a lot otherwise.
And they got one thing right: "Well that was certainly fun. The most interesting aspect of the avatar chat mode is the way words are communicated. Instead of opening a chat window underneath the main screen, There uses cartoon style bubbles that pop up above the avatar's head. There claims that this keeps your eye more on the avatar, and the facial expressions, rather than just turning the entire experience into a text chat.". Guess how almost all MMORPGs have implemented speech. With a g..damned IRC-like interface which makes all conversation a rather impersonal affair!
Except one... Ultima Online, like "There" also floats the speech text over the avatars, and I must say it works very well. Being able to see your partners, and to see quickly who says what, makes it very easy to converse with others in that game. I even have had a business meeting with three colleagues in Ultima Online, as an experiment. Our alternatives were ICQ, E-mail, IRC or a conference call. Meeting "face to face" in-game was by far the most effective of these options.
"There" may well be a success, if properly marketed. If they have any brains they'll try and hook up with big ISPs like AOL and the like, and have them distribute the software with those free CDs we all know and love. They do, as someone pointed out, face competition from the Sims. The Sims is different but they aim at the same market segment.
It seems you haven't noticed, but they have indeed all but taken over the world. From a crappy little provider, by catering to non-tech customers, they have grown into an enormous company.
Yes their service may still stink. But apparently hundreds of thousands of users all over the world are happy with them. Call them lusers if you want, but if you're still laughing at AOL I think the joke's on you.
Bah... I would prefer either free (or ad-ridden) services, or services with micropayments. The other schemes are unsuitable and very undesirable for the kind of things I'd pay for on the Internet. Imagine a trip to the baker:
Subscriptions: "Well we cannot sell you this loaf of bread because we refuse to deal in such small amounts, but for $20 a month you can pick one up every week, and $30 a month buys you two loafs of bread a week"
Aggregation: "You cannot buy just one loaf of bread, sir, but for $50 a month you can have the bread, a porn rag from the smut shop across the street, a dvd rental and an oil change for your car". What if I need bread but, I am married, don't watch movies and I don't have a car?
Aggregation is a fallacy. Either the syndicates will be small and/or very monocultural, ie. I pay $50 a month for the privilege of buying my bread from 50 different bakers, whoopido. The result is that I would have to subscribe to many different syndicates, which would be too expensive and an administrative nightmare.
Or, there will be a few very large syndicates that offer a broad range of content to a large number of subscribers. I predict that such a syndicate will soon feel the need to administer site hits on the one hand, so that they can fairly distribute the earnings, and charge per site access of the other hand, as the syndicate's full package would be too expensive for many casual users. That is beginning to smell an awful lot like micropayments.
Perhaps the larger syndicates will offer tailored packages for subset of their sites as well... and that will only result in starving off the smaller sites not included in the popular packages, and in effect is nothing more than a subscription model with a package deal.
"The problem is that there are far too many places around to get info, so subscribing to any one place in particular feels like you're putting all your eggs in one basket. That's why I feel that micropayments isn't necessarily the solution"
That was exactly my argument for micropayments. Instead of subscribing, you pay a very small fee to get just the item you want.
Examples of stuff that is worth paying a small one time fee for:
- Cheat codes. You might not want to pay for that, but I know enough people who'd pay $1 to get a code to pass that pesky level on their playstation game... especially if it didn't involve giving out credit card details to questionable sites.
- Templates... if a template would save me a hour of coding, I'd readily pay $1 for it.
- Shareware. Instead of charging $10 to those people that decide they want to use it, charge everyone $0.50 for the download. If they think it's rubbish, they're out $0.50 which is nothing to cry over.
- You said templates... but there's a bunch of stuff out there waiting to be picked up and used. Artwork for websites especially. These days you need to pay a licencing fee for a whole set or buy a CD even if it's just one button you want to use. So, most people just steal the artwork, but if they could pay $1 for just the one button, perhaps they'd do so.
- Reviews. And I mean real reviews, not the stuff sponsored by game companies that are nothing but veiled ads. People subscribe to game magazines, I don't think it's too far-fetched for people to pull reviews from a site for a fee, if they know the reviews to be good.
- Pr0n. 'Nuff said.
And finally an example of an instance where people already pay for smallish and seemingly worthless item: ring tones. No one, not even the guys running the ringtone sites, expected this to take off as fast as it did. They're being downloaded by the thousands.
This has got to be the most empty and over-quoted line...catchy though it is. My question in reply is "Why would it want to?" or perhaps rather: "What is the force that drives information to be free?"
As to people putting up web pages for fun: I doubt that would disappear. Already it is quite easy to set up banner ads on your site and derive some income from that. Yet many people refrain from this and continue to provide their content free of charge.
"Um no, the problem is not that people don't want to pay for products. The problem is that there's little to no value in most content on the web to pay for. Let me put that in even simpler terms: The web has virtually no content that's worth paying for. It has nothing to do with the idea that everything on the net is free."
Nonsense. There is a lot of worthwhile stuff on the net out there. Whatever it is you are after. There are two problems with charging for content that I see:
1) If I offer something and charge for it, chances are that someone else is offering something similar for free. To justify the charge, I'd have to offer the better content, filtered of junk and perhaps ad-free as well.
2) Without micropayments it is not possible to economically charge small amounts. Someone said the word "micro" has nothing to do with the size of the transaction; I say it has everything to do with it.
Today, most sites use a subscription system to charge for content. Why? Not because that is such an attractive model, in fact it may put off many a customer, especially the ones that just want something from the site occasionally. No, they do this because with the subscription model, the amount they can charge isn't dwarfed by transaction costs, when they charge $5 - $10 a month. On the other hand, micropayments would allow sites to economically charge a small amount per item or article.
There may not be many sites worth subscribing to, but there is a wealth of content on the Internet, for almost every purpose imaginable, worth spending a small amount on once ($0.10 - $0.50) to obtain.
"In other words, if you are offering a service online, and you feel that I need to pay to use that, by all means charge me something fair (anything over 2-3 dollars a month for simple browsing is rediculous), but remember, most people are only going to pay for a few sites a month if we're using a pay to browse system, and most will go looking for the same thing on a free site, and you lose a customer."
First of all, for many websites, their content is the service they provide. You don't pay to browse in a shop or peruse a sales catalog, but you are charged for a newpaper subscription, not because they deliver you a part of a dead tree, but because of the content.
Second of all, micropayments enable something far more important than subscriptions: one-off payments. Very often I just want something once from a website. I do not want to subscribe to Gamespot for $5 a month so I can access their premium content, but I would pay $0.50 to download that promo clip for a game I happen to be interested in. If I happen to be searching for a bit of Greek mythology, I won't subscribe at $5 a month to a site that offers this, since I don't need Greek mythology on a regular basis. However for that one time I'd pay $0.50 to get what I need.
That is the power of Micropayments: the ability to charge very small amounts for a one-time service. Credit cards or bank transfers do not offer this; the transaction costs would be prohibitive.
A very insightful remark, and I heartily recommend reading Joel Spolsky's article. Knowing the language is just one thing, knowing the APIs, and for some languages (especially VB and VBA) knowing the limitations and bugs, and how to get around them, is key. It is a common oversight when staffing a team, as well. This is where the difference in productivity of good vs average programmers (read: the Mythical man-month) is measured in factors of 10-100! It is, as Joel describes, the difference between solving a freaky bug in 3 minutes vs. 1 hour.
What has my main frustration been so far, when I held the post of development team leader? Not having a good mix of juniors and seniors! That, or having seniors who do not wish to allocate time to spend with the junior coders, reviewing their code and coaching them. The result? People are re-inventing the frikkin' wheel over and over again. This is most apparent in relation to APIs and the shortcomings of a language... but it applies to conceptual stuff like data structures and algorithms as well. You generally do not need an all-star team to be succesful, but it's worth gold to have one or two developers that know the ins and outs of the language, the database used, and the APIs.
That really depends on the particular job. On one certain project I'd want experienced coders for a particular language, able to bang out solid code and knowing what they are doing with the language. On other projects I'd be far more interested in quick thinkers and problem solvers, able to think up creative algorithms and solutions, while perhaps only being a so-so coder. Ideally I have both, with one guy doing the algorithms and the other reviewing the code.
I do agree with you when you're talking design jobs. The conceptual, high level stuff you learn in CS can pay off there, whereas knowing all the ins and outs of the selected language generally doesn't. And, I have seen very few projects fail because of poor coding. Perhaps that is because all our coders are good *grins*, or because of the kind of projects we do here. Our projects mainly fail because of two reasons: poor design at the conceptual level, and poor management of the user or client expectations.
I agree: this should be the parents' responsibility first of all. Classifications can help, as can a restriction of the sales of classified games to children. Another measure that might help is some sort of parental lock or games, or a "blood & gore" switch. None of these measures diminishes the rights and access to gore and pr0n that us adults enjoy, and they to parents some degree of control over what their kids see.
One argument against classification perhaps is that it will only make the bad games even more attractive to children. You know how kids are: if you tell them they can't have something, they'll want it all the more.
Hmm I can't fully agree with you there. What works for one person may not be good for another. There are many kinds of RSI and some people are more susceptable to it than others. If you get RSI easily, then switching to a different keyboard, mousing with your other hand, and adjusting your posture will only postpone the problem. But an average user may well find that by changing his posture and input devices helps, so that the early RSI symptons will gradually disappear over time.
For someone who has progressed further into RSI, feeling not just "a funny feeling", but distinct discomfort and even pain, there is no substitute for stopping work completely. You did the right thing by giving up work completely and getting better. Switching to another input device such a a special keyboard, trackball or pen device, can be beneficial, but I would advice it only to people with early symptons of RSI, or people that have recovered from it.
I solidly endorse your last advice: if you have progressed to the stage where you are suffering, then down tools!.
Some people will feel pain in their fingertips when striking the keys because of the hard stop. Using a clickety IBM keyboard doesn't help and in some cases makes it worse. The impact on the fingers on a mechanical typewriter is much more gradual, with a soft stop at the end of the key travel.
You're right though that the keys on such a typewriter are harder to press, possibly leading to a different kind of RSI, which can be alleviated by switching from a typewriter to a regular keyboard, as some people working in a typing pool have found in the past.
The typewriter is an interesting solution, but I wonder if this woman might be off just as well with one of those rubber keyboards like the ones that came with those IBM PS/1 systems.
Slashdot Mirror
They did not crack down on spammers for spamming, but for selling a bogus product, as someone else correctly pointed out.
Technical measures alone will not cut it, we'll need legislation as well to outlaw spam, and get those laws adopted in as many countries as we can. You'll want a good lock on your door and laws to make burglary a crime...
One of those head-smackers ... "why didn't I think of that?".
Someone may well have thought of it before... someone may even have tried to whip one up in his basement, but Kamen took the idea and turned it into a commercial product.
That takes a special kind of human being. A friend of mine is a little like that: he keeps a small recorder on him (and under his bed) and dictates ideas he gets to himself. He may wake up one night thinking "What if I printed ads for companies on those flexible magnetic sheets, slap them on cabs and pay the cabbie a sum for the privilege?" (In Holland cabs generally have no ads on them). Next morning he starts making phone calls, to buddies in advertising firms, to cab companies, to printers, ect. etc. He spends an enormous amount of energy, and 49 out of 50 times it comes to nothing. It's that successful nr. 50 that counts though.
You have to admire people like that, having the drive to follow through on an idea and getting a company off the ground. Me, I am much to lazy for that... I'd wake up with an idea, think "Hmm neat" and go back to sleep.
The sad part is that apparently one of the reasons they stopped the Buran program was a relatively minor glitch, and politics. The following story comes someone who has worked in the Russian aviation authorities and one of the design bureaus. It may be complete bollocks.
[rumour]
Apparently the Buran did a very short dive on the glide path to the runway, the quickly correcting itself. It was the Russian equivalent of the FAA that demanded to know why that happened before they'd approve Buran.
After an investigation they found that it was likely that one of the transmitters guiding Buran on an approach path, had failed. But no one could be sure, and apparently this report has circled offices and organisations for a while, with no one daring to sign the thing in cas ethe report turning out to be wrong. There was an attempt to have a whole department sign the thing collectively, but it came to nothing, and the project was delayed.
[/rumour]
Without this glitch they might well have continued the Buran programme, with success even. The basics of the Buran might have been copied from the US Shuttle design, but the overall design of the Buran is supposed to be much better, being the work of smallish groups of engineers and designers working closely together, rather than the gazillion design committees working individually on every Shuttle subsystem, leading to a horrible design. (Feynman wrote something about this in one of his books). Also, Buran was capable of lifting a far larger payload than the shuttle, and it could be piggybacked onto a Proton for an even larger payload.
By the way, the shuttle is almost completely automated as well.
"Your post rightfully says that all inventions belong to public, on loan to owners, not the other way around!"
Not so. All inventions and works of art belong to the creators. If they choose not to share them with us, that is their unalienable right, an the public has no right to demand that these inventions be shared.
However when the inventor or artist chooses to share his invention, it becomes "public domain" by default, more or less, and anyone can freely copy or use it. By "freely" I mean that there is no physical impedence to using someone else's work or invention, however "we the public" have put into place laws that places legal restrictions on such use, so that the artist receives fair benefit for his work, and the inventor is compensated for his toil. It is us, the public, that decide what compensation is fair, and what is a good length of time for the creator to retain special rights on his work.
But to say that inventions belong to the public and are merely on loan to the owners, is a horrible statement with far-reaching philosophical consequences.
Are there Windows alternatives to RealPlayer as well?
(And before you ask, I won't switch to Linux or run a dual boot *grins*. I'm a gamer and Windows works out fine for me... most of the time)
LogicaCMG as of this year!
If you're into SMS, you might do well to remember that company: I believe that Logica and CMG (now LogicaCMG) together have 85-90% of the world market for SMS software.
So if you lose a message, you know who to call.
...but all the crap, gook, bread grumps, cat hairs, and all the other assorted nastiness that tends to collect there. Eww, thanks but no thanks.
Rubbish. To do the groundbreaking stuff, most people still need solid fundamentals to begin with, just as in music and the other arts. All good art studies begin by drilling the classics and fundamentals, and this book might (although I cannot speak from experience) provide a basis for drawing Manga.
To produce exceptional work without having studied the basics first can be done... by a few rare, extraordinary people. Us mere mortals cannot do without drilling first, and when we try anyway... well there are some unfortunate examples to be found in any art form. Spare me from that stuff please
I mean how many MMOGs do we really need to waste our silly little lives away?
Infinitely many! Seriously, the MMORPG market is beginning to diversify, with games available or being released soon, catering to different tastes and playstyles. If the trend continues, I see the following things happening:
1) MMORPG's become more mainstream. The Sims and Star Wars Galaxies may set off this trend and expand the market for MMORPG's.
2) Each individual MMORPG will have less subscribers than they have now, and it will become increasingly difficult to obtain customers. That means that they may have to cater for smaller niche markets rather than trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This is good news: people are more likely to find an MMORPG they like, rather than having a choice from 5 or so games, all trying to be everything to everyone.
3) With each individual MMORPG appealing to smaller groups, revenues will drop sharply. However I suspect that MMORPGs for small groups can be run profitably, especially if a company runs more than one of them and shares resources such as billing, customer care, server facilities and possibly the servers and game code as well. Remember: some of today's MMORPGs are obscenely profitable. For a while, EA has been faltering, and Ultima Online by itself was the only thing keeping the company afloat (EA even admitted as much in one of the quarterly reports). These things will be profitable for less people.
"The gameplay differences between so called "MMORPGs" and games like Doom, Quake, and Unreal are negligible at best. FPS + chargen doth not an RPG make."
Depends on the game, and the people you play with. I heard of a few roleplaying groups in Dark Age of Camelot, and I know from experience that roleplaying is alive and well in Ultima Online. I can't speak for Everquest but I suspect there are roleplayers in there as well. These game do not at all compare to FPS games.
It is true that the current MMORPG's focus, as stated, on player status rather than storylines that would support roleplaying. In the current MMORPG's, roleplayers have to make up their own story, which is fun but of course limited by the game engine, since players do not have the same powers as the Game Masters.
It'll be interesting to see how this develop... but I foresee a problem, well a potential one at least: in a world where the storyline and RP are what is supposed to keep the players in, those players may well want frequent content updates and active Dungeon Masters. And those may be expensive to provide... compare that to Ultima or Everquest where the games practically run themselves. I'll definitely give it a go though, I always found the Myst worlds interesting, but they lacked one thing: people!
"So, you lose any and all nuance (short of maybe a guy mooning you or collapsing)"
What the hell kind of company are you working for?!
"Get ten to twenty "avatars" and sit them around a virtual conference room table. Now have them start "talking" and all of these baloons start popping up. First off, can you see all of them? If you're on one side of the table how do you see the balloons of the people on your side while watching for balloons of people on the other side?"
I can see where watching 20 people at once in a first-person view will be all but impossible. Does "There" have a 3rd person view? UO does, one can easily put 20 people around a large table where everyone can see everyone else, thanks to the isometric overhead viewpoint.
Ultima Online has a neat solution for overlappen texts of multiple persons speaking at once. If two texts overlap, the one typed in last moves to the foreground, the older text moves to the background and fades a bit. You can bring the other text forward by moving your mouse over it, but even with two or three texts overlapping, it is often quite possible to read all three. If it isn't just move your mouse over the text that is obscured. This system works surprisingly well even in busy areas, and I am surprised no other game or program has copied it.
"Great, now who's the poor soul who has to type the transcript of this whole meeting. How are they making sure they get things in the right chronological order. (Certain comments won't make any sense unless they follow the comment they were built upon.)"
As for minutes, Ultima optionally keeps a log of all text you see on your screen, even noting who said what. Instant minutes! This should be easy to add to "There" and I suspect that users will ask for such a feature at some point, just as they already have IRC and ICQ logs.
"This sounds like a usable interface for 2 or 3 people working together, but it'll break down real quick as the numbers increase."
I have held meetings in Ultima with as much as 15 people, not business related but about in-game matters. It was a proper meeting nonetheless and proceeded very smoothly. Of course all participants were used to the interface already, which helped.
"(Also, one of the joys of IRC was that you could go AFK to take care of something quickly and then go back and read the 'conversation' that happened while you were out.)"
Ultima also has an on-screen log window that will store a few minutes' worth of babbling.
The concept of virtual meetings with avatars is sound, I'd say, and I am speaking from experience. Whether or not "There" will measure up, I don't know.
It's all about chatting, not about gaming. And chatting has already to be proven a very popular pastime, even with people who don't use the Internet a lot otherwise.
And they got one thing right: "Well that was certainly fun. The most interesting aspect of the avatar chat mode is the way words are communicated. Instead of opening a chat window underneath the main screen, There uses cartoon style bubbles that pop up above the avatar's head. There claims that this keeps your eye more on the avatar, and the facial expressions, rather than just turning the entire experience into a text chat.". Guess how almost all MMORPGs have implemented speech. With a g..damned IRC-like interface which makes all conversation a rather impersonal affair!
Except one... Ultima Online, like "There" also floats the speech text over the avatars, and I must say it works very well. Being able to see your partners, and to see quickly who says what, makes it very easy to converse with others in that game. I even have had a business meeting with three colleagues in Ultima Online, as an experiment. Our alternatives were ICQ, E-mail, IRC or a conference call. Meeting "face to face" in-game was by far the most effective of these options.
"There" may well be a success, if properly marketed. If they have any brains they'll try and hook up with big ISPs like AOL and the like, and have them distribute the software with those free CDs we all know and love. They do, as someone pointed out, face competition from the Sims. The Sims is different but they aim at the same market segment.
It seems you haven't noticed, but they have indeed all but taken over the world. From a crappy little provider, by catering to non-tech customers, they have grown into an enormous company.
Yes their service may still stink. But apparently hundreds of thousands of users all over the world are happy with them. Call them lusers if you want, but if you're still laughing at AOL I think the joke's on you.
Bah... I would prefer either free (or ad-ridden) services, or services with micropayments. The other schemes are unsuitable and very undesirable for the kind of things I'd pay for on the Internet. Imagine a trip to the baker:
Subscriptions: "Well we cannot sell you this loaf of bread because we refuse to deal in such small amounts, but for $20 a month you can pick one up every week, and $30 a month buys you two loafs of bread a week"
Aggregation: "You cannot buy just one loaf of bread, sir, but for $50 a month you can have the bread, a porn rag from the smut shop across the street, a dvd rental and an oil change for your car". What if I need bread but, I am married, don't watch movies and I don't have a car?
Aggregation is a fallacy. Either the syndicates will be small and/or very monocultural, ie. I pay $50 a month for the privilege of buying my bread from 50 different bakers, whoopido. The result is that I would have to subscribe to many different syndicates, which would be too expensive and an administrative nightmare.
Or, there will be a few very large syndicates that offer a broad range of content to a large number of subscribers. I predict that such a syndicate will soon feel the need to administer site hits on the one hand, so that they can fairly distribute the earnings, and charge per site access of the other hand, as the syndicate's full package would be too expensive for many casual users. That is beginning to smell an awful lot like micropayments.
Perhaps the larger syndicates will offer tailored packages for subset of their sites as well... and that will only result in starving off the smaller sites not included in the popular packages, and in effect is nothing more than a subscription model with a package deal.
"The problem is that there are far too many places around to get info, so subscribing to any one place in particular feels like you're putting all your eggs in one basket. That's why I feel that micropayments isn't necessarily the solution"
That was exactly my argument for micropayments. Instead of subscribing, you pay a very small fee to get just the item you want.
Examples of stuff that is worth paying a small one time fee for:
- Cheat codes. You might not want to pay for that, but I know enough people who'd pay $1 to get a code to pass that pesky level on their playstation game... especially if it didn't involve giving out credit card details to questionable sites.
- Templates... if a template would save me a hour of coding, I'd readily pay $1 for it.
- Shareware. Instead of charging $10 to those people that decide they want to use it, charge everyone $0.50 for the download. If they think it's rubbish, they're out $0.50 which is nothing to cry over.
- You said templates... but there's a bunch of stuff out there waiting to be picked up and used. Artwork for websites especially. These days you need to pay a licencing fee for a whole set or buy a CD even if it's just one button you want to use. So, most people just steal the artwork, but if they could pay $1 for just the one button, perhaps they'd do so.
- Reviews. And I mean real reviews, not the stuff sponsored by game companies that are nothing but veiled ads. People subscribe to game magazines, I don't think it's too far-fetched for people to pull reviews from a site for a fee, if they know the reviews to be good.
- Pr0n. 'Nuff said.
And finally an example of an instance where people already pay for smallish and seemingly worthless item: ring tones. No one, not even the guys running the ringtone sites, expected this to take off as fast as it did. They're being downloaded by the thousands.
"Information wants to be free"
This has got to be the most empty and over-quoted line...catchy though it is. My question in reply is "Why would it want to?" or perhaps rather: "What is the force that drives information to be free?"
As to people putting up web pages for fun: I doubt that would disappear. Already it is quite easy to set up banner ads on your site and derive some income from that. Yet many people refrain from this and continue to provide their content free of charge.
"Um no, the problem is not that people don't want to pay for products. The problem is that there's little to no value in most content on the web to pay for. Let me put that in even simpler terms: The web has virtually no content that's worth paying for. It has nothing to do with the idea that everything on the net is free."
Nonsense. There is a lot of worthwhile stuff on the net out there. Whatever it is you are after. There are two problems with charging for content that I see:
1) If I offer something and charge for it, chances are that someone else is offering something similar for free. To justify the charge, I'd have to offer the better content, filtered of junk and perhaps ad-free as well.
2) Without micropayments it is not possible to economically charge small amounts. Someone said the word "micro" has nothing to do with the size of the transaction; I say it has everything to do with it.
Today, most sites use a subscription system to charge for content. Why? Not because that is such an attractive model, in fact it may put off many a customer, especially the ones that just want something from the site occasionally. No, they do this because with the subscription model, the amount they can charge isn't dwarfed by transaction costs, when they charge $5 - $10 a month. On the other hand, micropayments would allow sites to economically charge a small amount per item or article.
There may not be many sites worth subscribing to, but there is a wealth of content on the Internet, for almost every purpose imaginable, worth spending a small amount on once ($0.10 - $0.50) to obtain.
"In other words, if you are offering a service online, and you feel that I need to pay to use that, by all means charge me something fair (anything over 2-3 dollars a month for simple browsing is rediculous), but remember, most people are only going to pay for a few sites a month if we're using a pay to browse system, and most will go looking for the same thing on a free site, and you lose a customer."
First of all, for many websites, their content is the service they provide. You don't pay to browse in a shop or peruse a sales catalog, but you are charged for a newpaper subscription, not because they deliver you a part of a dead tree, but because of the content.
Second of all, micropayments enable something far more important than subscriptions: one-off payments. Very often I just want something once from a website. I do not want to subscribe to Gamespot for $5 a month so I can access their premium content, but I would pay $0.50 to download that promo clip for a game I happen to be interested in. If I happen to be searching for a bit of Greek mythology, I won't subscribe at $5 a month to a site that offers this, since I don't need Greek mythology on a regular basis. However for that one time I'd pay $0.50 to get what I need.
That is the power of Micropayments: the ability to charge very small amounts for a one-time service. Credit cards or bank transfers do not offer this; the transaction costs would be prohibitive.
A very insightful remark, and I heartily recommend reading Joel Spolsky's article. Knowing the language is just one thing, knowing the APIs, and for some languages (especially VB and VBA) knowing the limitations and bugs, and how to get around them, is key. It is a common oversight when staffing a team, as well. This is where the difference in productivity of good vs average programmers (read: the Mythical man-month) is measured in factors of 10-100! It is, as Joel describes, the difference between solving a freaky bug in 3 minutes vs. 1 hour.
What has my main frustration been so far, when I held the post of development team leader? Not having a good mix of juniors and seniors! That, or having seniors who do not wish to allocate time to spend with the junior coders, reviewing their code and coaching them. The result? People are re-inventing the frikkin' wheel over and over again. This is most apparent in relation to APIs and the shortcomings of a language... but it applies to conceptual stuff like data structures and algorithms as well. You generally do not need an all-star team to be succesful, but it's worth gold to have one or two developers that know the ins and outs of the language, the database used, and the APIs.
That really depends on the particular job. On one certain project I'd want experienced coders for a particular language, able to bang out solid code and knowing what they are doing with the language. On other projects I'd be far more interested in quick thinkers and problem solvers, able to think up creative algorithms and solutions, while perhaps only being a so-so coder. Ideally I have both, with one guy doing the algorithms and the other reviewing the code.
I do agree with you when you're talking design jobs. The conceptual, high level stuff you learn in CS can pay off there, whereas knowing all the ins and outs of the selected language generally doesn't. And, I have seen very few projects fail because of poor coding. Perhaps that is because all our coders are good *grins*, or because of the kind of projects we do here. Our projects mainly fail because of two reasons: poor design at the conceptual level, and poor management of the user or client expectations.
I agree: this should be the parents' responsibility first of all. Classifications can help, as can a restriction of the sales of classified games to children. Another measure that might help is some sort of parental lock or games, or a "blood & gore" switch. None of these measures diminishes the rights and access to gore and pr0n that us adults enjoy, and they to parents some degree of control over what their kids see.
One argument against classification perhaps is that it will only make the bad games even more attractive to children. You know how kids are: if you tell them they can't have something, they'll want it all the more.
Hmm I can't fully agree with you there. What works for one person may not be good for another. There are many kinds of RSI and some people are more susceptable to it than others. If you get RSI easily, then switching to a different keyboard, mousing with your other hand, and adjusting your posture will only postpone the problem. But an average user may well find that by changing his posture and input devices helps, so that the early RSI symptons will gradually disappear over time.
For someone who has progressed further into RSI, feeling not just "a funny feeling", but distinct discomfort and even pain, there is no substitute for stopping work completely. You did the right thing by giving up work completely and getting better. Switching to another input device such a a special keyboard, trackball or pen device, can be beneficial, but I would advice it only to people with early symptons of RSI, or people that have recovered from it.
I solidly endorse your last advice: if you have progressed to the stage where you are suffering, then down tools!.
Some people will feel pain in their fingertips when striking the keys because of the hard stop. Using a clickety IBM keyboard doesn't help and in some cases makes it worse. The impact on the fingers on a mechanical typewriter is much more gradual, with a soft stop at the end of the key travel.
You're right though that the keys on such a typewriter are harder to press, possibly leading to a different kind of RSI, which can be alleviated by switching from a typewriter to a regular keyboard, as some people working in a typing pool have found in the past.
The typewriter is an interesting solution, but I wonder if this woman might be off just as well with one of those rubber keyboards like the ones that came with those IBM PS/1 systems.