I strongly feel it's something the industry can ignore. WoW can only absorb players attention so long as it's the best alternative out there. Without regard to the time investment, the majority of players would immediately drop the game if something better came along that offered an experience more like what they're searching for.
Mind you, I'm not a WoW player, I was an EverQuest 2 player, but it's the same dynamic. As soon as Guild Wars came out, I dropped EverQuest 2 because Guild Wars appealed to me more. I think it's a mistake to talk about, and view it, in terms of an "investment". It's better viewed as "renting entertainment".
The simple fact is, as great and addictive as these games are, they've only scratched the surface of the possibilities. We don't play them because we're invested, we play them because there isn't a superior alternative. We play WoW for the same reason people played Pong; because that's all there was.
But when Pac-Man came out, no one took a stand against it because they had invested too much time in Pong already.
To pro-actively handle a counter argument, that in MMOs you accumulate virtual goods which differs it from the Pong scenario, I disagree. Even with Pong you had accumulated something, actual experience in the game controls, but we were all willing to give it up to play the newer games.
I can see your viewpoint, looking at it the other way around. But there is going to be resource savings by having additional functionality in a single program. Take the example of having 20 tabs open in a web browser versus having 20 instances of a web browser open. The latter uses a much larger amount of memory because each instance must have its own framework (buttons, toolbars, etc). With only a single instance, all those components can act in a context-sensitive manner (acting on the currently active tab) instead of having 20 of each.
Even in the case of seperate instances, crashing of one will take down the other if the crash is related to any shared resource (dynamic libraries for example). This has been exhibited in Internet Explorer for as long as it's been around, you have a dozen instances of IE open, one crashes and suddenly all your browser windows close up. The only way to prevent that from happening is to allocate additional resources.
That's exactly my point though, it's not a matter of needing multiple instances it's a matter of needing more functionality in the program.
We were discussing a hypothetical situation in which applications should work intelligently, such as if you try to run a program that's already running, it brings to the foreground the already existing one.
Continuing along the same hypothetical, you don't need two instances, you need one instance with more features. Just like the grandparent said about the warning dialog being a red herring, the need to open two instances is also a red herring. We don't need two instances, we need a single instance that does what we want. In this way, we should view the need to open two instances of a media player in the same way we view the need to play another file format. It's another function the application should provide. Allowing two instances doesn't fix the problem, it masks the problem.
What is an example of a situation in which you would ever need more the one instance of the same application running?
Any situation at all that I can think of is not a situation in which you need more than one instance, it's a situation in which you need the same instance to have additional functionality.
"If gamers demand graphical prowess in a quality game, as their response to both Wind Waker and Twilight Princess implies they do, they also have to face the possibility that all games, if rendered as realistically as possible, may soon look the same - not so much art as playable photographs of the world around them."
I think that statement is nonsensical. To say that all games may soon look the same is to imply that Batman Begins, Lord of the Rings, and Fight Club all looked the same. If asked about the aesthetics of The Matrix how many of us would say "It looks just like Three's Company."
Style is a concept which goes way beyond realism vs. cartoons. From my viewpoint art and games are seperate issues. You often use art to express a game, but you shouldn't use a game to express art. If you're creating a work as an artistic statement, maybe creating it as a game is a mistake, you'd be better off with an independent film, or a good old-fashioned canvas and paint.
I RTFA, and it comes off as a written by someone who isn't very well studied on the concepts of User Interfaces. To be truthful, it sounds like the author just finished reading The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin.
The editorialist makes a few good points, but it's a bit one-sided. He presents a very simplified view of what it takes to build a powerful user interface. There are thousands of scientists with PhDs studying the field of HCI, coming up with answers all the time, but there's a huge leap between what sounds good in theory and what actually works. One persons idea of a brilliant user interface is another person's nightmare that turns their operating system into something that resembles M.C. Ecsher's work.
Games are the breeding ground for examples of where conceptually-superior user interfaces often fail. Take a game like Black and White or Temple of Elemental Evil. Controlling a character or environment is no longer as simple as pushing some arrow keys, it's an exercise in digital dexterity. Even though conceptually it allows you to present more options in a smaller space, it's still foreign to everyone who has ever played another game.
Everytime you try a new user interface, it requires everyone who is comfortable to give up that comfort for the sake of eventually having an easier experience. The effect can be observed when people try using a Devorak keyboard. Technically speaking, Devorak might be a superior idea, but it also represents 4 weeks worth of practice.
The idea that we "should" find a better way to use computers has been around for a long time. Implementing those ideas in a way that the majority of users can accept is an enormous task. If the author really thinks his ideas about user interfaces is a trivial task, he should build a prototype.
Every couple years, someone comes up with a brilliant idea for a new way to interact with computers that involves some sort of surrealistic work of art like a Pyramid Keyboard you stick your fingers in like you're piloting an alien shuttle.
The article is hypocritical. There's no table of contents for each numbered point. For all the talk of making things difficult, why do I need to scroll repeatedly up and down the page to locate information? And why use >> << as some sort of quotation mark replacement? He talks about how intuitive using corners is but he can't use the same symbol to quote a person that almost every English document for the last 3 centuries has.
Glass house meet stones.
Although this sounds impressive and devastating: "... 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003..."
The problem is the word "affected". I had a cold last year, was I one of the people "affected" by natural disasters? How are they defining whether or not someone was affected? You could say anyone who donated money to a relief fund was affected, or are they only referring to the number of people injured or that had property damage. What about someone who hid out in his bomb shelter for a week. Was that person affected? Does emotional disurbance count as being "affected"?
I'd prefer a concrete statistic, like number of people killed, number of homes destroyed. Saying that x people were "affected" doesn't tell us anything useful.
Reports like these remind me that we're not in the information age, we're in the data age. The information age will be next when we start compiling all this data into useful information.
I think it's somewhat of a mistake to generalize our view of dinosaurs by making broad sweeping declarations that either they were all covered with feathers and descendants of birds, or they were all scaly reptiles.
I'm sure the relation among dinosaur breeds varied widely. I think it will be a worthwhile exercise to try discovering exactly which dinosaurs were feathery, and the evolutionary reasoning behind the difference.
Like one poster mentioned, crocodilians existed as dinosaurs, and as far as we know they've always biologically been very similar to the way they are today. So I don't think it's unreasonable to assume there are other dinosaurs who also had leathery, reptile skin.
I also think this problem with software is going to take a lot longer to fix because a company can produce a new application that has a proprietary format with much less time, money, and risk involved than they could if they were producing hardware.
Add to that, the fact that most non-technical consumers are perfectly willing to accept proprietary formats, even after it backfires on them. It makes a push for open standards a hard sell.
At one job, we had all of our data in a specific, non-portable format, and when the company who produced the application went out of business and we were stuck looking for a new system, my boss was still perfectly happy to spend money for the new application with absolute enthusiasm, even though the new application had the same risk of depending on the new company's support for it to function. I suggested switching to just a standard database format, SQL, but the company's marketing gurus had a whole list of reasons why their application and format was better which made my boss giddy like a school boy.
I don't work there anymore so I don't know how the story ends the second time, but I think it's only a matter of time before they'll be looking for a new system again.
I think at their heart, computer systems should be based on open standards. An Open Standard can easily be translated into a proprietary format but the reverse isn't true. It's easy enough to translate SVG documents into their Flash equivilant, but you can't do the reverse, it requires answers to too many questions that only Macromedia knows.
If you've got water, you can always make flavored-drink. If you've got flavored-drink, you can't get water without a lot of work.
Jim: "Too many visitors. It's like they all want something we have and I don't got a dang clue why."
Bob: "So what're we gonna do? Sell them stuff?"
Jim: "Heck no! Let's investigate web technology and find a way to get rid of them. I mean if we start selling them stuff, they're just gonna be back. Before you know it we'll have customers all over us like bees on honey! No no, we've gotta nip this in the bud!"
There is a vocal minority of gamers who complain that there are so few innovative games out there, but when they're actually released, they sell like crap:
The "innocative" games sell like crap because there's some fundamental need that gamers have that those games aren't filling. I'd consider myself part of the vocal minority, and most of those so-called innovative games aren't any better than your mainstream stuff.
The issue I take with the majority of the underground games that the fans call innovative is that they're often fueled solely by inside jokes and easter eggs that only a small niche of gamers is going to understand. References to obscure TV shows or references to previous (and equally as unpopular) games. They try to be innovative in a way I'm not looking for. They use a unique UI, control system, or the introduction of some new mythology. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't, but either way, it's not what I was looking for so it doesn't matter whether or not it works.
I'm looking for gameplay innovation. With combat, I want unparalelled control of my character and better physics. With role playing I'm looking to control the outcome of events with no script.
Just because a game tells a story that's difficult to understand or has weird gameplay controls doesn't necessarily make the game innovative.
Yes, The Mozilla Foundation does it already. But that's not big news because they've ALWAYS done it. Linus & Lawyers doing it is a whole different story because they've just started it.
I'm a Linux fan myself (Mandriva), but adopting a litigious attitude doesn't make FOSS more attractive to me, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. If I wanted to trade blows with patents, trademarks... reputation this, strategy that... we've got Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Dell for that bag of shenanigans.
To me, the whole FOSS spirit was supposed to encompass a non-litigious atmosphere. Open Standards, a place where the only "law" is the opinion of the masses.
If the FOSS community starts ruling by litigation, what next? We start trying to strong arm other companies out of the market in the Big Business way? Maybe the FOSS community should start patenting ideas and technologies now to prevent anyone else from potentially building their own operating system that could eventually threaten the popularity of Linux.
Everytime I hear about another FOSS project taking on the characteristics of The Man, it just makes me wonder, why bother? If the whole goal of the FOSS movement is to eventually become the same as the corporate environment, why not shave some time off our race and just start traditional corporations?
I like the FOSS community, but I don't want to look back and read in an economics book some day a definition of FOSS that reads:
FOSS - A method of doing business which became popular in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The idea is to start out with a grassroots campaign for an idealistic product and eventually sue everyone who latches on once your market share approaches a level which stands a chance of threatening already established market-holders.
I can't tell if you're being serious. Assuming you're being serious...
Originality and creativity have certain places in the world. Just because you have guidelines and standards doesn't mean you can't be creative. Programming languages have standards, that doesn't mean programmers can't create original programs. If there were no coding conventions and standards, you'd almost never be able to examine someone elses code. "Wait a second, why are all the integer variables stored as strings? And I think this guy uses + signs as assignment operators..."
Standards are there to prevent entropy, not prevent innovation. Every writer, producer, actor etc. has to write a proposal, film a pilot, and go through all the same stages that everyone else has to. Joss Wheddon, Chris Carter, Jon Stewart... they all had to adhere to the same process that their predecessors did, that didn't stop them from being original and succeeding, it prevented their ideas from being ignored because the people reading the proposal didn't need to interpret it, they already knew the format it was going to be in.
Standards make sure that our ideas are understood universally. In the case of a data center, it ensures that we can all store and retrieve data in a unified way. All the people who need that data don't need to figure out some proprietary system. When you contract services from a standards-compliant center, you don't need to hear the line "That might be what you're used to but... this is OUR way of doing things."
It's easy. If two gun-wielding burglars bust in my door and tell me if I open my fool mouth they're gonna bust all kinds of chaos on my ass... then the next morning I see the paperboy stealing CDs out of my car, I'd be all like "Hey! Paperboy! What the heck do you think you're doing?"
Someone might ask "Why did you turn in the paperboy and not those two beefy guys?" and I'd be like "Err... I could've, you know, taken them, but umm... that was like my favorite CD Jimmy was touching. I mean, I've got renter's insurance anyway so I can replace my flatscreen, and my life savings was just cash anyway. I mean money would eventually rot away. But that kid was trying to take my original digital remastered recopy of Zeppelin and I just don't let anyone touch that!"
Maybe you're not as adept at reviewing peer papers as you believe. There's a reason it's called "Peer Review" and not "One Man Judges All, And The Whole Process to Boot... Errr Review"
Point being, maybe you thought it was crap and maybe you interpreted the paper negatively. Being a slashdot reader, you may have a tendency to interpret things in the poorest possible light. As any slashdotter are wont to do, flaws are enhanced a thousand-fold, merits completely ignored.
Of course I ain't got no hifalutin biophysics degree, so perhaps you are the world's end-all judge of research papers and we should always defer to you on whether or not one is any good. I think at the very least it would do us good to hire you to single-handedly review all submitted research papers in the hard sciences and you can put the "lelitsch stamp of approval" on them. (an actual government stamp we could have sanctioned)
What do I think of the paper? Honestly, I haven't read it and I don't plan to read it until I've got a whole lot more spare time. I'm more concerned with the premise. I'm willing to believe it's more than possible that a fair percentage (50% give or take a few) of scientific papers are inaccurate. We are talking about the same body of people who can't decide if eggs and milk are good or bad. The same people who once said it's healthy to spend time outdoors and get some sun now say "For the love of god don't get any sun on you!"
If you consider the fact that, for any scientific paper to be correct in a field, it most probably must contain ideas that at least somehow conflict with existing research. Logically speaking, for a new paper to be right, a previous one must be wrong. Either that, or the new one is wrong and the previous one was right... either way we end up with a 50/50 accuracy rate. You can't publish a paper just to agree with someone, so you can really only publish a paper to disagree or explore new territory (few and far between), which means one of you is going to be wrong.
Like someone else said, scientists write papers to get tenure and benjamins. It has little to do with being accurate. Thank god they only need to defend their work for about 30-50 years before they die. If scientists were immortal we'd never disprove their research because the bastards defend it to the grave. "Damn you all! I got the corner office and I'm telling you, marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, and camp fires are the key to fusion!"
Ignorant am I? I never disputed whether or not Linux has been a registered trademark, but it had not been previously enforced. Many companies which currently call their product "Linux" (and have for the better part of a decade) have never been asked, required, or expected to sublicense. Red Hat Linux for example has not obtained a license and freely uses the name "Linux" all over its documentation, web site, and marketing. The same story with Mandriva Linux.
It wouldn't be malice if he wasn't quite so selective about his enforcement. Obviously he doesn't want to rock the Red Hat or Mandriva boat as they've been absolutely booming to Linux's reputation and he doesn't want to upset with his most popular supporters. They get a free pass because they bring in the cash.
People have a problem with it for the simple fact that Linus is now changing the way things have always been. It wouldn't be an issue if it had been this way from the start. Why didn't he speak up the very first time anyone called their distro "Linux"?
Of course you can't use the name Firefox, but since the inception of Firefox, you've never been free to use the name. They never allowed everyone to call their own build that and suddenly changed their mind.
It's like giving away a recipe for Lemonade, and you make a big hubub about how you're giving away a free Lemonade recipe. Then after you distribute it to a few million people and they're all mixing, selling, and creating their own Lemonade you go and say "Wait a second. You've gotta pay me to call it Lemonade. I forgot about that."
What makes you think that because you did something first means your efforts were any more sincere, valid, or superior to the efforts of the mainstream?
We had candles before we had lightbulbs, but I see you've hopped on the Electricity Bandwagon with the rest of us. Tool.
I agree with you. No matter how many times I watched them, I never glimpsed the friggen sideways building in series C. The images just flew by way too fast for my brain to process what most of them were pictures of, never mind picking out which one is oriented incorrectly.
I mean, seriously, with a picture of flowers or something, if I only see it for 1/10th of a second, how do I know if they're at a 90 degree angle? Half of this test is my own brain playing tricks on me trying to guess what was rotated at a 90 degree angle.
Of course it's always possible I'm just stupid, let's not discount that. I hear these psychological tricks don't work on stupid people.
Strictly speaking, you're right, you don't have the freedom to solicit someone to perform an illegal act. But blurting out something is a far cry from actually soliciting. In order for it to be solicitation, by definition, you must have the means to accomplish the act (or be aware that the person your soliciting has the means to accomplish it). Either way, you need to have the intent to cause that person to perform the act. From what I know, convictions for solicitation are usually in addition to another charge. Solicitation is extremely difficult to prove without the follow through. It's hard to convince a judge that the person "really did intend to do it" unless the person actually did it.
But you're not running afoul of any laws simply by saying "Come here and gamble!" or "Come here and buy heroin!"
That's precisely what I'm always trying to point out to people. That this "new wave" of crime is the same old garbage, brought to a new medium by the same psychos who'd kill you for saying their baseball team sucks.
Although I have no hard facts to backup this second idea, I speculate that the violent outbreaks over video games isn't even perpetuated by the geeks and nerds, it's a result of video games/PC Games becoming easier and popular enough that the same sick people who kill people over a football game are now playing video games.
People weren't killing each other when games were BBS style and you had to be a true nerd to even figure out how to connect, play them, and appreciate the ASCII art. Most maniacs who are prone to kill people just don't have the patience, desire, and intelligence to do all that, but now that the technical knowledge required to play games is so little, your average joe-psycho can hop in and get pissed off in record time.
Bah, what killed Rome was a lack of accountability. Blaming a scapeboat (e.g. Nero) for all of Rome's problems instead of holding anyone actually responsible for their own decisions and actions.
I don't think you understand what's at issue here. It doesn't matter what's written in a contract, you can't legally sign away your civil liberties. You can't sign away your freedom and enslave yourself to someone, you can't sign away your right to live (agree to be murdered). If you sign something that says a company can execute you at their discretion, it's still not legally binding. And similarly, you can't sign away your right to make a living, eat, and otherwise support your family.
Replying to this post will constitute a digital signiture agreeing the respondent will never perform anything that could, in my sole discretion, be construed as "breathing", ever again.
These non-compete agreements are complete and utter crap. Whether or not it's in a contract, a contract can't deny a person his civil liberties. If a contract says you're now a slave, even if you sign it, it's not a legally binding agreement. A non-compete agreement robs someone of the ability to work for a living. The company is essentially telling someone that, perhaps the only marketable skill they have, they're not allowed to use to make a living. People have the fundamental right to work for a living, and telling someone they signed away that right in a contract is just crap.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly feel it's something the industry can ignore. WoW can only absorb players attention so long as it's the best alternative out there. Without regard to the time investment, the majority of players would immediately drop the game if something better came along that offered an experience more like what they're searching for.
Mind you, I'm not a WoW player, I was an EverQuest 2 player, but it's the same dynamic. As soon as Guild Wars came out, I dropped EverQuest 2 because Guild Wars appealed to me more. I think it's a mistake to talk about, and view it, in terms of an "investment". It's better viewed as "renting entertainment".
The simple fact is, as great and addictive as these games are, they've only scratched the surface of the possibilities. We don't play them because we're invested, we play them because there isn't a superior alternative. We play WoW for the same reason people played Pong; because that's all there was. But when Pac-Man came out, no one took a stand against it because they had invested too much time in Pong already.
To pro-actively handle a counter argument, that in MMOs you accumulate virtual goods which differs it from the Pong scenario, I disagree. Even with Pong you had accumulated something, actual experience in the game controls, but we were all willing to give it up to play the newer games.
I can see your viewpoint, looking at it the other way around. But there is going to be resource savings by having additional functionality in a single program. Take the example of having 20 tabs open in a web browser versus having 20 instances of a web browser open. The latter uses a much larger amount of memory because each instance must have its own framework (buttons, toolbars, etc). With only a single instance, all those components can act in a context-sensitive manner (acting on the currently active tab) instead of having 20 of each.
Even in the case of seperate instances, crashing of one will take down the other if the crash is related to any shared resource (dynamic libraries for example). This has been exhibited in Internet Explorer for as long as it's been around, you have a dozen instances of IE open, one crashes and suddenly all your browser windows close up. The only way to prevent that from happening is to allocate additional resources.
That's exactly my point though, it's not a matter of needing multiple instances it's a matter of needing more functionality in the program.
We were discussing a hypothetical situation in which applications should work intelligently, such as if you try to run a program that's already running, it brings to the foreground the already existing one.
Continuing along the same hypothetical, you don't need two instances, you need one instance with more features. Just like the grandparent said about the warning dialog being a red herring, the need to open two instances is also a red herring. We don't need two instances, we need a single instance that does what we want. In this way, we should view the need to open two instances of a media player in the same way we view the need to play another file format. It's another function the application should provide. Allowing two instances doesn't fix the problem, it masks the problem.
What is an example of a situation in which you would ever need more the one instance of the same application running?
Any situation at all that I can think of is not a situation in which you need more than one instance, it's a situation in which you need the same instance to have additional functionality.
"If gamers demand graphical prowess in a quality game, as their response to both Wind Waker and Twilight Princess implies they do, they also have to face the possibility that all games, if rendered as realistically as possible, may soon look the same - not so much art as playable photographs of the world around them."
I think that statement is nonsensical. To say that all games may soon look the same is to imply that Batman Begins, Lord of the Rings, and Fight Club all looked the same. If asked about the aesthetics of The Matrix how many of us would say "It looks just like Three's Company."
Style is a concept which goes way beyond realism vs. cartoons. From my viewpoint art and games are seperate issues. You often use art to express a game, but you shouldn't use a game to express art. If you're creating a work as an artistic statement, maybe creating it as a game is a mistake, you'd be better off with an independent film, or a good old-fashioned canvas and paint.
I RTFA, and it comes off as a written by someone who isn't very well studied on the concepts of User Interfaces. To be truthful, it sounds like the author just finished reading The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin.
The editorialist makes a few good points, but it's a bit one-sided. He presents a very simplified view of what it takes to build a powerful user interface. There are thousands of scientists with PhDs studying the field of HCI, coming up with answers all the time, but there's a huge leap between what sounds good in theory and what actually works. One persons idea of a brilliant user interface is another person's nightmare that turns their operating system into something that resembles M.C. Ecsher's work.
Games are the breeding ground for examples of where conceptually-superior user interfaces often fail. Take a game like Black and White or Temple of Elemental Evil. Controlling a character or environment is no longer as simple as pushing some arrow keys, it's an exercise in digital dexterity. Even though conceptually it allows you to present more options in a smaller space, it's still foreign to everyone who has ever played another game.
Everytime you try a new user interface, it requires everyone who is comfortable to give up that comfort for the sake of eventually having an easier experience. The effect can be observed when people try using a Devorak keyboard. Technically speaking, Devorak might be a superior idea, but it also represents 4 weeks worth of practice.
The idea that we "should" find a better way to use computers has been around for a long time. Implementing those ideas in a way that the majority of users can accept is an enormous task. If the author really thinks his ideas about user interfaces is a trivial task, he should build a prototype.
Every couple years, someone comes up with a brilliant idea for a new way to interact with computers that involves some sort of surrealistic work of art like a Pyramid Keyboard you stick your fingers in like you're piloting an alien shuttle.
The article is hypocritical. There's no table of contents for each numbered point. For all the talk of making things difficult, why do I need to scroll repeatedly up and down the page to locate information? And why use >> << as some sort of quotation mark replacement? He talks about how intuitive using corners is but he can't use the same symbol to quote a person that almost every English document for the last 3 centuries has. Glass house meet stones.
Although this sounds impressive and devastating: "... 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003..."
The problem is the word "affected". I had a cold last year, was I one of the people "affected" by natural disasters? How are they defining whether or not someone was affected? You could say anyone who donated money to a relief fund was affected, or are they only referring to the number of people injured or that had property damage. What about someone who hid out in his bomb shelter for a week. Was that person affected? Does emotional disurbance count as being "affected"?
I'd prefer a concrete statistic, like number of people killed, number of homes destroyed. Saying that x people were "affected" doesn't tell us anything useful.
Reports like these remind me that we're not in the information age, we're in the data age. The information age will be next when we start compiling all this data into useful information.
I think it's somewhat of a mistake to generalize our view of dinosaurs by making broad sweeping declarations that either they were all covered with feathers and descendants of birds, or they were all scaly reptiles.
I'm sure the relation among dinosaur breeds varied widely. I think it will be a worthwhile exercise to try discovering exactly which dinosaurs were feathery, and the evolutionary reasoning behind the difference.
Like one poster mentioned, crocodilians existed as dinosaurs, and as far as we know they've always biologically been very similar to the way they are today. So I don't think it's unreasonable to assume there are other dinosaurs who also had leathery, reptile skin.
I think you're spot-on =)
I also think this problem with software is going to take a lot longer to fix because a company can produce a new application that has a proprietary format with much less time, money, and risk involved than they could if they were producing hardware.
Add to that, the fact that most non-technical consumers are perfectly willing to accept proprietary formats, even after it backfires on them. It makes a push for open standards a hard sell.
At one job, we had all of our data in a specific, non-portable format, and when the company who produced the application went out of business and we were stuck looking for a new system, my boss was still perfectly happy to spend money for the new application with absolute enthusiasm, even though the new application had the same risk of depending on the new company's support for it to function. I suggested switching to just a standard database format, SQL, but the company's marketing gurus had a whole list of reasons why their application and format was better which made my boss giddy like a school boy.
I don't work there anymore so I don't know how the story ends the second time, but I think it's only a matter of time before they'll be looking for a new system again.
I agree with you and to add one more:
I think at their heart, computer systems should be based on open standards. An Open Standard can easily be translated into a proprietary format but the reverse isn't true. It's easy enough to translate SVG documents into their Flash equivilant, but you can't do the reverse, it requires answers to too many questions that only Macromedia knows.
If you've got water, you can always make flavored-drink. If you've got flavored-drink, you can't get water without a lot of work.
Jim: "You know the problem with our site Bob?"
Bob: "What's that Jim?"
Jim: "Too many visitors. It's like they all want something we have and I don't got a dang clue why."
Bob: "So what're we gonna do? Sell them stuff?"
Jim: "Heck no! Let's investigate web technology and find a way to get rid of them. I mean if we start selling them stuff, they're just gonna be back. Before you know it we'll have customers all over us like bees on honey! No no, we've gotta nip this in the bud!"
There is a vocal minority of gamers who complain that there are so few innovative games out there, but when they're actually released, they sell like crap:
The "innocative" games sell like crap because there's some fundamental need that gamers have that those games aren't filling. I'd consider myself part of the vocal minority, and most of those so-called innovative games aren't any better than your mainstream stuff.
The issue I take with the majority of the underground games that the fans call innovative is that they're often fueled solely by inside jokes and easter eggs that only a small niche of gamers is going to understand. References to obscure TV shows or references to previous (and equally as unpopular) games. They try to be innovative in a way I'm not looking for. They use a unique UI, control system, or the introduction of some new mythology. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't, but either way, it's not what I was looking for so it doesn't matter whether or not it works.
I'm looking for gameplay innovation. With combat, I want unparalelled control of my character and better physics. With role playing I'm looking to control the outcome of events with no script.
Just because a game tells a story that's difficult to understand or has weird gameplay controls doesn't necessarily make the game innovative.
Yes, The Mozilla Foundation does it already. But that's not big news because they've ALWAYS done it. Linus & Lawyers doing it is a whole different story because they've just started it.
I'm a Linux fan myself (Mandriva), but adopting a litigious attitude doesn't make FOSS more attractive to me, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. If I wanted to trade blows with patents, trademarks... reputation this, strategy that... we've got Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Dell for that bag of shenanigans.
To me, the whole FOSS spirit was supposed to encompass a non-litigious atmosphere. Open Standards, a place where the only "law" is the opinion of the masses.
If the FOSS community starts ruling by litigation, what next? We start trying to strong arm other companies out of the market in the Big Business way? Maybe the FOSS community should start patenting ideas and technologies now to prevent anyone else from potentially building their own operating system that could eventually threaten the popularity of Linux.
Everytime I hear about another FOSS project taking on the characteristics of The Man, it just makes me wonder, why bother? If the whole goal of the FOSS movement is to eventually become the same as the corporate environment, why not shave some time off our race and just start traditional corporations?
I like the FOSS community, but I don't want to look back and read in an economics book some day a definition of FOSS that reads:
FOSS - A method of doing business which became popular in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The idea is to start out with a grassroots campaign for an idealistic product and eventually sue everyone who latches on once your market share approaches a level which stands a chance of threatening already established market-holders.
I can't tell if you're being serious. Assuming you're being serious...
Originality and creativity have certain places in the world. Just because you have guidelines and standards doesn't mean you can't be creative. Programming languages have standards, that doesn't mean programmers can't create original programs. If there were no coding conventions and standards, you'd almost never be able to examine someone elses code. "Wait a second, why are all the integer variables stored as strings? And I think this guy uses + signs as assignment operators..."
Standards are there to prevent entropy, not prevent innovation. Every writer, producer, actor etc. has to write a proposal, film a pilot, and go through all the same stages that everyone else has to. Joss Wheddon, Chris Carter, Jon Stewart... they all had to adhere to the same process that their predecessors did, that didn't stop them from being original and succeeding, it prevented their ideas from being ignored because the people reading the proposal didn't need to interpret it, they already knew the format it was going to be in.
Standards make sure that our ideas are understood universally. In the case of a data center, it ensures that we can all store and retrieve data in a unified way. All the people who need that data don't need to figure out some proprietary system. When you contract services from a standards-compliant center, you don't need to hear the line "That might be what you're used to but... this is OUR way of doing things."
It's easy. If two gun-wielding burglars bust in my door and tell me if I open my fool mouth they're gonna bust all kinds of chaos on my ass... then the next morning I see the paperboy stealing CDs out of my car, I'd be all like "Hey! Paperboy! What the heck do you think you're doing?"
Someone might ask "Why did you turn in the paperboy and not those two beefy guys?" and I'd be like "Err... I could've, you know, taken them, but umm... that was like my favorite CD Jimmy was touching. I mean, I've got renter's insurance anyway so I can replace my flatscreen, and my life savings was just cash anyway. I mean money would eventually rot away. But that kid was trying to take my original digital remastered recopy of Zeppelin and I just don't let anyone touch that!"
Maybe you're not as adept at reviewing peer papers as you believe. There's a reason it's called "Peer Review" and not "One Man Judges All, And The Whole Process to Boot... Errr Review"
Point being, maybe you thought it was crap and maybe you interpreted the paper negatively. Being a slashdot reader, you may have a tendency to interpret things in the poorest possible light. As any slashdotter are wont to do, flaws are enhanced a thousand-fold, merits completely ignored.
Of course I ain't got no hifalutin biophysics degree, so perhaps you are the world's end-all judge of research papers and we should always defer to you on whether or not one is any good. I think at the very least it would do us good to hire you to single-handedly review all submitted research papers in the hard sciences and you can put the "lelitsch stamp of approval" on them. (an actual government stamp we could have sanctioned) What do I think of the paper? Honestly, I haven't read it and I don't plan to read it until I've got a whole lot more spare time. I'm more concerned with the premise. I'm willing to believe it's more than possible that a fair percentage (50% give or take a few) of scientific papers are inaccurate. We are talking about the same body of people who can't decide if eggs and milk are good or bad. The same people who once said it's healthy to spend time outdoors and get some sun now say "For the love of god don't get any sun on you!"
If you consider the fact that, for any scientific paper to be correct in a field, it most probably must contain ideas that at least somehow conflict with existing research. Logically speaking, for a new paper to be right, a previous one must be wrong. Either that, or the new one is wrong and the previous one was right... either way we end up with a 50/50 accuracy rate. You can't publish a paper just to agree with someone, so you can really only publish a paper to disagree or explore new territory (few and far between), which means one of you is going to be wrong.
Like someone else said, scientists write papers to get tenure and benjamins. It has little to do with being accurate. Thank god they only need to defend their work for about 30-50 years before they die. If scientists were immortal we'd never disprove their research because the bastards defend it to the grave. "Damn you all! I got the corner office and I'm telling you, marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, and camp fires are the key to fusion!"
Ignorant am I? I never disputed whether or not Linux has been a registered trademark, but it had not been previously enforced. Many companies which currently call their product "Linux" (and have for the better part of a decade) have never been asked, required, or expected to sublicense. Red Hat Linux for example has not obtained a license and freely uses the name "Linux" all over its documentation, web site, and marketing. The same story with Mandriva Linux.
It wouldn't be malice if he wasn't quite so selective about his enforcement. Obviously he doesn't want to rock the Red Hat or Mandriva boat as they've been absolutely booming to Linux's reputation and he doesn't want to upset with his most popular supporters. They get a free pass because they bring in the cash.
People have a problem with it for the simple fact that Linus is now changing the way things have always been. It wouldn't be an issue if it had been this way from the start. Why didn't he speak up the very first time anyone called their distro "Linux"?
Of course you can't use the name Firefox, but since the inception of Firefox, you've never been free to use the name. They never allowed everyone to call their own build that and suddenly changed their mind.
It's like giving away a recipe for Lemonade, and you make a big hubub about how you're giving away a free Lemonade recipe. Then after you distribute it to a few million people and they're all mixing, selling, and creating their own Lemonade you go and say "Wait a second. You've gotta pay me to call it Lemonade. I forgot about that."
What makes you think that because you did something first means your efforts were any more sincere, valid, or superior to the efforts of the mainstream?
We had candles before we had lightbulbs, but I see you've hopped on the Electricity Bandwagon with the rest of us. Tool.
I agree with you. No matter how many times I watched them, I never glimpsed the friggen sideways building in series C. The images just flew by way too fast for my brain to process what most of them were pictures of, never mind picking out which one is oriented incorrectly.
I mean, seriously, with a picture of flowers or something, if I only see it for 1/10th of a second, how do I know if they're at a 90 degree angle? Half of this test is my own brain playing tricks on me trying to guess what was rotated at a 90 degree angle.
Of course it's always possible I'm just stupid, let's not discount that. I hear these psychological tricks don't work on stupid people.
Strictly speaking, you're right, you don't have the freedom to solicit someone to perform an illegal act. But blurting out something is a far cry from actually soliciting. In order for it to be solicitation, by definition, you must have the means to accomplish the act (or be aware that the person your soliciting has the means to accomplish it). Either way, you need to have the intent to cause that person to perform the act. From what I know, convictions for solicitation are usually in addition to another charge. Solicitation is extremely difficult to prove without the follow through. It's hard to convince a judge that the person "really did intend to do it" unless the person actually did it. But you're not running afoul of any laws simply by saying "Come here and gamble!" or "Come here and buy heroin!"
That's precisely what I'm always trying to point out to people. That this "new wave" of crime is the same old garbage, brought to a new medium by the same psychos who'd kill you for saying their baseball team sucks. Although I have no hard facts to backup this second idea, I speculate that the violent outbreaks over video games isn't even perpetuated by the geeks and nerds, it's a result of video games/PC Games becoming easier and popular enough that the same sick people who kill people over a football game are now playing video games. People weren't killing each other when games were BBS style and you had to be a true nerd to even figure out how to connect, play them, and appreciate the ASCII art. Most maniacs who are prone to kill people just don't have the patience, desire, and intelligence to do all that, but now that the technical knowledge required to play games is so little, your average joe-psycho can hop in and get pissed off in record time.
Bah, what killed Rome was a lack of accountability. Blaming a scapeboat (e.g. Nero) for all of Rome's problems instead of holding anyone actually responsible for their own decisions and actions.
I don't think you understand what's at issue here. It doesn't matter what's written in a contract, you can't legally sign away your civil liberties. You can't sign away your freedom and enslave yourself to someone, you can't sign away your right to live (agree to be murdered). If you sign something that says a company can execute you at their discretion, it's still not legally binding. And similarly, you can't sign away your right to make a living, eat, and otherwise support your family.
Replying to this post will constitute a digital signiture agreeing the respondent will never perform anything that could, in my sole discretion, be construed as "breathing", ever again.
These non-compete agreements are complete and utter crap. Whether or not it's in a contract, a contract can't deny a person his civil liberties. If a contract says you're now a slave, even if you sign it, it's not a legally binding agreement. A non-compete agreement robs someone of the ability to work for a living. The company is essentially telling someone that, perhaps the only marketable skill they have, they're not allowed to use to make a living. People have the fundamental right to work for a living, and telling someone they signed away that right in a contract is just crap.