Which is completely fine. I'm simply saying that if they're going to do this fast release schedule, they can't do it half-way like they are right now. Either ditch the versions, and remove the option to reject upgrades (in the interest of both home users and enterprise) and force them, or they need to split off API versioning and only increment them when changes will break extensions/plugins (which, honestly, I think will only muddle matters more).
The key difference, I think, is that Mozilla still thinks versions are an important signifier, whereas for Chrome, it's the browser platform, not the version, that matters. Mozilla's trying to move to what Chrome's doing without realizing why Chrome does it the way they do it.
Personally, I dislike this e-peen^W version envy Mozilla's got. Their yearly update schedule wasn't broken at all. Since they've taken to this in half-measures, it ends up being a hassle and making nobody happy at all.
At least to some extent. I think Mozilla's trying to switch over to the fast release schedule because of serious version envy, as well as wanting to push out releases faster, but what I don't think they realized is the fundamental difference between how Google's Chrome engineers seem to view the version number.
A user downloads Chrome. That's it. They don't ever need to download updates, since once Chrome is launched, it patches the binary with newest updates automagically. It updates automagically in the background, only occasionally asking for a restart. The version number is buried in the "About Chrome" dialog box, and almost never referred to elsewhere. Extensions aren't tied to versioning, but rather, features. Chrome's fast release schedule works because they've taken some choices and options out of the equation. They're asking people not to support a specific version of Chrome, but rather the Chrome browser platform--which makes it easier: instead of asking what browser version someone's using, one asks what browser, and the supporter can be reasonably assured that the user has the most recent version, with all the most recent bug fixes and features. Whatever the version number is, at best, incidental.
Firefox, on the other hand, still requires some user interaction to download and install updates; updates still go through an installation/update process that's visible to the user, and worse yet, they give the option to the user to ignore them. Extensions are tied to versions, which is why there's frequent breakage on updates. Finally, on first launch, and whenever you visit the page, the version number is there, like it's important or something. Mozilla is still thinking with versions--which makes it important to ask what version of the browser someone's using, and leaving the supporter wondering what updates and what features have been installed and applied.
Mozilla's only gotten the fast releases half-right.
False rumors about their service? I could see their tower from my living room window in Chicago. Nothing in the way. They advertised 6Mbps, but I was lucky to get 2. Watching Netflix was a chore, since the quality would be atrocious and would take forever to buffer; YouTube fared little better. I'd call and call, and get the runaround about problems with the tower that would never be fixed, or blamed that I put the modem in the wrong place (except I had 5 bars...). To cap it all off, it'd cut out for about thirty minutes every night between midnight and one.
I was with them a year. A whole year, because I wrote a lot of it off to being an early adopter. They had to comp my service four months because it was so bad. When I called to cancel? $40 "restocking" fee for the modems.
They're not false rumors. The company is shitty and the service is worse, so much so that it was a *relief* to go back to the awfulness that is xfinity/Comcast.
Which makes me sad. I'm willing to be patient for a while, and this is a beta, but there's been almost no real discussion on the Opera Desktop Team blog about it.
I may well eventually cave and reinstall the QT3 dependencies, but I do hope that I won't have to.
Richard Garriot wasn't a founder. They hired him to open up NC-Austin in 2000 or so, but they published their first MMO, Lineage, in Korea in the late '90s. (For a while, it was one of the largest, in terms of subscribers).
I think it's entirely possible, and I think it's quite a good analogy--but not in the same sense that he's using it.
Part of the reason why comic books, at least in the United States, aren't accorded as much respect as an art form can probably be traced back to the hysterical allegations of Dr. Fredric Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent. In short, he claimed that within those pulp pages, the amount of violence, of innuendo and sex, and the like would twist and stunt the growth of the children consuming them--and lead to crime, as well, by glamourizing it.
As a result, the publishers themselves began to censor their books with the industry's own Comics Code, refusing to take chances with so-called weighty subjects, and ultimately consigned themselves to a niche audience that, until recently was utterly unable to get any significant mindshare among the general public; even today, comic books and graphic novels are rarely accorded the same respect that other, textual novels are given, so much so that movies such as Road to Perdition try, somewhat, to obscure their source material.
These days, it's Jack Thompson and his ilk claiming that within the realm of the electronic world, the violence of Unreal Tournament, the sex in God of War, the anatomic issues in The Sims and the like are seducing the youth of our country and twisting their growth by forming them into school shooters and contributing to the deplorable state of culture and decline of the US.
This, coupled with ballooning budgets for games, is leading game publishers to not only inconsistently apply their own self-censorship group, but stick to only those games that have made money in the past and try to deflect criticism away from themselves any way they can; weighty subjects are less likely to be tackled in games such as these, precisely because returns for the money aren't as guaranteed, and the response from modern-day Werthams would decry the fact that these games are filled with sin, even if they're as exquisitely crafted as, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bridge to Terabithia, A Wrinkle in Time, 1984, and the like.
If anything, it's that mentality that would consign videogames to any sort of cultural "ghetto".
Of course, on foreign shores, like Japan, comics never had to fight the puritanical streak; it's doubtful they're suffering from the same odd notions about games there these days, too.
...yeah, that'll learn me good that I should press the preview button first.
Reposting for better readability:
First things first, and said by others: Civ is an example of a TBS, not an RTS. While he doesn't explicitly come out and say that Civ is an RTS, he conflates the two by then launching into UI issues with RTSes.
Complaining about Civ because it has too many clicks is like complaining about a database because it has too many datapoints. Why? Civ's a game where you're in control of a whole empire. Rome wasn't built in one click and lots of automation (which, honestly, one could argue would have made the city better designed, but also likely lacking a lot of charm).
The problem with the "rule of seven" in a game such as Civ is that you end up with an overly ambitions, poorly executed disaster like Master of Orion III--everything was abstracted to a level where it was "easy" to maintain an empire, "easy" to play a game with turns lasting fewer than 5 minutes, and still ostensibly being in the true vein of TBS games. One had all the data of the game available within five mouse-clicks, but you could just as easily ignore it and click on the "next turn" button.
Problem was, it wasn't very fun--and it wasn't just the case of poor execution. When you have so much automation, a game of that complexity almost gets "dumbed-down", almost too simplistic in its interface and presentation to the player. There is a lack of fine-grained control, as most of the more powerful and useful tools become so hidden or not even shown (like some OSes...). Instead of recognizing that increasing production in one region will cause cascade effects that may lead to unhappiness in three other regions, lessened treasuries, and bad research, because it's so "intuitive" and "helpful", the pull-this-lever type simplicity obscures that sort of insight into the Rube Goldberg-esque mechanics of the game.
Now, admittely, this is where the issue lies--what's fun for one isn't fun for others; honestly, I admit that I've played Civ for so long that all the keyboard shortcuts are placed into my memory, and this mouse-click UI problem he thinks exists, I don't think is even an issue. He might well enjoy a game like MOO3; if so, I'll send him my copy.
First things first, and said by others: Civ is an example of a TBS, not an RTS. While he doesn't explicitly come out and say that Civ is an RTS, he conflates the two by then launching into UI issues with RTSes.
Complaining about Civ because it has too many clicks is like complaining about a database because it has too many datapoints. Why? Civ's a game where you're in control of a whole empire. Rome wasn't built in one click and lots of automation (which, honestly, one could argue would have made the city better designed, but also likely lacking a lot of charm).
The problem with the "rule of seven" in a game such as Civ is that you end up with an overly ambitions, poorly executed disaster like Master of Orion III--everything was abstracted to a level where it was "easy" to maintain an empire, "easy" to play a game with turns lasting fewer than 5 minutes, and still ostensibly being in the true vein of TBS games. One had all the data of the game available within five mouse-clicks, but you could just as easily ignore it and click on the "next turn" button.
Problem was, it wasn't very fun--and it wasn't just the case of poor execution. When you have so much automation, the game almost gets dumbed-down, almost too simplistic in its interface and presentation to the player. There is a lack of fine-grained control, as most of the more powerful and useful tools become so hidden or not even shown (like some OSes...). Instead of recognizing that increasing production in one region will cause cascade effects that may lead to unhappiness in three other regions, lessened treasuries, and bad research, because it's so "intuitive" and "helpful", the pull-this-lever type simplicity obscures that sort of insight into the mechanics of the game.
Now, admittely, this is where the issue lies--what's fun for one isn't fun for others; honestly, I admit that I've played Civ for so long that all the keyboard shortcuts are placed into my memory, and this mouse-click UI problem he thinks exists, I don't think is even an issue. He might well enjoy a game like MOO3; if so, I'll send him my copy.
Yes, they're trying to reach out. No, it's not going to be successful. Why?
1. It reeks of commercialization. Every single hot/featured video reads like it's from a script; every single hot/featured profile drops the slogan like nobody's business--everything is tagged with "school my way", an awkward phrase that I highly doubt will catch on at all.
2. Unlike most other social networking sites, the links to the profiles themselves are nigh impossible to remember, being nothing but a string of numbers atop a rather unwieldy domain--and very few people are going to remember what there user id number string is.
3. As far as I can tell, there is no feature that enables social networking in the sense where someone can add/delete friends and link to them, see a list of friends, or write to or even comment on other profiles. Since that drastically reduces the amount of user generated content, it doesn't seem that it'll remain compelling to anyone for longer than i seconds.
4. Virtually every "profile" I've visited, if they have videos, they're pending approval. That sort of restriction on content generation will do more to stifle it than engender it.
5. The only expressions anybody's done is are pick a song, at most 3 photos, and a line or two of text. Oh, and a wishlist. Because really, that's all anyone needs to "express themselves".
6. It reeks of inauthenticity, with its spokespeople and front page faces very clearly appearing to try entirely too hard to be "cool" and "hip^H^H^H hubsterish". The problem is, it's often more successful if the users name themselves (and often doesn't sound as bad), and the "-ster" ending fell into disfavor among the hip web crowd (again, the demographic they seem to want with this page)... oh, three? four years ago now?
To summarize, it looks fake, doesn't have the freedom or control for the users, is hardly "social networking"... and is a classic example of how some marketers and suits really just don't get it. It's not a fantastic idea at all; rather, it's a prime example of someone falling to the buzzword disease, and then trying to make a cheap knockoff without even understanding how or what makes the original work. As far as the worst thing that can happen to Wal-Mart from this? Scorn and cementing the poor image it has from the demographic it most wants--and honestly, that already seems to be happening.
Or is this like another "World Series", where the only parts of the world that matter are Europe and America?
And why should I even pay attention to this joke of an event, especially when compared to that other, big, world-famous one. Y'know... that... World... Cybering... Games? Or something?
That's racist!
i just don't like it, is all. the original point remains, though, which is that the livejournal servers going down doesn't reflect at all upon six apart.
Taking this idea... if we could program a chatbot/imbot/(something that can almost pass the turing test) to just send out "secret messages" and what not...
...just to make it that much harder for any sense to be made of the noise. think of it as chaff, if you will.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is completely fine. I'm simply saying that if they're going to do this fast release schedule, they can't do it half-way like they are right now. Either ditch the versions, and remove the option to reject upgrades (in the interest of both home users and enterprise) and force them, or they need to split off API versioning and only increment them when changes will break extensions/plugins (which, honestly, I think will only muddle matters more).
The key difference, I think, is that Mozilla still thinks versions are an important signifier, whereas for Chrome, it's the browser platform, not the version, that matters. Mozilla's trying to move to what Chrome's doing without realizing why Chrome does it the way they do it.
Personally, I dislike this e-peen^W version envy Mozilla's got. Their yearly update schedule wasn't broken at all. Since they've taken to this in half-measures, it ends up being a hassle and making nobody happy at all.
At least to some extent. I think Mozilla's trying to switch over to the fast release schedule because of serious version envy, as well as wanting to push out releases faster, but what I don't think they realized is the fundamental difference between how Google's Chrome engineers seem to view the version number.
A user downloads Chrome. That's it. They don't ever need to download updates, since once Chrome is launched, it patches the binary with newest updates automagically. It updates automagically in the background, only occasionally asking for a restart. The version number is buried in the "About Chrome" dialog box, and almost never referred to elsewhere. Extensions aren't tied to versioning, but rather, features. Chrome's fast release schedule works because they've taken some choices and options out of the equation. They're asking people not to support a specific version of Chrome, but rather the Chrome browser platform--which makes it easier: instead of asking what browser version someone's using, one asks what browser, and the supporter can be reasonably assured that the user has the most recent version, with all the most recent bug fixes and features. Whatever the version number is, at best, incidental.
Firefox, on the other hand, still requires some user interaction to download and install updates; updates still go through an installation/update process that's visible to the user, and worse yet, they give the option to the user to ignore them. Extensions are tied to versions, which is why there's frequent breakage on updates. Finally, on first launch, and whenever you visit the page, the version number is there, like it's important or something. Mozilla is still thinking with versions--which makes it important to ask what version of the browser someone's using, and leaving the supporter wondering what updates and what features have been installed and applied.
Mozilla's only gotten the fast releases half-right.
False rumors about their service? I could see their tower from my living room window in Chicago. Nothing in the way. They advertised 6Mbps, but I was lucky to get 2. Watching Netflix was a chore, since the quality would be atrocious and would take forever to buffer; YouTube fared little better. I'd call and call, and get the runaround about problems with the tower that would never be fixed, or blamed that I put the modem in the wrong place (except I had 5 bars...). To cap it all off, it'd cut out for about thirty minutes every night between midnight and one.
I was with them a year. A whole year, because I wrote a lot of it off to being an early adopter. They had to comp my service four months because it was so bad. When I called to cancel? $40 "restocking" fee for the modems.
They're not false rumors. The company is shitty and the service is worse, so much so that it was a *relief* to go back to the awfulness that is xfinity/Comcast.
Which makes me sad. I'm willing to be patient for a while, and this is a beta, but there's been almost no real discussion on the Opera Desktop Team blog about it. I may well eventually cave and reinstall the QT3 dependencies, but I do hope that I won't have to.
Richard Garriot wasn't a founder. They hired him to open up NC-Austin in 2000 or so, but they published their first MMO, Lineage, in Korea in the late '90s. (For a while, it was one of the largest, in terms of subscribers).
I've been having luck with BBC's coverage. Flash player is all that's needed.
Are you talking about Metallica? Or Activision?
I think it's entirely possible, and I think it's quite a good analogy--but not in the same sense that he's using it.
Part of the reason why comic books, at least in the United States, aren't accorded as much respect as an art form can probably be traced back to the hysterical allegations of Dr. Fredric Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent. In short, he claimed that within those pulp pages, the amount of violence, of innuendo and sex, and the like would twist and stunt the growth of the children consuming them--and lead to crime, as well, by glamourizing it.
As a result, the publishers themselves began to censor their books with the industry's own Comics Code, refusing to take chances with so-called weighty subjects, and ultimately consigned themselves to a niche audience that, until recently was utterly unable to get any significant mindshare among the general public; even today, comic books and graphic novels are rarely accorded the same respect that other, textual novels are given, so much so that movies such as Road to Perdition try, somewhat, to obscure their source material.
These days, it's Jack Thompson and his ilk claiming that within the realm of the electronic world, the violence of Unreal Tournament, the sex in God of War, the anatomic issues in The Sims and the like are seducing the youth of our country and twisting their growth by forming them into school shooters and contributing to the deplorable state of culture and decline of the US.
This, coupled with ballooning budgets for games, is leading game publishers to not only inconsistently apply their own self-censorship group, but stick to only those games that have made money in the past and try to deflect criticism away from themselves any way they can; weighty subjects are less likely to be tackled in games such as these, precisely because returns for the money aren't as guaranteed, and the response from modern-day Werthams would decry the fact that these games are filled with sin, even if they're as exquisitely crafted as, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bridge to Terabithia, A Wrinkle in Time, 1984, and the like.
If anything, it's that mentality that would consign videogames to any sort of cultural "ghetto".
Of course, on foreign shores, like Japan, comics never had to fight the puritanical streak; it's doubtful they're suffering from the same odd notions about games there these days, too.
...actually, very much like ohmynews.com
Yeah, I'm betting that Beethoven fellow is hoping Civ 4 will make his career...
...yeah, that'll learn me good that I should press the preview button first.
Reposting for better readability:
First things first, and said by others: Civ is an example of a TBS, not an RTS. While he doesn't explicitly come out and say that Civ is an RTS, he conflates the two by then launching into UI issues with RTSes.
Complaining about Civ because it has too many clicks is like complaining about a database because it has too many datapoints. Why? Civ's a game where you're in control of a whole empire. Rome wasn't built in one click and lots of automation (which, honestly, one could argue would have made the city better designed, but also likely lacking a lot of charm).
The problem with the "rule of seven" in a game such as Civ is that you end up with an overly ambitions, poorly executed disaster like Master of Orion III--everything was abstracted to a level where it was "easy" to maintain an empire, "easy" to play a game with turns lasting fewer than 5 minutes, and still ostensibly being in the true vein of TBS games. One had all the data of the game available within five mouse-clicks, but you could just as easily ignore it and click on the "next turn" button.
Problem was, it wasn't very fun--and it wasn't just the case of poor execution. When you have so much automation, a game of that complexity almost gets "dumbed-down", almost too simplistic in its interface and presentation to the player. There is a lack of fine-grained control, as most of the more powerful and useful tools become so hidden or not even shown (like some OSes...). Instead of recognizing that increasing production in one region will cause cascade effects that may lead to unhappiness in three other regions, lessened treasuries, and bad research, because it's so "intuitive" and "helpful", the pull-this-lever type simplicity obscures that sort of insight into the Rube Goldberg-esque mechanics of the game.
Now, admittely, this is where the issue lies--what's fun for one isn't fun for others; honestly, I admit that I've played Civ for so long that all the keyboard shortcuts are placed into my memory, and this mouse-click UI problem he thinks exists, I don't think is even an issue. He might well enjoy a game like MOO3; if so, I'll send him my copy.
First things first, and said by others: Civ is an example of a TBS, not an RTS. While he doesn't explicitly come out and say that Civ is an RTS, he conflates the two by then launching into UI issues with RTSes. Complaining about Civ because it has too many clicks is like complaining about a database because it has too many datapoints. Why? Civ's a game where you're in control of a whole empire. Rome wasn't built in one click and lots of automation (which, honestly, one could argue would have made the city better designed, but also likely lacking a lot of charm). The problem with the "rule of seven" in a game such as Civ is that you end up with an overly ambitions, poorly executed disaster like Master of Orion III--everything was abstracted to a level where it was "easy" to maintain an empire, "easy" to play a game with turns lasting fewer than 5 minutes, and still ostensibly being in the true vein of TBS games. One had all the data of the game available within five mouse-clicks, but you could just as easily ignore it and click on the "next turn" button. Problem was, it wasn't very fun--and it wasn't just the case of poor execution. When you have so much automation, the game almost gets dumbed-down, almost too simplistic in its interface and presentation to the player. There is a lack of fine-grained control, as most of the more powerful and useful tools become so hidden or not even shown (like some OSes...). Instead of recognizing that increasing production in one region will cause cascade effects that may lead to unhappiness in three other regions, lessened treasuries, and bad research, because it's so "intuitive" and "helpful", the pull-this-lever type simplicity obscures that sort of insight into the mechanics of the game. Now, admittely, this is where the issue lies--what's fun for one isn't fun for others; honestly, I admit that I've played Civ for so long that all the keyboard shortcuts are placed into my memory, and this mouse-click UI problem he thinks exists, I don't think is even an issue. He might well enjoy a game like MOO3; if so, I'll send him my copy.
You forgot to check the "post anonymously" box.
Also, it's Adobe Flash Player now, not Macromedia.
Yes, they're trying to reach out. No, it's not going to be successful. Why?
1. It reeks of commercialization. Every single hot/featured video reads like it's from a script; every single hot/featured profile drops the slogan like nobody's business--everything is tagged with "school my way", an awkward phrase that I highly doubt will catch on at all.
2. Unlike most other social networking sites, the links to the profiles themselves are nigh impossible to remember, being nothing but a string of numbers atop a rather unwieldy domain--and very few people are going to remember what there user id number string is.
3. As far as I can tell, there is no feature that enables social networking in the sense where someone can add/delete friends and link to them, see a list of friends, or write to or even comment on other profiles. Since that drastically reduces the amount of user generated content, it doesn't seem that it'll remain compelling to anyone for longer than i seconds.
4. Virtually every "profile" I've visited, if they have videos, they're pending approval. That sort of restriction on content generation will do more to stifle it than engender it.
5. The only expressions anybody's done is are pick a song, at most 3 photos, and a line or two of text. Oh, and a wishlist. Because really, that's all anyone needs to "express themselves".
6. It reeks of inauthenticity, with its spokespeople and front page faces very clearly appearing to try entirely too hard to be "cool" and "hip^H^H^H hubsterish". The problem is, it's often more successful if the users name themselves (and often doesn't sound as bad), and the "-ster" ending fell into disfavor among the hip web crowd (again, the demographic they seem to want with this page)... oh, three? four years ago now?
To summarize, it looks fake, doesn't have the freedom or control for the users, is hardly "social networking"... and is a classic example of how some marketers and suits really just don't get it. It's not a fantastic idea at all; rather, it's a prime example of someone falling to the buzzword disease, and then trying to make a cheap knockoff without even understanding how or what makes the original work. As far as the worst thing that can happen to Wal-Mart from this? Scorn and cementing the poor image it has from the demographic it most wants--and honestly, that already seems to be happening.
...Duron?
They're not letting Asian teams compete?
Are they afraid of losing?
Or is this like another "World Series", where the only parts of the world that matter are Europe and America?
And why should I even pay attention to this joke of an event, especially when compared to that other, big, world-famous one. Y'know... that... World... Cybering... Games? Or something? That's racist!
RTFA.
Sony is Japanese.
Sony Korea, which is releasing the laptops, is the Korean subsidiary.
It sounds like a Google Quagmire.
"Yes, I did gegoogle that woman. Googley-googley-google..."
Nobody uses FreeBSD anymore!
;)
Just replace Ska with FreeBSD.
I think they already pissed off their community enough with Enterprise, don't you?
actually, it doesn't really. =p
i just don't like it, is all. the original point remains, though, which is that the livejournal servers going down doesn't reflect at all upon six apart.
i'm sorry, how exactly does this reflect poorly on sixapart?
THIS doesn't reflect poorly on them. their licensing scheme for movabletype does.
Taking this idea... if we could program a chatbot/imbot/(something that can almost pass the turing test) to just send out "secret messages" and what not...
...just to make it that much harder for any sense to be made of the noise. think of it as chaff, if you will.