There's an extremely high barrier to entry for new players. Which client do you install? Which of the 3 or 4 third party assist tools do you need? Where do you download all that?
Even once you get the game client up and running, you end up with choice paralysis trying to find out what server to play.
Picking a server involves shitloads of googling and visiting each of their random websites while they explain mostly in game jargon terms which settings they have, or what "era" of the game they adhere to, without really explaining what that means.
And then there's the PVP, which is a joke on every server I've ever played. No diversity. No balance. One or two templates is all anyone ever plays.
And don't forget the ganks, because PVP is dominated solely by large, organized guilds everywhere. Want to duel? Good luck. Some servers have dueling systems, but they're ghost towns.
The most popular servers all seem to have declining player populations, which isn't surprising. Any community this hostile to newcomers deserves to wither.
So yeah, I welcome the UO devs one-upping existing player run UO shards with something new. Someone needs to do it right.
Or as Simpsons' Lenny would put it: "All we want is brand new, big-budget entertainment in our homes for nothing. Why doesn't Hollywood get that?"
Just because you invested an extraordinary amount of money in something doesn't mean you deserve extraordinary government intervention to guarantee you a return. If new technology undermines your business model, find another business model.
The same way as, for instance, iOS. Using some proprietary developer toolkit that requires registering a developer account (which may cost money) in order to grant sideloading capability.
That's what I'm hoping will not be the case with the steam machines and I'm trying to find some empirical evidence of that. All I'm seeing so far is just a bunch of optimistic speculation.
People aren't outraged because all the rhetoric criticizing the surveillance programs was overblown. There are certainly plenty of things to be concerned about, sure. But just go read some news coverage from the time of the leaks and have a look at all the hyperbole and fear mongering. It was ridiculous.
If we want people to have a serious discussion about surveillance, then we need less fear mongering and more actionable activism. We need to get more organized and make specific proposals detailing what laws we would change and why it's so important to do so.
Instead of doing that, we just went on rants about how right we were the whole time and how evil it all is. We vomited vague, nonspecific emotion over the issue instead of proposing tangible solutions people could actually act on.
So yeah, no wonder everyone's suffering from "surveillance fatigue." I am too. And I actually care about the issue.
That's not proof. It's marketing. To my knowledge they haven't explicitly stated that sideloading will be permitted. You could make a (very good) argument that it's implied, but I'm seeking hard evidence.
We didn't get lucky. The vast majority of the surface of the Earth is either not populated or extremely sparsely populated. The odds are strongly against such a large airburst happening to burst over any reasonably densely populated area.
I hope you're right, but what you wrote is still just speculation. Not proof.
What worries me is that when this thing goes live, a whole lot of people who just assumed it's going to be a totally open platform are going to be disappointed when Steam imitates every other console gaming platform by disabling sideloading or making it prohibitively difficult for ordinary users.
It's going to be a game console style user experience on top of PC hardware. There's no guarantee they won't do what literally every other game console does and disable sideloading. I'm trying to find real evidence that sideloading will be permitted. Otherwise I think the sensible if yes pessimistic assumption is to assume installing apps from outside of Steam will be disabled or at least prohibitively difficult for ordinary users.
Do you have hard evidence that stock Ubuntu with Steam installed is architecturally identical to SteamOS and that SteamOS will permit sideloading the same Ubuntu does, or are you just guessing based on their vague marketing pages?
Progressive enhancement has not at all been abandoned. The majority of frontend developers are constantly thinking about accessibility, usability, writing semantic markup and making simple enhancements with JS, that's the standard these days, you build sites that work on any device, at any resolution with and without javascript.
The majority? Where do you work? Can I get a job there? Most of the developers I've met in Silicon Valley either A. don't have those priorities or B. pay lip service to those priorities but don't implement them competently.
But the time where the web was just web pages is gone. You just cannot build an advanced web app without javascript, it's simply not feasible.
Not everybody wants the rich experience. In the vast majority of cases, providing a non-JS experience is not extra work if you're using best practices to begin with.
Turn off JS on Sencha Touch's kitchen sink, see a blank screen.
And what for? None of that UI fundamentally requires JS to function. If they'd built it with progressive enhancement instead, the links would still work, just without the animations. The forms would still work, just without the fancy enhancements. But most importantly, the page would still fucking render.
You can differentiate the JS and non-JS experiences using the same URL endpoints by sending a special HTTP header to indicate that it's an AJAX request.
That can allow the server to send back a response without the header and footer if it's an AJAX request, or send a fully composed page if it's not.
Saying that the JS and non-JS experiences are "so totally different" is just an excuse people use to ignore the non-JS scenario.
I will concede that some webapps (particularly games) cannot be reasonably hybridized in this fashion, but I think most developers jump the gun in assuming too quickly that their app is too rich for progressive enhancement.
In my experience, the vast majority of webapp projects out there could be done with progressive enhancement without creating extra work, but as time goes on developers are less and less willing to even consider the idea.
The unstated premise in your comment assumes the web's current obsession with JSON. There's no reason your AJAX service can't respond with HTML instead. HTML is a data format just like JSON. If your HTML is semantic, then you can write it once and use it in both contexts. I do this all the time and I feel like some special enlightened snowflake who does twice the work for half the effort of most developers.
I miss the days when web developers still gave a shit about progressive enhancement.
I miss the days when you couldn't be considered a real web developer unless you could make a CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com) skin without cheating by changing the markup or using JS.
I miss the days when you were only considered a good web web developer if your site was usable with both JS and CSS disabled because you used semantic HTML.
I miss the days when accessibility still mattered.
I miss the days when writing semantic HTML, enhancing it with CSS, and enhancing it further with JS was considered the best practice, rather than starting with just JS and an empty body tag as is so common today.
I miss the days before the now popular false dichotomy of thinking that progressive enhancement is extra work was popular among web developers.
I love that the web can do more now and compete with native apps better. But I hate that web developers are so quick to unnecessarily abandon progressive enhancement in the process when that's what made the web great to begin with.
Read the book (or at least watch the damn video) before dismissing the idea out of hand. He's spent years researching the problem in his capacity as a constitutional law professor and he proposes a very specific solution which has been demonstrated to work well in other western democracies.
I'm not saying that campaign finance reform is the silver bullet that'll fix our all our problems, I'm saying if we don't fix that first, it's going to be either impossible or much harder than it should be to fix the rest of our problems.
Unlimited donations from large donors erodes the democratic process. Campaign finance reform should be our top priority. Once we fix that, it makes fixing all our other problems so much easier.
It's not going to happen, but a single checkbox in the settings would do:
[ ] Allow installation of apps from unknown sources
The fact that your post got modded funny instead of insightful is pretty sad reflection of our collective lack of faith in Apple's willingness to do the right thing.
Allowing users to opt-out of the walled garden is the single biggest thing iOS has needed since day one.
Imagine the outrage that would ensue if Apple flipped that switch on OSX and required all apps to come from the Mac App Store without a button to turn that restriction off.
iOS has been that way since day one and everyone seems to act like that's okay.
It's as if once a computer can fit into your pocket, it ceases to become a computer and suddenly becomes an "appliance," an oft-toted euphemism which serves no purpose other than to say "this general purpose computer is okay to lock down, but this one over here on my desk is not okay to lock down."
Locked down phones? Why not. Locked down game consoles? Sure. Locked down PCs? Mass outrage. It makes no sense. It's like nobody possess the critical thinking ability to realize that they're all just fucking computers in different form factors.
Yes, of course it would change Monsanto's incentives. In order for their crops to remain proprietary without a patent monopoly they'd have to invent new crops which don't produce seeds and are painstakingly difficult to reverse engineer and reproduce by their competitors. That way they wouldn't need patent protection to protect their proprietary crops. They would possess a natural monopoly until the competition caught up with them, which ideally would give them enough time to recoup the R&D investment and profit in the process.
I don't know if inventing such a thing as hard to copy GM crops is even possible in the GMO field (though generally speaking it is possible in other technology fields), but it seems to me that creating and monopolizing a proprietary crop should require that kind of ingenuity to offset the enormously unfair competitive advantage that possessing such a monopoly gives to the proprietor at the expense of the rest of the economy.
Now assuming for the sake of argument that inventing hard to copy GM crops is too difficult, or too risky, or even simply impossible, that doesn't mean new research on GM crops wouldn't get done in the absence of patent protection, it just means it would no longer be proprietary. There are many possible non-proprietary funding paths. Competing companies could collaborate on open source GM crops as is often done in the software world, governments could subsidize new research, private charities could fund new research, etc.
Such reform would force Monsanto and its competitors to compete on the merits of their manufacturing capabilities rather than their IP monopolies, much to the economy's benefit.
As a side benefit, if R&D of GMOs shifted more towards an open source model, I think the fact that it would be subject to the scrutiny of different contributors with different agendas would effectively end the controversies surrounding these much-maligned companies and probably do much to assuage public panic and ignorance about the science of GMOs.
Notwithstanding the excellent points you made elsewhere in your post, I quibble with this part:
If it became legal to buy GM seeds intended for milling and then plant them, then the price for new seeds would no longer be able to support future developments.
Not necessarily. People would still invent new GMOs without the patent system to protect them. The research would just be done under different economic models.
I believe those alternative economic models would be better for the economy overall than the status quo, but that is of course a matter for debate.
If can't run your business on anything less than $1000 per user, then you're better off reworking it into an internet service so you can enforceably control access to your software rather than making it a standalone downloadable software package.
Huge upfront prices are rarely a good way to run a business unless you're selling a large tangible asset like a TV, or a car, or a house. Software just isn't one of those kinds of things.
But you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you offer it as a service instead and charge smaller amounts of cash over time (perhaps with discounts for upfront sums) then you're way more likely to get people to think it's a fair deal.
Otherwise, your software will fall into the trap of people wondering why the hell anyone would pay $1000 for something they could just as easily download from piratebay. You discourage that bias by offering less eye-popping pricing plans.
I agree. Not all free downloaders should be considered freeloaders in the pejorative sense of the term you assumed I meant. I didn't intend to imply that in my original post.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet utterly devoid of entertainment value.
There's an extremely high barrier to entry for new players. Which client do you install? Which of the 3 or 4 third party assist tools do you need? Where do you download all that?
Even once you get the game client up and running, you end up with choice paralysis trying to find out what server to play.
Picking a server involves shitloads of googling and visiting each of their random websites while they explain mostly in game jargon terms which settings they have, or what "era" of the game they adhere to, without really explaining what that means.
And then there's the PVP, which is a joke on every server I've ever played. No diversity. No balance. One or two templates is all anyone ever plays.
And don't forget the ganks, because PVP is dominated solely by large, organized guilds everywhere. Want to duel? Good luck. Some servers have dueling systems, but they're ghost towns.
The most popular servers all seem to have declining player populations, which isn't surprising. Any community this hostile to newcomers deserves to wither.
So yeah, I welcome the UO devs one-upping existing player run UO shards with something new. Someone needs to do it right.
Just because you invested an extraordinary amount of money in something doesn't mean you deserve extraordinary government intervention to guarantee you a return. If new technology undermines your business model, find another business model.
The same way as, for instance, iOS. Using some proprietary developer toolkit that requires registering a developer account (which may cost money) in order to grant sideloading capability.
That's what I'm hoping will not be the case with the steam machines and I'm trying to find some empirical evidence of that. All I'm seeing so far is just a bunch of optimistic speculation.
People aren't outraged because all the rhetoric criticizing the surveillance programs was overblown. There are certainly plenty of things to be concerned about, sure. But just go read some news coverage from the time of the leaks and have a look at all the hyperbole and fear mongering. It was ridiculous.
If we want people to have a serious discussion about surveillance, then we need less fear mongering and more actionable activism. We need to get more organized and make specific proposals detailing what laws we would change and why it's so important to do so.
Instead of doing that, we just went on rants about how right we were the whole time and how evil it all is. We vomited vague, nonspecific emotion over the issue instead of proposing tangible solutions people could actually act on.
So yeah, no wonder everyone's suffering from "surveillance fatigue." I am too. And I actually care about the issue.
That's not proof. It's marketing. To my knowledge they haven't explicitly stated that sideloading will be permitted. You could make a (very good) argument that it's implied, but I'm seeking hard evidence.
We didn't get lucky. The vast majority of the surface of the Earth is either not populated or extremely sparsely populated. The odds are strongly against such a large airburst happening to burst over any reasonably densely populated area.
I hope you're right, but what you wrote is still just speculation. Not proof.
What worries me is that when this thing goes live, a whole lot of people who just assumed it's going to be a totally open platform are going to be disappointed when Steam imitates every other console gaming platform by disabling sideloading or making it prohibitively difficult for ordinary users.
Then cite a source proving it.
It's going to be a game console style user experience on top of PC hardware. There's no guarantee they won't do what literally every other game console does and disable sideloading. I'm trying to find real evidence that sideloading will be permitted. Otherwise I think the sensible if yes pessimistic assumption is to assume installing apps from outside of Steam will be disabled or at least prohibitively difficult for ordinary users.
Do you have hard evidence that stock Ubuntu with Steam installed is architecturally identical to SteamOS and that SteamOS will permit sideloading the same Ubuntu does, or are you just guessing based on their vague marketing pages?
Do you have hard information that SteamOS will permit sideloading or are you just assuming it will based on their vague marketing rhetoric?
You replied with a post that consisted of:
1. An insult.
2. No actual answer to my question about sideloading.
And someone modded you up.
Yep, that's Slashdot.
Is there any real evidence that steamOS will actually be truly open?
I know they advertised that the OS will be open source to some degree, but I haven't been able to dig up the details.
What worries me is this: if I can't sideload apps, install separate app stores, or root the system, then it's not truly open.
I'm worried steamOS will be as locked down to Steam as iOS is locked down to the iOS app store.
Is there evidence that steamOS will be more open than that?
The majority? Where do you work? Can I get a job there? Most of the developers I've met in Silicon Valley either A. don't have those priorities or B. pay lip service to those priorities but don't implement them competently.
Not everybody wants the rich experience. In the vast majority of cases, providing a non-JS experience is not extra work if you're using best practices to begin with.
When I see things like this, I shake my head: http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/touch/examples/production/kitchensink/
Turn off JS on Sencha Touch's kitchen sink, see a blank screen.
And what for? None of that UI fundamentally requires JS to function. If they'd built it with progressive enhancement instead, the links would still work, just without the animations. The forms would still work, just without the fancy enhancements. But most importantly, the page would still fucking render.
You can differentiate the JS and non-JS experiences using the same URL endpoints by sending a special HTTP header to indicate that it's an AJAX request.
That can allow the server to send back a response without the header and footer if it's an AJAX request, or send a fully composed page if it's not.
Saying that the JS and non-JS experiences are "so totally different" is just an excuse people use to ignore the non-JS scenario.
I will concede that some webapps (particularly games) cannot be reasonably hybridized in this fashion, but I think most developers jump the gun in assuming too quickly that their app is too rich for progressive enhancement.
In my experience, the vast majority of webapp projects out there could be done with progressive enhancement without creating extra work, but as time goes on developers are less and less willing to even consider the idea.
The unstated premise in your comment assumes the web's current obsession with JSON. There's no reason your AJAX service can't respond with HTML instead. HTML is a data format just like JSON. If your HTML is semantic, then you can write it once and use it in both contexts. I do this all the time and I feel like some special enlightened snowflake who does twice the work for half the effort of most developers.
I miss the days when web developers still gave a shit about progressive enhancement.
I miss the days when you couldn't be considered a real web developer unless you could make a CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com) skin without cheating by changing the markup or using JS.
I miss the days when you were only considered a good web web developer if your site was usable with both JS and CSS disabled because you used semantic HTML.
I miss the days when accessibility still mattered.
I miss the days when writing semantic HTML, enhancing it with CSS, and enhancing it further with JS was considered the best practice, rather than starting with just JS and an empty body tag as is so common today.
I miss the days before the now popular false dichotomy of thinking that progressive enhancement is extra work was popular among web developers.
I love that the web can do more now and compete with native apps better. But I hate that web developers are so quick to unnecessarily abandon progressive enhancement in the process when that's what made the web great to begin with.
Read the book (or at least watch the damn video) before dismissing the idea out of hand. He's spent years researching the problem in his capacity as a constitutional law professor and he proposes a very specific solution which has been demonstrated to work well in other western democracies.
I'm not saying that campaign finance reform is the silver bullet that'll fix our all our problems, I'm saying if we don't fix that first, it's going to be either impossible or much harder than it should be to fix the rest of our problems.
You've got that backwards. Money is the disease. Political corruption is the symptom. Have a look at Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig some time. Or just watch this quick overview video: http://blip.tv/lessig/republic-lost-my-favorite-version-5697728
Unlimited donations from large donors erodes the democratic process. Campaign finance reform should be our top priority. Once we fix that, it makes fixing all our other problems so much easier.
The fact that your post got modded funny instead of insightful is pretty sad reflection of our collective lack of faith in Apple's willingness to do the right thing.
Allowing users to opt-out of the walled garden is the single biggest thing iOS has needed since day one.
Imagine the outrage that would ensue if Apple flipped that switch on OSX and required all apps to come from the Mac App Store without a button to turn that restriction off.
iOS has been that way since day one and everyone seems to act like that's okay.
It's as if once a computer can fit into your pocket, it ceases to become a computer and suddenly becomes an "appliance," an oft-toted euphemism which serves no purpose other than to say "this general purpose computer is okay to lock down, but this one over here on my desk is not okay to lock down."
Locked down phones? Why not. Locked down game consoles? Sure. Locked down PCs? Mass outrage. It makes no sense. It's like nobody possess the critical thinking ability to realize that they're all just fucking computers in different form factors.
Yes, of course it would change Monsanto's incentives. In order for their crops to remain proprietary without a patent monopoly they'd have to invent new crops which don't produce seeds and are painstakingly difficult to reverse engineer and reproduce by their competitors. That way they wouldn't need patent protection to protect their proprietary crops. They would possess a natural monopoly until the competition caught up with them, which ideally would give them enough time to recoup the R&D investment and profit in the process.
I don't know if inventing such a thing as hard to copy GM crops is even possible in the GMO field (though generally speaking it is possible in other technology fields), but it seems to me that creating and monopolizing a proprietary crop should require that kind of ingenuity to offset the enormously unfair competitive advantage that possessing such a monopoly gives to the proprietor at the expense of the rest of the economy.
Now assuming for the sake of argument that inventing hard to copy GM crops is too difficult, or too risky, or even simply impossible, that doesn't mean new research on GM crops wouldn't get done in the absence of patent protection, it just means it would no longer be proprietary. There are many possible non-proprietary funding paths. Competing companies could collaborate on open source GM crops as is often done in the software world, governments could subsidize new research, private charities could fund new research, etc.
Such reform would force Monsanto and its competitors to compete on the merits of their manufacturing capabilities rather than their IP monopolies, much to the economy's benefit.
As a side benefit, if R&D of GMOs shifted more towards an open source model, I think the fact that it would be subject to the scrutiny of different contributors with different agendas would effectively end the controversies surrounding these much-maligned companies and probably do much to assuage public panic and ignorance about the science of GMOs.
Notwithstanding the excellent points you made elsewhere in your post, I quibble with this part:
Not necessarily. People would still invent new GMOs without the patent system to protect them. The research would just be done under different economic models.
I believe those alternative economic models would be better for the economy overall than the status quo, but that is of course a matter for debate.
Alas ye olde pinkdot, we barely knew ye. Return unto us hither in a better life, anew.
If can't run your business on anything less than $1000 per user, then you're better off reworking it into an internet service so you can enforceably control access to your software rather than making it a standalone downloadable software package.
Huge upfront prices are rarely a good way to run a business unless you're selling a large tangible asset like a TV, or a car, or a house. Software just isn't one of those kinds of things.
But you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you offer it as a service instead and charge smaller amounts of cash over time (perhaps with discounts for upfront sums) then you're way more likely to get people to think it's a fair deal.
Otherwise, your software will fall into the trap of people wondering why the hell anyone would pay $1000 for something they could just as easily download from piratebay. You discourage that bias by offering less eye-popping pricing plans.
I agree. Not all free downloaders should be considered freeloaders in the pejorative sense of the term you assumed I meant. I didn't intend to imply that in my original post.