This is the case of wether taking stuff left outside a house for trash is considered stealing or not. once the courts have ruled one way or another that is the new law. IF the courts rule that taking stuff left outside is NOT stealing then nobody can ever be charged for that act again.
I am dealing with a user at the moment who just isn't that bright. It is not that she is a moron, she just doesn't think. Somethings she does right, she gets her wallpapers through googles image search and uses firefox after my suggestion.
But she also wants animated cursors and finds them and happily installes them. Cursor Mania.
She just doesn't get, yet, that the internet has two kinds of free and that the more something shouts it is free the less likely it is. How do you explain that firefox is free and safe but cursormania is free and not safe?
The problem is not so much that some people are stupid but that they lack a healthy dose of cynasism, they forget to question things. And that is pretty to stupid.
The system can't protect against this unless you want to life in the nanny state. Women are free to go with convicted wife-beaters unless you want the state to decide your partner for you. People can install spyware unless you want the system to decide what you can install.
For some reason people like you want software to do things you would NEVER accept in hardware. Would you really want a powerdrill that constantly checked wether you where drilling in the factory approved substances, at the right angled, under the right conditions? A screwdriver that refuses to be used as a hammer?
At some point users must accept a responsibilty to operate their equipment responsible themselves and accept that if they make mistakes, they are the ones to blaim.
You know what my solution has been to fix 99% of friends requests to fix their windows PC? Re-install. Whipe the crap and sooner or later they either figure out that "mmm once I downloaded those free smiley's my computer starts to act like a piece of crap, maybe these two things are connected" or at least find someone else to help with their crap PC's.
Lets face it, after 30 years I have started to realise that no amount of suggestion is ever going to result in girls actually giving any of the sexual favors they seem to promise when they ask you to fix their laptop.
Learn to read. The law students are defending Jaul Tennenbaum. NOT the piratebay. It is there in plain english. Granted that might be hard for an american to read but still.
And the law students are just assisting, in law there is an awful lot of hard work and students are the best for this provided you beat them enough. They are doing it under the guidance of their proffesor who is a qualified lawyer.
EVERY CUSTOMER ALREADY HAS THE RIGHT TO MODIFY ANY PRODUCT HE BUYS AND DISTRUBTE THIS MODIFICATION.
Lets examine this because with software and media we have allowed ourselves to forget this.
Cars, the eternal slashdot metaphor for everything, are a prime example. I am allowed to buy ANY car in the world, modify it in any way I want and sell it. THE ONLY restriction in this case is that it must be road safe but this has NOTHING to do with what the original manufacturer wants. There is a HUGE industry that modifies cars. In fact if you want a special type of vehicle you are pretty much required to modify an existing one.
Imagine what "no modification" and "no redistribution" would mean for the food industry. You couldn't cook anything not even share a biscuit with someone.
But we are talking about media you say. Okay, newspaper cuts. This has died down a bit but most big companies used to have someone reading all newspapers for articles of intrest and cut them out for information and the archive.
So in most countries where idiotic bought laws have not raped the customers basic rights the end-user already HAS the right to modify software AND to distribute these modifications. The legal problem with most mods is that you do NOT pass the original product with it. If I modded a bought copy of a game and modified it and then sold that copy on there is NOTHING that can be done against it under dutch law for instance.
So you are basically asking for a piece of text that already allows customers to do what you want to allow them to do. So include common law with your product and you are done.
Lets see, we got three players. The convicted monopolist Microsoft who pushes DRM onto the PC if only they could get people to use it. Constantly changes format and is constantly in a split about wether the PC can be for gaming or not. They LOVE DRM and would dearly love to push trusted computing down our troath.
Nintendo absolutly HATES drm. That is why they switched to CD's the moment that tech became superior to catridges and don't constantly change the physical interface to their handhelds. Oops.
Sony, as you said, has an open console, standard formats, open browser. But OOPS, they got BlueRay (which competes against DRM laden HD-DVD and of course DVD and of course VHS (Yes kiddies, ALL these formats have DRM, that we managed to work around them so you no longer notice doesn't count)) and that embarrising rootkit (which by the way was possible thanks to the way MS wrote their OS).
It seems clear that ALL three are pretty nasty when it comes to DRM but for some reason Sony is getting all the blame for it. Choosing the better console maker is like choosing between which guy beating you up isn't aiming for your nuts.
Linus Torvald NEVER claimed to have created the best thing since sliced bread. He was modest and didn't shout from the roof tops that everything everyone else had been doing was wrong and that this was the next big thing.
Modesty goes a long way into getting people to listen to your ideas because you give them room to adjust their own views without having to get defensive.
What version of Ubuntu limits you to 1 gig of ram or only three apps?
The different Ubuntu versions are different configurations you can EASILY switch between if you want it to. I have NO objection to MS including an option to automatically configure your OS for various settings. Let it offer me a choice wether this is a single shared PC at home, or a PC at on a small network or a locked down machine in an office.
So your argument fails because you just don't have a clue about Ubuntu.
You never worked with Linux or indeed any OS have you?
The linux kernel ain't 30mb. For instance mine are around 4.5mb so you are not even close.
Oh wait, you are talking about the complete source? Yup that is 30-40mb. Why should you wish to put the complete source code on a mobile phone? Anyway, modern phones can easily have several gigabytes storage so even then it isn't that much.
Oh and while my kernel is 4.5mb, that is because it includes a LOT of drivers that are not needed but I am to lazy to remove. A mobile phone maker would compile the kernel with only the options that are needed for that piece of hardware. The proof? Mobile phones with linux running on it.
So basically, you are suggesting a fix for something that ain't broken. Oh well that is slashdot for you. What next, you claims Vista is slow because you have to install it from DVD?
A picture is a permanent image, this is just a camera that observes but does not record. if that was illegal all camera displays that show the people in front of the shop window on a screen to show the camera's capabilities would be illegal and they are not.
Apparently you do not ask yourself what the quality is of the coders who wrote the software that could be so easily exploited to be botted. If russian hackers are crap then what does that say about the coders from Redmond?
Really, how could you miss that joke. Hand in your slashdot ID and go have some sex you traitor! You are not one of us, you probably even talk to girls!
Lets face it ME showed that already and what exactly ever happened to windows 1 2 and 3 (remember, the windows 3 we know and ***** is actually 3.11 (or something like that)).
1. It's client-server all over again.
Web applications encourage a thin-client approach: the client handles UI rendering and user input, while the real processing happens on servers. What sense does that make when any modern laptop packs enough CPU and GPU power to put yesterday's Cray supercomputer to shame?
Simple solution DO NOT BUY SUPERPOWERFULL PC's. Guess what, try and figure out HOW much you can save NOT just by using google docs by not buying MS Office but by not buying a powerful PC either. In fact my P3 booting from network works just fine with webapps, Office not so much (that it boots linux of course does not help). Oh yeah, another cost saving. You don't have to buy Windows either. Sorry, this argument fails, we bought powerful PC's because our clientside programs and OS demanded it, if they don't, we don't have to buy powerful PC's anymore.
Concentrating computing power in the datacenter is fine if you're a Google or a Microsoft, but that approach puts a lot of pressure on smaller players. Scaling small server farms to meet demand can be a real challenge -- just ask Twitter.
Eh, twitter? Good luck making that into an offline app. What next, offline websites? Yes, scaling a serverfarm is hard but is this applicable to most small companies choosing between a web-app or a desktop application (that usually still needs a server backend anyway). Sorry, but datacenters are nothing new and the likes of IBM can happily sell you all the power you need, you can pay them with the money you saved on your client PC's. Oh, and if all your data is local, how are you going to back all of that up? If all your data is server side, then your client programs still need a server farm to serve them. Failed argument again.
Furthermore, security vulnerabilities abound in networked applications, and the complexity of the browser itself seemingly makes bugs inevitable. Why saddle your apps with that much baggage?
In a net-app I only need to patch ONE piece of software, if it is purely clientside I need to patch all clients out there. Browsers patches are being taken care off globally. If you have a client-app you still need a patching strategy so nothing changes, you just patch the browser instead of your own apps. The complexity of the browser makes bugs inevitable he claims. True enough but for most web-apps these bugs are totally irrelevant. Futhermore such bugs are under constant scrutiny where as your own client apps are not. This argument by him is just scare mongering. There are secure web-apps and insecure client side programs.
2. Web UIs are a mess.
The Web's stateless, mainly forms-based UI approach is reliable, but it's not necessarily the right model for every application. Why sacrifice the full range of real-time interactivity offered by traditional, OS-based apps? Technologies such as AJAX only simulate in the browser what systems programming could do already.
So he says in the title that UI's are a mess and next that they are reliable. He seems confused, Ajax is for communicating with the server, what is the difference between using Ajax and whatever your clientside program happens to use? Did he ever program client programs that interact with servers? If so he would know they are easily as messy.
And while systems programmers are accustomed to building apps with consistent UI toolkits such as the Windows APIs, Apple's Cocoa, or Nokia's Qt, building a Web UI is too often an exercise in reinventing the wheel. Buttons, controls, and widgets vary from app to app. Sometimes the menus are along the top, other times they're off to the side. Sometimes they pop down when you roll over them, and sometimes you have to click. That inconsistency hurts your development budget, but it hurts usability more.
Now he is just getting silly. He mentions THREE UI systems ALL COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and then complains web-app developers don't follow a standard. WHAT STANDARD? If there was a standard M
That windows will become nothing more then a gateway to the net. A basic OS nothing more and everything else is supplied by others. Because a basic OS isn't that hard to write. Most Uni IT students do it as an assignment. You think Linus was the first guy to program an OS at home? Hardly.
The trick is that building a complete solution is what is hard to do AND is what MS has made a fortune out of doing. MS doesn't sell an OS, it sells ALL the tools you need to run a computer. This in itself is not enough, what really powers MS is that for a long time THEIR tools were the ONLY tools you could use and be certain they were compatible.
MS doesn't give a SHIT about IE, for a long time it was perfectly happy to let netscape have it. Until it dawned on them that the internet might be big and that if they didn't control the internet, someone else would.
It is the same as with their office suit. people use MS office not because they need all its features or because it is the best but because everyone else uses it too. Since for a long time all documents where MS.DOC format you better be able to open them and write them if you wanted to do business. MS sells their software NOT because it can compete but because if you don't buy theirs you can't connect to anyone else.
This is changing and it is scary as hell to MS. Why are all cars petrol powered? Because that is the fuel that is available. By a car that moves on say compressed air and you won't be driving it far because there are no compressed air stations, just petrol stations. If this changes, then people can change the fuel for their car.
IF MS were to truly create a core OS for which others would then provide the frills, then it would very quickly find that someone else can not just supply the frills but the core OS itself.
Example? MS Outlook. For the longest time Linux users have had to jump through hoops to connect to their employers Outlook servers. More and more however I see companies going to purely webbased mail and voila. Not only can I use that with ANY OS, neither do I need to jump through hoops anymore to access MS software. It is a dangerous thing for MS. If parts of it are no longer the universal standard, what reason have you got to buy their software when there are far cheaper and better solutions out there?
No, your solution would not kill Linux or Apple. It would empower them and others to rise to new heights while MS would quickly die.
Try this, MS opens up DX10 to be implemented freely by say Linux and Apple. Exactly how many gamers would stay with XP/Vista/W7 and migrate away? 99%? Why do think MS is pushing Game for Windows after years of neglecting the market and even having their own rival the X-box?
So MS has started working on controlling the US nuclear arsenal? Mmm, well MS typically needs 3 yrs to get a release out, so since it is 2009, that would means 2012. Just in time for the aztec prediction of the world ending. Well at least now we know.
Seriously, MS controlled nukes. Who didn't just shit themselves?
Your math is flawed. The game SOLD 700k boxes, but that includes a free month of gameplay. The game has been in development for 5 years or so. Those costs have to be payed first plus some extra because investors don't invest for the fun of it.
The people selling the boxes want to be payed too, and of course you tend to need to produce more boxes then you actually sell. Again, this has to be done with borrowed money essentially so box sales are not all that impressive.
The game has trouble right from the start. Once the first free month was over the servers started dying fast. MMO's tend to have rabid fanboys who live in their own fantasy world but the simply fact was that two weeks or so after launch the rot started to set in. Yes, new players were coming in but there were also a LOT of people who just didn't even bother completing their first month. After the first month ran out thing really went down hill. Entire guilds collapsed, not unusual but not all of these were ego tripping guilds with 1 leader who wants his own name on the guild.
It is very hard to judge just how many players AoC has left, but they faced a real problem. During beta and early launch they had to add servers to deal with the population, just a couple of weeks later they had servers turning into ghosts towns. Do you think their hardware vendor cared? Those servers had to be paid for and now they can try to sell them off second hand.
A small MMORPG can survive, if it keeps a stable population. But going from 700k to having to close servers... that means a LOT of money has been lost. They had huge trouble at launch with not enough customer support. They HAD to get more people in but as they got more employees the number of subscribers collapsed. Now they have to fire them again. That is a LOT of extra money over a small MMORPG who just has the same stable employee pool from the start.
No, Funcom is in trouble. They gambled and they lost mostly because they completely failed to understand basic MMORPG design. They just didn't get it. To list the games fault is easy, just list all its elements. Every single one of them was flawed.
For instance, its so called maturity. Naked boobs. True it had them, and that was it. But the game had no sex, there are several NPC's who hint at it, but nothing ever happens and the armours worn were totally non-sexy.
Its economy was out of whack, a horse, a staple of MMORPG design, was just to fucking expensive. So expensive that gold sellers just gave up because NOBODY was going pay to a 1000 euro's for a horse. For that matter the level requirement was WAY to high.
No fast travel options.
Its melee fighting system basically being nothing more then instead of WoW's 1 button mashing you mash 4 buttons. Whoo! Long live macro keyboards.
The list goes on. Sure there were some highprofile bugs, but basically, at its core, the game just wasn't any good. It was for a short while an intresting diversion from WoW and other fantasy MMORPG's but basically, it just wasn't a good game. A couple of nice ideas don't save a product if its core is flawed. When basic things like chat don't work as they need to, everything else is secondary. And lets face it, Guild Wars had boobs that jiggled, and weren't hidden after level 1 behind a brown leather slab.
Did you actually go to the ruins? Where enemies kept get stuck in their fall animation, unattackable leaving no mobs for your quest? How about the insane bats whose AI and animation was so buggered you wondered how it often got out of alpha?
What about the invisible bits of landscaping you could get stuck on. The slow loading. The missing bank and auction house.
The game was a disaster. Really, some classes you started right from lvl 1 one shotting every enemy, others struggeled with enemies below their level. Nerfs happened all over changing entire classes. Balance must be done BEFORE release because if a class plays in a certain way you are just going to upset those who choose that class to play in a certain way.
Frankly, AoC was to old. It started development before WoW came out and to Goat seems to have been living in a cave ever since. The UI was a total disaster. Lotro is already bad with its non-customziable UI in this Post-WoW world but AoC set a new low. Not only was it ugly, it didn't even give players basic tools. Did you ever figure out what the equivelant of/inspect was in AoC? To lazy to look it up but even as a linux user a I balked at that commandline. That it has to be done from the commandline at all showed just how out of touch the developers were.
No, AoC is better left forgotten a bigger pile of shit then Anarchy Online or indeed Vanguard. Vanguard at least tried. AoC dev's just couldn't be bothered to make the game fun. The fast travel options were insane! Walk EVERYWHERE, one corner of the world to the other OR die and choose your own respawn point.
The only thing I worry that with Funcom in the situation it is in, The Secret World, the MMORPG by the team that made The Longest Journey might be axed as well. Lets not forget that this is a completely seperate team and the Goat has nothing to do with TSW yet it might suffer for this guys incompetence.
When has it ever worked? When have the people ever used their guns to stop the executive? Answer: Never.
But yes, in a way it works. It works as a band aid. You got guns, the elite say, so anytime you want to, you can overthrow us. Of course it would be 1 of you against millions of us but hey, don't worry. If we abuse you to much, you can always rise up.
The whole "right to bear arms" thing only can be proven to work when it is just once used. Until then, it is a pacifier.
Slashdot Mirror
We just look at their boobies and try to get them to translate the swedish chef.
The car companies don't speed. Nooo, they are just allowing people to speed themselves.
The gun companies don't kill. Nooo, they are just allowing people to kill each other.
This is the case of wether taking stuff left outside a house for trash is considered stealing or not. once the courts have ruled one way or another that is the new law. IF the courts rule that taking stuff left outside is NOT stealing then nobody can ever be charged for that act again.
Trust me, pretty doesn't even get a look in, but they make up for it in rabidness.
I looked at the pole dancers and boozed up, loosing maybe $20.
Obviously you are smarter then I am.
I am dealing with a user at the moment who just isn't that bright. It is not that she is a moron, she just doesn't think. Somethings she does right, she gets her wallpapers through googles image search and uses firefox after my suggestion.
But she also wants animated cursors and finds them and happily installes them. Cursor Mania.
She just doesn't get, yet, that the internet has two kinds of free and that the more something shouts it is free the less likely it is. How do you explain that firefox is free and safe but cursormania is free and not safe?
The problem is not so much that some people are stupid but that they lack a healthy dose of cynasism, they forget to question things. And that is pretty to stupid.
The system can't protect against this unless you want to life in the nanny state. Women are free to go with convicted wife-beaters unless you want the state to decide your partner for you. People can install spyware unless you want the system to decide what you can install.
For some reason people like you want software to do things you would NEVER accept in hardware. Would you really want a powerdrill that constantly checked wether you where drilling in the factory approved substances, at the right angled, under the right conditions? A screwdriver that refuses to be used as a hammer?
At some point users must accept a responsibilty to operate their equipment responsible themselves and accept that if they make mistakes, they are the ones to blaim.
You know what my solution has been to fix 99% of friends requests to fix their windows PC? Re-install. Whipe the crap and sooner or later they either figure out that "mmm once I downloaded those free smiley's my computer starts to act like a piece of crap, maybe these two things are connected" or at least find someone else to help with their crap PC's.
Lets face it, after 30 years I have started to realise that no amount of suggestion is ever going to result in girls actually giving any of the sexual favors they seem to promise when they ask you to fix their laptop.
The truth? Both got some suprise buttsex from a passing whale and are embarresed to admit it.
If anything, this article is to long and doesn't have enough lolcats and baseless rumors that author thought he heard someone say on the bus home.
The internet, mediocrity spread around the world.
Learn to read. The law students are defending Jaul Tennenbaum. NOT the piratebay. It is there in plain english. Granted that might be hard for an american to read but still.
And the law students are just assisting, in law there is an awful lot of hard work and students are the best for this provided you beat them enough. They are doing it under the guidance of their proffesor who is a qualified lawyer.
EVERY CUSTOMER ALREADY HAS THE RIGHT TO MODIFY ANY PRODUCT HE BUYS AND DISTRUBTE THIS MODIFICATION.
Lets examine this because with software and media we have allowed ourselves to forget this.
Cars, the eternal slashdot metaphor for everything, are a prime example. I am allowed to buy ANY car in the world, modify it in any way I want and sell it. THE ONLY restriction in this case is that it must be road safe but this has NOTHING to do with what the original manufacturer wants. There is a HUGE industry that modifies cars. In fact if you want a special type of vehicle you are pretty much required to modify an existing one.
Imagine what "no modification" and "no redistribution" would mean for the food industry. You couldn't cook anything not even share a biscuit with someone.
But we are talking about media you say. Okay, newspaper cuts. This has died down a bit but most big companies used to have someone reading all newspapers for articles of intrest and cut them out for information and the archive.
So in most countries where idiotic bought laws have not raped the customers basic rights the end-user already HAS the right to modify software AND to distribute these modifications. The legal problem with most mods is that you do NOT pass the original product with it. If I modded a bought copy of a game and modified it and then sold that copy on there is NOTHING that can be done against it under dutch law for instance.
So you are basically asking for a piece of text that already allows customers to do what you want to allow them to do. So include common law with your product and you are done.
Lets see, we got three players. The convicted monopolist Microsoft who pushes DRM onto the PC if only they could get people to use it. Constantly changes format and is constantly in a split about wether the PC can be for gaming or not. They LOVE DRM and would dearly love to push trusted computing down our troath.
Nintendo absolutly HATES drm. That is why they switched to CD's the moment that tech became superior to catridges and don't constantly change the physical interface to their handhelds. Oops.
Sony, as you said, has an open console, standard formats, open browser. But OOPS, they got BlueRay (which competes against DRM laden HD-DVD and of course DVD and of course VHS (Yes kiddies, ALL these formats have DRM, that we managed to work around them so you no longer notice doesn't count)) and that embarrising rootkit (which by the way was possible thanks to the way MS wrote their OS).
It seems clear that ALL three are pretty nasty when it comes to DRM but for some reason Sony is getting all the blame for it. Choosing the better console maker is like choosing between which guy beating you up isn't aiming for your nuts.
Linus Torvald NEVER claimed to have created the best thing since sliced bread. He was modest and didn't shout from the roof tops that everything everyone else had been doing was wrong and that this was the next big thing.
Modesty goes a long way into getting people to listen to your ideas because you give them room to adjust their own views without having to get defensive.
What version of Ubuntu limits you to 1 gig of ram or only three apps?
The different Ubuntu versions are different configurations you can EASILY switch between if you want it to. I have NO objection to MS including an option to automatically configure your OS for various settings. Let it offer me a choice wether this is a single shared PC at home, or a PC at on a small network or a locked down machine in an office.
So your argument fails because you just don't have a clue about Ubuntu.
You never worked with Linux or indeed any OS have you?
The linux kernel ain't 30mb. For instance mine are around 4.5mb so you are not even close.
Oh wait, you are talking about the complete source? Yup that is 30-40mb. Why should you wish to put the complete source code on a mobile phone? Anyway, modern phones can easily have several gigabytes storage so even then it isn't that much.
Oh and while my kernel is 4.5mb, that is because it includes a LOT of drivers that are not needed but I am to lazy to remove. A mobile phone maker would compile the kernel with only the options that are needed for that piece of hardware. The proof? Mobile phones with linux running on it.
So basically, you are suggesting a fix for something that ain't broken. Oh well that is slashdot for you. What next, you claims Vista is slow because you have to install it from DVD?
A picture is a permanent image, this is just a camera that observes but does not record. if that was illegal all camera displays that show the people in front of the shop window on a screen to show the camera's capabilities would be illegal and they are not.
Apparently you do not ask yourself what the quality is of the coders who wrote the software that could be so easily exploited to be botted. If russian hackers are crap then what does that say about the coders from Redmond?
Beware of geeks bearing gifts.
Really, how could you miss that joke. Hand in your slashdot ID and go have some sex you traitor! You are not one of us, you probably even talk to girls!
Lets face it ME showed that already and what exactly ever happened to windows 1 2 and 3 (remember, the windows 3 we know and ***** is actually 3.11 (or something like that)).
1. It's client-server all over again. Web applications encourage a thin-client approach: the client handles UI rendering and user input, while the real processing happens on servers. What sense does that make when any modern laptop packs enough CPU and GPU power to put yesterday's Cray supercomputer to shame?
Simple solution DO NOT BUY SUPERPOWERFULL PC's. Guess what, try and figure out HOW much you can save NOT just by using google docs by not buying MS Office but by not buying a powerful PC either. In fact my P3 booting from network works just fine with webapps, Office not so much (that it boots linux of course does not help). Oh yeah, another cost saving. You don't have to buy Windows either. Sorry, this argument fails, we bought powerful PC's because our clientside programs and OS demanded it, if they don't, we don't have to buy powerful PC's anymore.
Concentrating computing power in the datacenter is fine if you're a Google or a Microsoft, but that approach puts a lot of pressure on smaller players. Scaling small server farms to meet demand can be a real challenge -- just ask Twitter.
Eh, twitter? Good luck making that into an offline app. What next, offline websites? Yes, scaling a serverfarm is hard but is this applicable to most small companies choosing between a web-app or a desktop application (that usually still needs a server backend anyway). Sorry, but datacenters are nothing new and the likes of IBM can happily sell you all the power you need, you can pay them with the money you saved on your client PC's. Oh, and if all your data is local, how are you going to back all of that up? If all your data is server side, then your client programs still need a server farm to serve them. Failed argument again.
Furthermore, security vulnerabilities abound in networked applications, and the complexity of the browser itself seemingly makes bugs inevitable. Why saddle your apps with that much baggage?
In a net-app I only need to patch ONE piece of software, if it is purely clientside I need to patch all clients out there. Browsers patches are being taken care off globally. If you have a client-app you still need a patching strategy so nothing changes, you just patch the browser instead of your own apps. The complexity of the browser makes bugs inevitable he claims. True enough but for most web-apps these bugs are totally irrelevant. Futhermore such bugs are under constant scrutiny where as your own client apps are not. This argument by him is just scare mongering. There are secure web-apps and insecure client side programs.
2. Web UIs are a mess.
The Web's stateless, mainly forms-based UI approach is reliable, but it's not necessarily the right model for every application. Why sacrifice the full range of real-time interactivity offered by traditional, OS-based apps? Technologies such as AJAX only simulate in the browser what systems programming could do already.
So he says in the title that UI's are a mess and next that they are reliable. He seems confused, Ajax is for communicating with the server, what is the difference between using Ajax and whatever your clientside program happens to use? Did he ever program client programs that interact with servers? If so he would know they are easily as messy.
And while systems programmers are accustomed to building apps with consistent UI toolkits such as the Windows APIs, Apple's Cocoa, or Nokia's Qt, building a Web UI is too often an exercise in reinventing the wheel. Buttons, controls, and widgets vary from app to app. Sometimes the menus are along the top, other times they're off to the side. Sometimes they pop down when you roll over them, and sometimes you have to click. That inconsistency hurts your development budget, but it hurts usability more.
Now he is just getting silly. He mentions THREE UI systems ALL COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and then complains web-app developers don't follow a standard. WHAT STANDARD? If there was a standard M
That windows will become nothing more then a gateway to the net. A basic OS nothing more and everything else is supplied by others. Because a basic OS isn't that hard to write. Most Uni IT students do it as an assignment. You think Linus was the first guy to program an OS at home? Hardly.
The trick is that building a complete solution is what is hard to do AND is what MS has made a fortune out of doing. MS doesn't sell an OS, it sells ALL the tools you need to run a computer. This in itself is not enough, what really powers MS is that for a long time THEIR tools were the ONLY tools you could use and be certain they were compatible.
MS doesn't give a SHIT about IE, for a long time it was perfectly happy to let netscape have it. Until it dawned on them that the internet might be big and that if they didn't control the internet, someone else would.
It is the same as with their office suit. people use MS office not because they need all its features or because it is the best but because everyone else uses it too. Since for a long time all documents where MS.DOC format you better be able to open them and write them if you wanted to do business. MS sells their software NOT because it can compete but because if you don't buy theirs you can't connect to anyone else.
This is changing and it is scary as hell to MS. Why are all cars petrol powered? Because that is the fuel that is available. By a car that moves on say compressed air and you won't be driving it far because there are no compressed air stations, just petrol stations. If this changes, then people can change the fuel for their car.
IF MS were to truly create a core OS for which others would then provide the frills, then it would very quickly find that someone else can not just supply the frills but the core OS itself.
Example? MS Outlook. For the longest time Linux users have had to jump through hoops to connect to their employers Outlook servers. More and more however I see companies going to purely webbased mail and voila. Not only can I use that with ANY OS, neither do I need to jump through hoops anymore to access MS software. It is a dangerous thing for MS. If parts of it are no longer the universal standard, what reason have you got to buy their software when there are far cheaper and better solutions out there?
No, your solution would not kill Linux or Apple. It would empower them and others to rise to new heights while MS would quickly die.
Try this, MS opens up DX10 to be implemented freely by say Linux and Apple. Exactly how many gamers would stay with XP/Vista/W7 and migrate away? 99%? Why do think MS is pushing Game for Windows after years of neglecting the market and even having their own rival the X-box?
Language. Not everyone has english as their native tongue. Americans for one.
So MS has started working on controlling the US nuclear arsenal? Mmm, well MS typically needs 3 yrs to get a release out, so since it is 2009, that would means 2012. Just in time for the aztec prediction of the world ending. Well at least now we know.
Seriously, MS controlled nukes. Who didn't just shit themselves?
Your math is flawed. The game SOLD 700k boxes, but that includes a free month of gameplay. The game has been in development for 5 years or so. Those costs have to be payed first plus some extra because investors don't invest for the fun of it.
The people selling the boxes want to be payed too, and of course you tend to need to produce more boxes then you actually sell. Again, this has to be done with borrowed money essentially so box sales are not all that impressive.
The game has trouble right from the start. Once the first free month was over the servers started dying fast. MMO's tend to have rabid fanboys who live in their own fantasy world but the simply fact was that two weeks or so after launch the rot started to set in. Yes, new players were coming in but there were also a LOT of people who just didn't even bother completing their first month. After the first month ran out thing really went down hill. Entire guilds collapsed, not unusual but not all of these were ego tripping guilds with 1 leader who wants his own name on the guild.
It is very hard to judge just how many players AoC has left, but they faced a real problem. During beta and early launch they had to add servers to deal with the population, just a couple of weeks later they had servers turning into ghosts towns. Do you think their hardware vendor cared? Those servers had to be paid for and now they can try to sell them off second hand.
A small MMORPG can survive, if it keeps a stable population. But going from 700k to having to close servers... that means a LOT of money has been lost. They had huge trouble at launch with not enough customer support. They HAD to get more people in but as they got more employees the number of subscribers collapsed. Now they have to fire them again. That is a LOT of extra money over a small MMORPG who just has the same stable employee pool from the start.
No, Funcom is in trouble. They gambled and they lost mostly because they completely failed to understand basic MMORPG design. They just didn't get it. To list the games fault is easy, just list all its elements. Every single one of them was flawed.
For instance, its so called maturity. Naked boobs. True it had them, and that was it. But the game had no sex, there are several NPC's who hint at it, but nothing ever happens and the armours worn were totally non-sexy.
Its economy was out of whack, a horse, a staple of MMORPG design, was just to fucking expensive. So expensive that gold sellers just gave up because NOBODY was going pay to a 1000 euro's for a horse. For that matter the level requirement was WAY to high.
No fast travel options.
Its melee fighting system basically being nothing more then instead of WoW's 1 button mashing you mash 4 buttons. Whoo! Long live macro keyboards.
The list goes on. Sure there were some highprofile bugs, but basically, at its core, the game just wasn't any good. It was for a short while an intresting diversion from WoW and other fantasy MMORPG's but basically, it just wasn't a good game. A couple of nice ideas don't save a product if its core is flawed. When basic things like chat don't work as they need to, everything else is secondary. And lets face it, Guild Wars had boobs that jiggled, and weren't hidden after level 1 behind a brown leather slab.
Did you actually go to the ruins? Where enemies kept get stuck in their fall animation, unattackable leaving no mobs for your quest? How about the insane bats whose AI and animation was so buggered you wondered how it often got out of alpha?
What about the invisible bits of landscaping you could get stuck on. The slow loading. The missing bank and auction house.
The game was a disaster. Really, some classes you started right from lvl 1 one shotting every enemy, others struggeled with enemies below their level. Nerfs happened all over changing entire classes. Balance must be done BEFORE release because if a class plays in a certain way you are just going to upset those who choose that class to play in a certain way.
Frankly, AoC was to old. It started development before WoW came out and to Goat seems to have been living in a cave ever since. The UI was a total disaster. Lotro is already bad with its non-customziable UI in this Post-WoW world but AoC set a new low. Not only was it ugly, it didn't even give players basic tools. Did you ever figure out what the equivelant of /inspect was in AoC? To lazy to look it up but even as a linux user a I balked at that commandline. That it has to be done from the commandline at all showed just how out of touch the developers were.
No, AoC is better left forgotten a bigger pile of shit then Anarchy Online or indeed Vanguard. Vanguard at least tried. AoC dev's just couldn't be bothered to make the game fun. The fast travel options were insane! Walk EVERYWHERE, one corner of the world to the other OR die and choose your own respawn point.
The only thing I worry that with Funcom in the situation it is in, The Secret World, the MMORPG by the team that made The Longest Journey might be axed as well. Lets not forget that this is a completely seperate team and the Goat has nothing to do with TSW yet it might suffer for this guys incompetence.
When has it ever worked? When have the people ever used their guns to stop the executive? Answer: Never.
But yes, in a way it works. It works as a band aid. You got guns, the elite say, so anytime you want to, you can overthrow us. Of course it would be 1 of you against millions of us but hey, don't worry. If we abuse you to much, you can always rise up.
The whole "right to bear arms" thing only can be proven to work when it is just once used. Until then, it is a pacifier.