Re:Beta? Or stable pre-alpha rushed out the door?
on
Adobe Lightroom Review
·
· Score: 1
Which ones are you thinking about?
As per my parenthetic inclusion:
Adobe Premiere -- started as Mac only, now PC only. Macromedia Authorware -- started as Mac only, now PC only.
And also: Adobe Audition -- PC only. Adobe Encore -- PC only. Adobe Acrobat -- originally Mac, now frequently lags on Mac. Adobe Dimensions -- started as PC Only, now defunct. Adobe FrameMaker -- started out totally cross-platform (including Linux/UNIX), has dropped Mac support. Macromedia ColdFusion -- started out cross-platform, now lags on Mac and has occasionally been completely unavailable on Mac.
I tried to find the Gateway notebook you mention and it doesn't have the right CPU, so I specced out an equivalent Gateway S-7510Nb.
After upgrading to X1400 graphics, bluetooth, 80GB hard disk, higher resolution screen, DVD burner, single memory chip -- I get $1649.99 before shipping and handling.
Note that it still has *significantly* inferior graphics.
So yes -- getting a roughly equivalent Gateway laptop is cheaper. Of course you won't be able to get anything even remotely as pleasant as iLife for it, and then there's the security crap you'll need to install on it...
And, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, in the morning, it will still be a Gateway PC running Windows.
Last I checked, Fords were still cheaper than BMWs too.
Beta? Or stable pre-alpha rushed out the door?
on
Adobe Lightroom Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here's a program from Macromedia...sorry Adobe that is Mac only when Macromedia and Adobe have both been going PC-first for some time now (and both have dropped support for programs that started out as Mac-only, such as Premiere and Authorware) and it's developed in Cocoa.
Is this perhaps some engineer's hobby project that is being rushed to market in response to Aperture as a placeholder while they figure out what to do?
After all, would Adobe seriously ship a product with such poor Photoshop integration?
Just watching the demo the "we have lots of features to add" comment gets bandied about so often it's not funny. How is this a "beta"?
I imagine that a major problem with all of these approaches in the long term is that this isn't what the components were designed for and you may discover various things (such as the sticky labels on some components) will dissolve or decompose in a hot oil (or whatever) bath that either live or die cheerfully in an air-cooled PC.
While I was Apple's QuickTime Evangelist, I was a magnet for all kinds of folks who claimed to have miraculous codecs and other holy-grail technologies. Burst.com claimed to have a revolutionary way of delivering streaming content. Lossless. Faster than realtime.
Well, golly. You can deliver content losslessly and faster than real time via HTTP and FTP, too. Only Burst.com did this with a magical, proprietary protocol that required a magical, proprietary server that they would be happy to sell to you. The secret of the "secret sauce" that Burst.com CEO Richard Lang mentions in the feature is that there is no secret sauce.
Mr. Lang believes that Microsoft was out to get him. However, the reality is that Burst.com was, at best, a fly to Microsoft's mountain.
Now Burst.com is suing Microsoft, a move apparently prompted by Windows Media 9's "Instant On" feature. If you have a really fast conneciton and there are no bottlenecks along the way, it lets you see/hear media almost instantly. It works by putting a huge buffer at the client, and then filling that buffer as fast as possible so that buffering time is minimized.
QuickTime's "Fast Start" provided much of this functionality with QuickTime 3's progressive streaming (1998), and QuickTime 6 added the final missing piece (random access) with its Instant-On feature earlier this year. RealNetworks uses a similar method to optimize the viewing experience in RealSystem 9.
When QuickTime introduced "streaming" support is irrelevant and has to do with streaming a live feed. We're talking about viewing canned videos, and QuickTime movies would start playing before they were fully loaded as of at least QuickTime 3.0 (and without requiring any special server technology beyond http) -- much as GIFs and JPEGs could, in some cases, display a low resolution image when partially loaded (again, without a "streaming" server).
In any event, a patent doesn't cover an idea, but an implementation of an idea. Unless Apple actually stole code OR used the same implementation as Burst (and didn't do it first, and it wasn't bleeding obvious), their patent is irrelevant.
QuickTime was released in 1991. I think developers saw betas in late 1990 but I could be wrong. They'd demoed QuickTime as an early alpha at least one year earlier (e.g. they'd shown digital videos playing back in MacWrite documents).
QuickTime 1.0 was followed in 1993 by 1.5 and 1.6 (which ran under Windows). By the time QuickTime 2.0 came out in 1994, you could embed quicktime videos inside a web page. QuickTime 3.0 allowed videos to start playing as soon as enough data had been downloaded, and you could stream ahead of the playback head (the way it works today). I believe QuickTime 3.0 also unified the file format (i.e. by eliminating "forked" QuickTime files where metadata was stored in the resource fork.)
Given that Burst was founded in 1990, that its flagship product is at 2.0 (I think Apple's opensourced Darwin Streaming Server is probably a more mature product), I doubt they have a leg to stand on.
TiVo's Usability Sucks ... except compared to VCRs
on
The Odds at Macworld
·
· Score: 1
Tivo right now, works perfect.
I disagree. TiVo works well in comparison to competitors, but it has a clunky UI, a remote control which is easy to accidentally use upside-down and has way too many buttons for way too few functions (and yet still requires too many clicks and screen loads to get from "Now Playing" to watching your chosen program).
E.g. if you have four episodes of a program and choose to pick one, by default you have to click twice (and load two screens) to start watching that program (you can bypass one of the screens by pressing a different button -- but it's not the most likely button you'll use). If you discover you've picked the wrong episode and click the TiVo button you get dropped back at the BOTTOM level of the menu.
TiVo has been around for six years, and has had the iPod to imitate (and not only does the iPod have a cleaner UI with fewer buttons -- it's far more responsive). If it's UI is still this clunky with all this time and testing, then its product team simply doesn't get it and never will.
Crying fire in a theatre is private property -- the Constitution protects nothing on private property and the theatre owner is responsible for setting the standards of speech.
Um... no.
You think murder is legal/constitutional on private property? Or wiretapping? Or cruel and unusual punishment?
Crying fire in a crowded theatre -- as an example of the limits of free expression -- is the same regardless of whether the theatre is privately or publicly owned.
All of that said, getting folks to click "refresh" is about as legal as suggesting that folks grab free brochures from a stand so as to exhaust the supply of brochures, except that printing more brochures and refreshing the stand are both more expensive to do than restarting a server.
Who is going to film the ads? Who is going to edit the ads? Who is going to appear in the ads and do voice-overs?
When the dotcom boom started, the average starting salary of a fine arts graduate went from whatever they were paying at McDonalds to more than the average starting salary of a Comp Sci graduate. Why? Because suddenly thousands of companies needed thousands of artists to produce hundreds of thousands of web page design elements. This was a consequence of supply and demand. As the production of people with web design skills ramped up to meet demand, fine arts graduate salaries dropped (but not to previous levels -- suddenly, artists are in huge demand). As the demand for folks with video production skills goes through the roof, training courses will appear, folks will switch from learning Flash to Final Cut Pro, etc.
The same "problem" existed when, suddenly, desktop publishing vastly increased the volume and richness of low end publishing. Newsletters which used to be typed suddenly needed graphical mastheads and page layout...
And hmm, which company is best positioned to profit from a huge increase in demand for video production?
After glancing quickly at your website vallejodsl.com it looks like the only clue that your website has anything to do with vallejo and dsl is its URL which google (rightly) considers a "shady SEO" tactic.
Try:
1) Putting some actual RELEVANT CONTENT on your site. 2) Having titles and content that correspond to your website URL.
Your site looks like an incompetent cybersquatter site. That's why.
These days, thanks in large part to google's aggressive attempts to break SEO tactics, most SEO advice consists of stuff like "make your link text meaningful", "provide relevant and up-to-date information on your site", "don't point a bunch of URLs to one web page", etc.
Actually, assuming you were using a dedicated TV, they could do a pretty good job of narrowing demographics simply based on (a) viewing habits, and (b) click-through (assuming such a facility were built into television); but this strategy is really predicated on your using an all-in-one computer / web browser / DVR / TV / Stereo... stealing information from your web browser and/or inbox to figure out what ads to show you while technically feasible would obviously run into legal / ethical / PR issues.
It says it does anything an ordinary laptop does except store large quantities of data.
Not very complicated.
Take a look at a 1995 Apple Powerbook. It had a smaller display, less storage and memory, and a slower cpu, and it does anything a modern laptop can do except store large quantities of data.
So I am inclined to treat "working directly with RAW images" as nothing but Apple marketspeak with a dose of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field thrown in.
By this reasoning a text editor doesn't allow you to edit text because it shows you glyphs instead of the raw binary values in the file.
Any image editor does something like this:
Image Data --> Image Meta Data --> Magic --> Image on Screen
In Photoshop the "Image Data" part is an array of pixels, each represented by 8-bit or 16-bit integer RGB (or other color space). Between you and those pixels, at minimum, is a bunch of color space meta data and a bunch of other magic to make the pixels on your computer's screen appear to be resemble the color you first thought of. In Aperture the "Image Data" part is the RAW image file. The meta data includes color space stuff, yada yada.
And your example:
And I doubt very much that if I, say, make some Curves contrast adjustments Aperture will re-mosaic the image and re-create the Bayer pattern RAW file with my contrast adjustments.
This is exactly what Aperture is doing. Aperture's architecture doesn't require it to keep an intermediate representation of the data for performance purposes. This is precisely its advantage over Photoshop (at every level).
Not marketing hype -- just a perfectly reasonable description of what's going on.
"Hey the gigantic dialog box with 400 options is missing, all I get is these modeless dialogs that do 99.9% of what I ever want to do faster and more easily".
E.g. he complains about the lack of a Curves dialog (which Aperture lacks) giving as an example a task better performed using the levels dialog (which Aperture does better than Photoshop).
Usage Note: The traditional rule states that the whole comprises the parts and the parts compose the whole. In strict usage: The Union comprises 50 states. Fifty states compose (or constitute or make up) the Union. Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected. See Usage Note at include.
"No buyer was actually able to pick up the phantom shares for 1 yen due to market rules designed to limit price fluctuations, but the shares may have gone as cheaply as 572,000 yen ($4,750) each, a more than 9 percent discount to the intended sale price."
So the headline is wrong and/or the poster did not RTDA.
Arguing that an AJAX app sucks because it violates bookmarking is missing the point. An AJAX app (a good one, anyway) isn't a web page that happens to be an app, it's an app that happens to run in/on a web browser. It should support bookmarking -- say -- if and when that happens to make sense, but it shouldn't be a criterion for goodness simply because it's a criterion for goodness in the underlying technology.
Ajax breaks the unified model of the Web and introduce a new way of looking at data that has not been well integrated into the other aspects of the Web. With ajax, the user's view of information on the screen is now determined by a sequence of navigation actions rather than a single navigation action.
Right, and aircraft violate the unified model of human beings by allowing us to fly.
AJAX apps need to be compared to other apps, not other web pages. And yes, AJAX apps may suck for reasons along the lines of "a dog that can walk on its hind legs" but that's a different kind of (and much more valid) criticism.
AJAX apps allow for interactive apps to be implemented cross-platform in a browser; in many cases "bookmarking" would be a BAD thing. (E.g. bookmarking a view of a secure document *shouldn't* work in some sense.) I don't have the ability to bookmark my email in either Outlook or gmail -- I'm guessing that if there were a burning demand for bookmarks in Outlook it would probably get implemented.
Yes this is really usable. So essentially you'd need to drop to the command line to execute a program the first time? Hey, let's provide a haxie to do it automatically based on filename.
Anyone can make a secure system by making it unusable. The trick is making a secure system that is still usable.
The only real difference between this idea and NeverWinter Nights is that:
This product supports ANY setting (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it support anything other than the vanilla fantasy setting they first thought of)
This product supports ANY ruleset (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it not support something other than the default fantasy ruleset)
This product is MASSIVE whereas NWN isn't. Although NWN or a descendant probably will be before they ship anything.
This product provides developers with an SDK. NWN provides developers with a fully functional IDE allowing a person only one skill (e.g. writing / programming / art) to contribute to or create a world.
This product provides a revenue model for content developers. NWN kind of does (they can commercialise a module you develop) but so far this hasn't worked out well for anyone except the developers of NWN.
Slashdot Mirror
Which ones are you thinking about?
As per my parenthetic inclusion:
Adobe Premiere -- started as Mac only, now PC only.
Macromedia Authorware -- started as Mac only, now PC only.
And also:
Adobe Audition -- PC only.
Adobe Encore -- PC only.
Adobe Acrobat -- originally Mac, now frequently lags on Mac.
Adobe Dimensions -- started as PC Only, now defunct.
Adobe FrameMaker -- started out totally cross-platform (including Linux/UNIX), has dropped Mac support.
Macromedia ColdFusion -- started out cross-platform, now lags on Mac and has occasionally been completely unavailable on Mac.
I tried to find the Gateway notebook you mention and it doesn't have the right CPU, so I specced out an equivalent Gateway S-7510Nb.
After upgrading to X1400 graphics, bluetooth, 80GB hard disk, higher resolution screen, DVD burner, single memory chip -- I get $1649.99 before shipping and handling.
Note that it still has *significantly* inferior graphics.
So yes -- getting a roughly equivalent Gateway laptop is cheaper. Of course you won't be able to get anything even remotely as pleasant as iLife for it, and then there's the security crap you'll need to install on it...
And, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, in the morning, it will still be a Gateway PC running Windows.
Last I checked, Fords were still cheaper than BMWs too.
Here's a program from Macromedia...sorry Adobe that is Mac only when Macromedia and Adobe have both been going PC-first for some time now (and both have dropped support for programs that started out as Mac-only, such as Premiere and Authorware) and it's developed in Cocoa.
Is this perhaps some engineer's hobby project that is being rushed to market in response to Aperture as a placeholder while they figure out what to do?
After all, would Adobe seriously ship a product with such poor Photoshop integration?
Just watching the demo the "we have lots of features to add" comment gets bandied about so often it's not funny. How is this a "beta"?
I imagine that a major problem with all of these approaches in the long term is that this isn't what the components were designed for and you may discover various things (such as the sticky labels on some components) will dissolve or decompose in a hot oil (or whatever) bath that either live or die cheerfully in an air-cooled PC.
No -- my point was that it's "about as legal" -- which is to say, not totally legal, but probably not a felony either :-)
Oh here's some research -- from a former QuickTime Evangelist's Blog:
While I was Apple's QuickTime Evangelist, I was a magnet for all kinds of folks who claimed to have miraculous codecs and other holy-grail technologies. Burst.com claimed to have a revolutionary way of delivering streaming content. Lossless. Faster than realtime.
Well, golly. You can deliver content losslessly and faster than real time via HTTP and FTP, too. Only Burst.com did this with a magical, proprietary protocol that required a magical, proprietary server that they would be happy to sell to you. The secret of the "secret sauce" that Burst.com CEO Richard Lang mentions in the feature is that there is no secret sauce.
Mr. Lang believes that Microsoft was out to get him. However, the reality is that Burst.com was, at best, a fly to Microsoft's mountain.
Now Burst.com is suing Microsoft, a move apparently prompted by Windows Media 9's "Instant On" feature. If you have a really fast conneciton and there are no bottlenecks along the way, it lets you see/hear media almost instantly. It works by putting a huge buffer at the client, and then filling that buffer as fast as possible so that buffering time is minimized.
QuickTime's "Fast Start" provided much of this functionality with QuickTime 3's progressive streaming (1998), and QuickTime 6 added the final missing piece (random access) with its Instant-On feature earlier this year. RealNetworks uses a similar method to optimize the viewing experience in RealSystem 9.
When QuickTime introduced "streaming" support is irrelevant and has to do with streaming a live feed. We're talking about viewing canned videos, and QuickTime movies would start playing before they were fully loaded as of at least QuickTime 3.0 (and without requiring any special server technology beyond http) -- much as GIFs and JPEGs could, in some cases, display a low resolution image when partially loaded (again, without a "streaming" server).
In any event, a patent doesn't cover an idea, but an implementation of an idea. Unless Apple actually stole code OR used the same implementation as Burst (and didn't do it first, and it wasn't bleeding obvious), their patent is irrelevant.
QuickTime was released in 1991. I think developers saw betas in late 1990 but I could be wrong. They'd demoed QuickTime as an early alpha at least one year earlier (e.g. they'd shown digital videos playing back in MacWrite documents).
QuickTime 1.0 was followed in 1993 by 1.5 and 1.6 (which ran under Windows). By the time QuickTime 2.0 came out in 1994, you could embed quicktime videos inside a web page. QuickTime 3.0 allowed videos to start playing as soon as enough data had been downloaded, and you could stream ahead of the playback head (the way it works today). I believe QuickTime 3.0 also unified the file format (i.e. by eliminating "forked" QuickTime files where metadata was stored in the resource fork.)
Given that Burst was founded in 1990, that its flagship product is at 2.0 (I think Apple's opensourced Darwin Streaming Server is probably a more mature product), I doubt they have a leg to stand on.
It's ColorSync all over again.
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicktime
Tivo right now, works perfect.
I disagree. TiVo works well in comparison to competitors, but it has a clunky UI, a remote control which is easy to accidentally use upside-down and has way too many buttons for way too few functions (and yet still requires too many clicks and screen loads to get from "Now Playing" to watching your chosen program).
E.g. if you have four episodes of a program and choose to pick one, by default you have to click twice (and load two screens) to start watching that program (you can bypass one of the screens by pressing a different button -- but it's not the most likely button you'll use). If you discover you've picked the wrong episode and click the TiVo button you get dropped back at the BOTTOM level of the menu.
TiVo has been around for six years, and has had the iPod to imitate (and not only does the iPod have a cleaner UI with fewer buttons -- it's far more responsive). If it's UI is still this clunky with all this time and testing, then its product team simply doesn't get it and never will.
Apple adopts DSPs (in their special AV models): crickets
Crying fire in a theatre is private property -- the Constitution protects nothing on private property and the theatre owner is responsible for setting the standards of speech.
... no.
Um
You think murder is legal/constitutional on private property? Or wiretapping? Or cruel and unusual punishment?
Crying fire in a crowded theatre -- as an example of the limits of free expression -- is the same regardless of whether the theatre is privately or publicly owned.
All of that said, getting folks to click "refresh" is about as legal as suggesting that folks grab free brochures from a stand so as to exhaust the supply of brochures, except that printing more brochures and refreshing the stand are both more expensive to do than restarting a server.
Who is going to film the ads? Who is going to edit the ads? Who is going to appear in the ads and do voice-overs?
When the dotcom boom started, the average starting salary of a fine arts graduate went from whatever they were paying at McDonalds to more than the average starting salary of a Comp Sci graduate. Why? Because suddenly thousands of companies needed thousands of artists to produce hundreds of thousands of web page design elements. This was a consequence of supply and demand. As the production of people with web design skills ramped up to meet demand, fine arts graduate salaries dropped (but not to previous levels -- suddenly, artists are in huge demand). As the demand for folks with video production skills goes through the roof, training courses will appear, folks will switch from learning Flash to Final Cut Pro, etc.
The same "problem" existed when, suddenly, desktop publishing vastly increased the volume and richness of low end publishing. Newsletters which used to be typed suddenly needed graphical mastheads and page layout...
And hmm, which company is best positioned to profit from a huge increase in demand for video production?
After glancing quickly at your website vallejodsl.com it looks like the only clue that your website has anything to do with vallejo and dsl is its URL which google (rightly) considers a "shady SEO" tactic.
Try:
1) Putting some actual RELEVANT CONTENT on your site.
2) Having titles and content that correspond to your website URL.
Your site looks like an incompetent cybersquatter site. That's why.
These days, thanks in large part to google's aggressive attempts to break SEO tactics, most SEO advice consists of stuff like "make your link text meaningful", "provide relevant and up-to-date information on your site", "don't point a bunch of URLs to one web page", etc.
Actually, assuming you were using a dedicated TV, they could do a pretty good job of narrowing demographics simply based on (a) viewing habits, and (b) click-through (assuming such a facility were built into television); but this strategy is really predicated on your using an all-in-one computer / web browser / DVR / TV / Stereo ... stealing information from your web browser and/or inbox to figure out what ads to show you while technically feasible would obviously run into legal / ethical / PR issues.
It says it does anything an ordinary laptop does except store large quantities of data.
Not very complicated.
Take a look at a 1995 Apple Powerbook. It had a smaller display, less storage and memory, and a slower cpu, and it does anything a modern laptop can do except store large quantities of data.
So I am inclined to treat "working directly with RAW images" as nothing but Apple marketspeak with a dose of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field thrown in.
By this reasoning a text editor doesn't allow you to edit text because it shows you glyphs instead of the raw binary values in the file.
Any image editor does something like this:
Image Data --> Image Meta Data --> Magic --> Image on Screen
In Photoshop the "Image Data" part is an array of pixels, each represented by 8-bit or 16-bit integer RGB (or other color space). Between you and those pixels, at minimum, is a bunch of color space meta data and a bunch of other magic to make the pixels on your computer's screen appear to be resemble the color you first thought of. In Aperture the "Image Data" part is the RAW image file. The meta data includes color space stuff, yada yada.
And your example:
And I doubt very much that if I, say, make some Curves contrast adjustments Aperture will re-mosaic the image and re-create the Bayer pattern RAW file with my contrast adjustments.
This is exactly what Aperture is doing. Aperture's architecture doesn't require it to keep an intermediate representation of the data for performance purposes. This is precisely its advantage over Photoshop (at every level).
Not marketing hype -- just a perfectly reasonable description of what's going on.
No, no-one's found a *bug*
Here's a flaw: TeX takes a lot longer to learn to use than MS Word. Where's my check?
He missed the point on image editing too.
"Hey the gigantic dialog box with 400 options is missing, all I get is these modeless dialogs that do 99.9% of what I ever want to do faster and more easily".
E.g. he complains about the lack of a Curves dialog (which Aperture lacks) giving as an example a task better performed using the levels dialog (which Aperture does better than Photoshop).
You don't produce drop shadowed embossed text in a dark room either.
OMG -- metaphor is imperfect. News at 11.
Usage Note: The traditional rule states that the whole comprises the parts and the parts compose the whole. In strict usage: The Union comprises 50 states. Fifty states compose (or constitute or make up) the Union. Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected. See Usage Note at include.
d
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=comprise
Language changes -- sometimes for the worse. Get over it.
I fully expect "loose" to be an acceptable spelling of "lose" within ten years.
From TFA:
"No buyer was actually able to pick up the phantom shares for 1 yen due to market rules designed to limit price fluctuations, but the shares may have gone as cheaply as 572,000 yen ($4,750) each, a more than 9 percent discount to the intended sale price."
So the headline is wrong and/or the poster did not RTDA.
Arguing that an AJAX app sucks because it violates bookmarking is missing the point. An AJAX app (a good one, anyway) isn't a web page that happens to be an app, it's an app that happens to run in/on a web browser. It should support bookmarking -- say -- if and when that happens to make sense, but it shouldn't be a criterion for goodness simply because it's a criterion for goodness in the underlying technology.
Ajax breaks the unified model of the Web and introduce a new way of looking at data that has not been well integrated into the other aspects of the Web. With ajax, the user's view of information on the screen is now determined by a sequence of navigation actions rather than a single navigation action.
Right, and aircraft violate the unified model of human beings by allowing us to fly.
AJAX apps need to be compared to other apps, not other web pages. And yes, AJAX apps may suck for reasons along the lines of "a dog that can walk on its hind legs" but that's a different kind of (and much more valid) criticism.
AJAX apps allow for interactive apps to be implemented cross-platform in a browser; in many cases "bookmarking" would be a BAD thing. (E.g. bookmarking a view of a secure document *shouldn't* work in some sense.) I don't have the ability to bookmark my email in either Outlook or gmail -- I'm guessing that if there were a burning demand for bookmarks in Outlook it would probably get implemented.
Yes this is really usable. So essentially you'd need to drop to the command line to execute a program the first time? Hey, let's provide a haxie to do it automatically based on filename.
Anyone can make a secure system by making it unusable. The trick is making a secure system that is still usable.
Indeed -- very good point.
And again, no advertising or marketing involved.
The only real difference between this idea and NeverWinter Nights is that:
This product supports ANY setting (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it support anything other than the vanilla fantasy setting they first thought of)
This product supports ANY ruleset (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it not support something other than the default fantasy ruleset)
This product is MASSIVE whereas NWN isn't. Although NWN or a descendant probably will be before they ship anything.
This product provides developers with an SDK. NWN provides developers with a fully functional IDE allowing a person only one skill (e.g. writing / programming / art) to contribute to or create a world.
This product provides a revenue model for content developers. NWN kind of does (they can commercialise a module you develop) but so far this hasn't worked out well for anyone except the developers of NWN.
This product doesn't exist. NWN does.