Then Microsoft made up some terribly convoluted name for the behavior, and put it into Outlook
The technology was first fielded for Outlook then rolled into version 3 of MSXML. You're really not very good at following this, are you?
Mozilla, liking the terribly convoluted name, invents something accessible, and in Javascript with XML.
I take it you've never actually used XMLHTTPRequest in MSXML? It's pretty god damn easy to automate in JScript.
var req = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTPRequest");
Tada! I just created an instance of the XMLHTTPRequest object in MSXML. If you've ever used XMLHttpRequest in Mozilla, then you know how to do the rest because Mozilla copied the interface to make it exceedingly easy to switch between the two.
I suppose it follows that Microsoft invented Web 2.0?
Microsoft was the first to field an object that could do the asynchronous XML bit of AJAX, discounting iframe hacks. I wouldn't consider this inventing Web 2.0, but your other claims are a bit bizarre in that they don't really seem line up with reality.
It seems rather disingenuous to make the claim that because IE supported more than one scripting language and that MSXML, which is designed as a COM object that can be automated by any COM container and therefore accessed by any scripting engine in IE, that therefore Microsoft did not actually invent AJAX, but instead the technology was actually invented by Mozilla who copied it after the fact and supported one less scripting language. Because, really, letting VBScript automate MSXML makes it not AJAX. Just a note, the name XMLHttpRequest is (very obviously) based on the name of the actual interface in MSXML, IXHTMLHTTPRequest.
Also, I really really really really Jesse James Garrett for coining AJAX and therefore ensuring that every god damn "new" technology centered around Javascript and the browser is going to be named after a household cleaner (Comet, anyone?). Furthermore, he coined the term in 2005. MSXML 3 came out in June (July?) of 2001, which was based on previous technology used in Outlook web access to email. He coined the annoying term, but he had no hand inventing the technology.
Then again, hating Microsoft is always the rage, and making stuff up as you go along is something that I to enjoy.
It'd be cool if someone would come up with a more interesting argument than we're perfect, everything here is perfect, so it's the only way to go. It's a good logical starting point, go with what you know, but claiming that life on Earth is the only way to go because that's how it works here is, well, basically begging the question, and last I heard, logical fallacies are bad.
I think the real problem will come from the disparity of prices of the same item across sharded MMOs. An item on one server that is worth, let's say, 500 gold, may in fact be worth 2000 gold on another. Even inflation adjusted some items will just not match up pricewise across servers. So which do the appraiser pick? The highest? The lowest? The average? What if on one server, the item is worth disproportionately less than the other servers?
The basic problem is that MMOs are not real life. As stupid as it is to state the obvious, it's extremely relevant to the situation. Trying to apply real-world value to an item that has no true, real intrinsic value is absurd. Especially in MMOs that are explicitly not based on RMT. Actually, I take that back, those items are probably the easiest: they are worth exactly what the developer says they are worth, which is likely to be always be exactly $0.00.
FFXI has the luck of being part of the MMO whipping-boy crowd. WoW is currently god, FFXI is currently good for wiping your ass according to all the WoW fanatics. Zonk plays WoW, comes as zero surprise that the summary would take the tone that it does.
I'm looking forward to how they implement chocobo breeding and racing. Could be pretty cool.
It's hard to know if there is anything being done about what you consider usability problems if you refuse to describe even one of these problems. People are supposed to divine what you percieve to be a problem?
Telecoms already do this. End users pay a fee to access the internet, hosts pay an even larger fee for the bandwidth to ship data down to end users. Telecoms want to drop their common carrier status in favor of being able to charge preferentially based on the type of content shipped, instead of just how much bandwidth is used.
I think that telecoms are going to find that in dropping common carrier status they are going to lose a lot more than they gain; naming them in kiddy porn suits is going to be the next Big Thing.
Actually, it's not that hard to understand. Universal Media Disc, as in all forms of media can be stored and read off of the same disc. Video, audio, games, data all on one disc, a universal media disc! Crazy!
You know, despite the ToS of nearly every MMO specifically forbidding RMT, it's really the playerbase of Westerners that are perpetrating in game race based hate crimes. I don't think I even want to bother reading the article if the person writing is such a simplistic moron.
The difference, of course, being that you own shares of stock in companies, and you own currency. In online games (that do not base their entire model around RMT, such as Project Entropia or Second Life), you own nothing. The company owns everything. Essentially, people who participate in RMT pay money for an item that is not only intangible, but is never even theirs; the company who runs the game can delete their account for violation of the ToS and they are out whatever actual real currency they paid with no real recourse.
Or maybe, you know, it was/.'d. But of course that never happens to a server running on a *nix platform and Apache httpd, because those magically overcome any lack of bandwidth or lack of processing power from an unexpected surge in load.
Seriously, just Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
FFXI used to have a rather ridiculously short amount of time before they would delete your characters (3 months initially). I quit for 6 months, came back, and yep, my character was gone. Didn't hurt me that much (I hadn't gotten very far initially), but they still deleted it.
Of course, as it turns out, they didn't really delete characters. They had the whole Return to Vana'diel thing, and people could get their characters back if they'd been unsubscribed for more than 3 months, so obviously they were still keeping your data, but just didn't let you reactivate the character just to be assholes, I suppose.
I think the deadline has been extended to 12 months now, but they'll still toss your character if you wait longer than that.
It's a pretty standard method for emulating OOP in Javascript. In the context, rcube_webmail is not really a function, but rather a constructor that builds an object when invoked using the new operator. The first 18 lines (or thereabouts) sets up the properties of the new object (of type rcube_webmail), and most everything after that sets up the methods for the new object (ex: this.set_env = function(name, value){...} creates a function and registers it as set_env on the new rcube_webmail object).
Of course, the other way to do it is to use the prototype object, which tends to be a bit cleaner looking if looked at from the perspective of OO in other languages (and allows for more easy emulation of inheritance as well, but that's not always necessary). It's all a matter of preference, really; there are lots of different ways to lay out constructor functions in Javascript.
The people at Opera Software didn't come up with this first. I know I've seen this concept put forth in just about every single Firefox thread on/. that I can remember, and I'm sure the same idea has been bandied about across numerous other types of forums. The people at Opera Software just (possibly) got it done first.
Why all the fuss? Maybe because people like my mother (totally computer illiterate) came up with the same concept merely by wishing it existed, and because it's a relatively trivial concept (which should cause it to fail the obvious test, which I mention again later on).
Without even looking at the patent, I imagine it covers this basic idea:
Person A looks at Product 1, Product 2, and Product 3. Person B looks at Product 2, Product 3, and Product 4. Person C looks at Product 2 and Product 3.
Along comes Person D, who looks at Product 3. The program then goes and dredges up the viewing history of everyone that looked at Product 3 and noticed that (in this contrived example) all of them also looked at Product 2. It therefore offers Product 2 as a suggestion.
Now obviously with a much larger dataset some statistical analysis will need to be done to try to determine relavence, but that of course would be unpatentable since it's plain old math.
Seriously, this concept is ridiculous in its simplicity and obviousness, and when laid out this way, it should be crystal clear that it is in fact not a new concept at all, but has been in use, either consciously or subconsciously, for probably about as long as the concept of commerce has been around.
So what are they actually left with to patent? An idea that has been around for as long as commerce? Obviously not. Math? Again, obviously not. What exactly was patented? The idea that a machine can do that for us? How is that not obvious given the past 20-30 years, and the rapid push to have computers do everything for us?
No, what I said was I rip shit up in Ballista as RDM/NIN in FFXI, and that's enjoyable because everyone there is there to PvP with no penalty, but I hate getting ganked by some jerk who's out to prove something to himself by ganking some random person.
I've never played WoW, but my experience with Lineage II just was crap, and typically went like this:
Me> Yay! Finally got it installed. Me> *wanders outside for the first time* Somerandomfuckwith+30levelstome> *ganks zoips* Me> Exciting!
It's interesting how easily people will label someone a carebear if they have no interest in being randomly ganked, or randomly ganking some poor n00b they see wandering by. PvP is great, but not open PvP bullshit where some maxlevel asshole decides that it'd be great fun for everyone if they one-shotted you, and the only people that ever seem to be labeled carebears are the ones that dislike open PvP gankfests.
I don't know how it is on other servers, but in all the time I've been playing FFXI (~2 months after NA PC release), I've only seen the server population on Ramuh go up. When I first started, 2k on Ramuh was a highpoint. Now I regularly see ~3.4k during peak, and I don't think Ramuh is one of the populated servers.
No! If there is an unacceptable imbalance in the game, then Blizzard should fix their bloody game!
The obvious, and best solution to this specific problem is to ban the people who are causing the problem.
There is a specific set of people who are driving costs up. Okay, that sucks, no reason to ban them, we can all agree on that. The difference here is that same specific set of people is violating the ToS at the same time (selling gold for real-world money). Because of the nature of how the gold- sellers work in the game (they sell an item for gold, some Joe User with too much disposable income and not enough time purchases in-game gold with real world money, to buy an item that is being sold by the gold-seller, thereby giving them back their gold, which they resell for real-world money back to the same old Joe User), they over-inflate the economy at an extreme pace, eventually making it so the only way to actually get rare/wanted items is to buy the gold, which just feeds the inflation.
So with that in mind, what is the fix? Increase gold drop rates so that people who don't want to buy gold with real money can buy items in an over-inflated economy? Yeah, right, that'll work for maybe 10 minutes, tops. The only real, viable solution is to ban the gold sellers, which is well within Blizzards right, specifically because the ToS disallows selling in-game items for real-world currency. Who gets hurt by banning the gold sellers? The gold sellers (but who gives a flying fuck about them), and Joe User with too much disposable income and not enough time to play the game. Personally, I don't care about them either, but they certainly have every right to play the game, unlike the gold sellers, they deserve consideration in how to try to balance the game, but frankly, maybe the game just isn't for them if they don't want to invest the time in actually playing the stupid thing.
I fail to see how it could possibly attract people to the game to allow gold farmers. The single biggest annoyance in FFXI are the gilsellers. They have no decency (steal logging, mining, and harvesting points), they'll MPK (violation of the ToS by the way) you without a second thought if you try to camp the same NM as them. They work in teams to monopolize NM spawns, which gives them a monopoly on the drop, which in turn damages the economy (granted, on Ramuh most of the gilsellers that camp NMs quite frankly suck at claiming them, so it's a moot point).
Allowing gold farmers to continue doesn't help the game. It ruins it for everyone that wants to play the game as it is meant. Average people will not monopolize some monster spawn, or do the same repetative task and monopolize a certain kind of item drop, day in and day out for months at a time like a gold farmer would (of course, since I've never played WoW, I'm trying to imagine what it would be like based on my experience with gilsellers in FFXI).
It's really an either-or situation. Either the company itself sells in-game money for a fee to their players, and that's really the only worthile way to get the money (which puts everyone on the same level field), or the company does not allow anyone to buy in-game money and makes sure that there are plenty of ways to earn decent money in-game (again, putting everyone on a level field, except WHMs, who can't farm for crap =P). You can't have both without totally hosing the economy.
SE already did this. Granted, they missed some of the commonly known gilsellers on my server (one of the Angles got it, but the rest escaped somehow >_<). Though it wasn't just gilsellers that got the boot, they banned some people for repeated MPKing (though the majority of the people doing that is gilsellers...)
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Then Microsoft made up some terribly convoluted name for the behavior, and put it into Outlook
The technology was first fielded for Outlook then rolled into version 3 of MSXML. You're really not very good at following this, are you?
Mozilla, liking the terribly convoluted name, invents something accessible, and in Javascript with XML.
I take it you've never actually used XMLHTTPRequest in MSXML? It's pretty god damn easy to automate in JScript.
var req = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTPRequest");
Tada! I just created an instance of the XMLHTTPRequest object in MSXML. If you've ever used XMLHttpRequest in Mozilla, then you know how to do the rest because Mozilla copied the interface to make it exceedingly easy to switch between the two.
I suppose it follows that Microsoft invented Web 2.0?
Microsoft was the first to field an object that could do the asynchronous XML bit of AJAX, discounting iframe hacks. I wouldn't consider this inventing Web 2.0, but your other claims are a bit bizarre in that they don't really seem line up with reality.
It seems rather disingenuous to make the claim that because IE supported more than one scripting language and that MSXML, which is designed as a COM object that can be automated by any COM container and therefore accessed by any scripting engine in IE, that therefore Microsoft did not actually invent AJAX, but instead the technology was actually invented by Mozilla who copied it after the fact and supported one less scripting language. Because, really, letting VBScript automate MSXML makes it not AJAX. Just a note, the name XMLHttpRequest is (very obviously) based on the name of the actual interface in MSXML, IXHTMLHTTPRequest.
Also, I really really really really Jesse James Garrett for coining AJAX and therefore ensuring that every god damn "new" technology centered around Javascript and the browser is going to be named after a household cleaner (Comet, anyone?). Furthermore, he coined the term in 2005. MSXML 3 came out in June (July?) of 2001, which was based on previous technology used in Outlook web access to email. He coined the annoying term, but he had no hand inventing the technology.
Then again, hating Microsoft is always the rage, and making stuff up as you go along is something that I to enjoy.
Bit of a problem in that Sucrose is comprised in part by Fructose, so you're not really avoiding Fructose at all.
It'd be cool if someone would come up with a more interesting argument than we're perfect, everything here is perfect, so it's the only way to go. It's a good logical starting point, go with what you know, but claiming that life on Earth is the only way to go because that's how it works here is, well, basically begging the question, and last I heard, logical fallacies are bad.
Right, so we need another group in order to push ECMAScript 4 (aka Javascript 2.0)?
AJAX: The latest masturbatory buzzword for the clueless and stupid.
I'm a bit confused on this. I suppose the obvious would be cross-platform support. Is that really the only difference, though?
I think the real problem will come from the disparity of prices of the same item across sharded MMOs. An item on one server that is worth, let's say, 500 gold, may in fact be worth 2000 gold on another. Even inflation adjusted some items will just not match up pricewise across servers. So which do the appraiser pick? The highest? The lowest? The average? What if on one server, the item is worth disproportionately less than the other servers?
The basic problem is that MMOs are not real life. As stupid as it is to state the obvious, it's extremely relevant to the situation. Trying to apply real-world value to an item that has no true, real intrinsic value is absurd. Especially in MMOs that are explicitly not based on RMT. Actually, I take that back, those items are probably the easiest: they are worth exactly what the developer says they are worth, which is likely to be always be exactly $0.00.
FFXI has the luck of being part of the MMO whipping-boy crowd. WoW is currently god, FFXI is currently good for wiping your ass according to all the WoW fanatics. Zonk plays WoW, comes as zero surprise that the summary would take the tone that it does.
I'm looking forward to how they implement chocobo breeding and racing. Could be pretty cool.
Eh, if you want to shit on the game, be my guest. I don't think we need your blessing to continue playing a game we enjoy.
Good job.
It's hard to know if there is anything being done about what you consider usability problems if you refuse to describe even one of these problems. People are supposed to divine what you percieve to be a problem?
Telecoms already do this. End users pay a fee to access the internet, hosts pay an even larger fee for the bandwidth to ship data down to end users. Telecoms want to drop their common carrier status in favor of being able to charge preferentially based on the type of content shipped, instead of just how much bandwidth is used.
I think that telecoms are going to find that in dropping common carrier status they are going to lose a lot more than they gain; naming them in kiddy porn suits is going to be the next Big Thing.
Actually, it's not that hard to understand. Universal Media Disc, as in all forms of media can be stored and read off of the same disc. Video, audio, games, data all on one disc, a universal media disc! Crazy!
You know, despite the ToS of nearly every MMO specifically forbidding RMT, it's really the playerbase of Westerners that are perpetrating in game race based hate crimes. I don't think I even want to bother reading the article if the person writing is such a simplistic moron.
The difference, of course, being that you own shares of stock in companies, and you own currency. In online games (that do not base their entire model around RMT, such as Project Entropia or Second Life), you own nothing. The company owns everything. Essentially, people who participate in RMT pay money for an item that is not only intangible, but is never even theirs; the company who runs the game can delete their account for violation of the ToS and they are out whatever actual real currency they paid with no real recourse.
Or maybe, you know, it was /.'d. But of course that never happens to a server running on a *nix platform and Apache httpd, because those magically overcome any lack of bandwidth or lack of processing power from an unexpected surge in load.
Seriously, just Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
FFXI used to have a rather ridiculously short amount of time before they would delete your characters (3 months initially). I quit for 6 months, came back, and yep, my character was gone. Didn't hurt me that much (I hadn't gotten very far initially), but they still deleted it.
Of course, as it turns out, they didn't really delete characters. They had the whole Return to Vana'diel thing, and people could get their characters back if they'd been unsubscribed for more than 3 months, so obviously they were still keeping your data, but just didn't let you reactivate the character just to be assholes, I suppose.
I think the deadline has been extended to 12 months now, but they'll still toss your character if you wait longer than that.
It's a pretty standard method for emulating OOP in Javascript. In the context, rcube_webmail is not really a function, but rather a constructor that builds an object when invoked using the new operator. The first 18 lines (or thereabouts) sets up the properties of the new object (of type rcube_webmail), and most everything after that sets up the methods for the new object (ex: this.set_env = function(name, value){...} creates a function and registers it as set_env on the new rcube_webmail object).
Of course, the other way to do it is to use the prototype object, which tends to be a bit cleaner looking if looked at from the perspective of OO in other languages (and allows for more easy emulation of inheritance as well, but that's not always necessary). It's all a matter of preference, really; there are lots of different ways to lay out constructor functions in Javascript.
The people at Opera Software didn't come up with this first. I know I've seen this concept put forth in just about every single Firefox thread on /. that I can remember, and I'm sure the same idea has been bandied about across numerous other types of forums. The people at Opera Software just (possibly) got it done first.
Why all the fuss? Maybe because people like my mother (totally computer illiterate) came up with the same concept merely by wishing it existed, and because it's a relatively trivial concept (which should cause it to fail the obvious test, which I mention again later on).
Without even looking at the patent, I imagine it covers this basic idea:
Person A looks at Product 1, Product 2, and Product 3.
Person B looks at Product 2, Product 3, and Product 4.
Person C looks at Product 2 and Product 3.
Along comes Person D, who looks at Product 3. The program then goes and dredges up the viewing history of everyone that looked at Product 3 and noticed that (in this contrived example) all of them also looked at Product 2. It therefore offers Product 2 as a suggestion.
Now obviously with a much larger dataset some statistical analysis will need to be done to try to determine relavence, but that of course would be unpatentable since it's plain old math.
Seriously, this concept is ridiculous in its simplicity and obviousness, and when laid out this way, it should be crystal clear that it is in fact not a new concept at all, but has been in use, either consciously or subconsciously, for probably about as long as the concept of commerce has been around.
So what are they actually left with to patent? An idea that has been around for as long as commerce? Obviously not. Math? Again, obviously not. What exactly was patented? The idea that a machine can do that for us? How is that not obvious given the past 20-30 years, and the rapid push to have computers do everything for us?
No, what I said was I rip shit up in Ballista as RDM/NIN in FFXI, and that's enjoyable because everyone there is there to PvP with no penalty, but I hate getting ganked by some jerk who's out to prove something to himself by ganking some random person.
I've never played WoW, but my experience with Lineage II just was crap, and typically went like this:
Me> Yay! Finally got it installed.
Me> *wanders outside for the first time*
Somerandomfuckwith+30levelstome> *ganks zoips*
Me> Exciting!
Repeat ad nauseum.
It's interesting how easily people will label someone a carebear if they have no interest in being randomly ganked, or randomly ganking some poor n00b they see wandering by. PvP is great, but not open PvP bullshit where some maxlevel asshole decides that it'd be great fun for everyone if they one-shotted you, and the only people that ever seem to be labeled carebears are the ones that dislike open PvP gankfests.
I don't know how it is on other servers, but in all the time I've been playing FFXI (~2 months after NA PC release), I've only seen the server population on Ramuh go up. When I first started, 2k on Ramuh was a highpoint. Now I regularly see ~3.4k during peak, and I don't think Ramuh is one of the populated servers.
No! If there is an unacceptable imbalance in the game, then Blizzard should fix their bloody game!
The obvious, and best solution to this specific problem is to ban the people who are causing the problem.
There is a specific set of people who are driving costs up. Okay, that sucks, no reason to ban them, we can all agree on that. The difference here is that same specific set of people is violating the ToS at the same time (selling gold for real-world money). Because of the nature of how the gold- sellers work in the game (they sell an item for gold, some Joe User with too much disposable income and not enough time purchases in-game gold with real world money, to buy an item that is being sold by the gold-seller, thereby giving them back their gold, which they resell for real-world money back to the same old Joe User), they over-inflate the economy at an extreme pace, eventually making it so the only way to actually get rare/wanted items is to buy the gold, which just feeds the inflation.
So with that in mind, what is the fix? Increase gold drop rates so that people who don't want to buy gold with real money can buy items in an over-inflated economy? Yeah, right, that'll work for maybe 10 minutes, tops. The only real, viable solution is to ban the gold sellers, which is well within Blizzards right, specifically because the ToS disallows selling in-game items for real-world currency. Who gets hurt by banning the gold sellers? The gold sellers (but who gives a flying fuck about them), and Joe User with too much disposable income and not enough time to play the game. Personally, I don't care about them either, but they certainly have every right to play the game, unlike the gold sellers, they deserve consideration in how to try to balance the game, but frankly, maybe the game just isn't for them if they don't want to invest the time in actually playing the stupid thing.
I fail to see how it could possibly attract people to the game to allow gold farmers. The single biggest annoyance in FFXI are the gilsellers. They have no decency (steal logging, mining, and harvesting points), they'll MPK (violation of the ToS by the way) you without a second thought if you try to camp the same NM as them. They work in teams to monopolize NM spawns, which gives them a monopoly on the drop, which in turn damages the economy (granted, on Ramuh most of the gilsellers that camp NMs quite frankly suck at claiming them, so it's a moot point).
Allowing gold farmers to continue doesn't help the game. It ruins it for everyone that wants to play the game as it is meant. Average people will not monopolize some monster spawn, or do the same repetative task and monopolize a certain kind of item drop, day in and day out for months at a time like a gold farmer would (of course, since I've never played WoW, I'm trying to imagine what it would be like based on my experience with gilsellers in FFXI).
It's really an either-or situation. Either the company itself sells in-game money for a fee to their players, and that's really the only worthile way to get the money (which puts everyone on the same level field), or the company does not allow anyone to buy in-game money and makes sure that there are plenty of ways to earn decent money in-game (again, putting everyone on a level field, except WHMs, who can't farm for crap =P). You can't have both without totally hosing the economy.
That's interesting...except:
SE already did this. Granted, they missed some of the commonly known gilsellers on my server (one of the Angles got it, but the rest escaped somehow >_<). Though it wasn't just gilsellers that got the boot, they banned some people for repeated MPKing (though the majority of the people doing that is gilsellers...)