Great. I sit 2 feet from my monitor, most people don't sit within 6 feet of their TV. The article mentions that, and so do I. That's why I have the signature I do.
Port to another console? You just want them to wave their magical wand and suddenly the code works, they don't have to work on the timing and threading that's unique to each console, and they don't have to turn it into a major project that takes years? Erm... Portable code doesn't require magic, and it doesn't always take additional years. It does require forethought, though.
The years of work that go into an MMO are, what, content, server load balancing issues, content, client update management, content, less-laggy network play, and oh yeah, content. Maybe I'm completely out of my league here, but it doesn't seem like the client is such a huge problem -- more like that you'd pick up any off-the-shelf engine and adapt it.
Making that content scale might be difficult, but then, take Half-Life 2 -- plays reasonably what was mid-range hardware for 2005, yet scales up with things like HDR. I think it could be done better still -- keep in mind, MMOs don't need to have absolutely bleeding-edge graphics. Just create very high-res models, and scale them down programmatically.
And MMOs are considerably more complex than goldeneye. Are MMO clients that much more complex than goldeneye?
Also, try fitting the chat text into 1/4 of a TV screen. Voice.
Also, TFA mentions that, done properly, the split screen on the console could be a huge selling point since people play together. True, but it seems to kind of weaken the "barriers" listed. The excuse here is not trying to fit stuff into 1/4th of a screen -- more likely 1/2, I'd guess (think couples playing) -- but that it would increase development complexity.
What I would like to see is DS-like devices or even phones.... I'd just like to be able to do things like move my characters around and list things on the auction house in WoW. Man, that would be so huge. One of the disadvantages of having a ginormous virtual world all under the control of one corporate overlord.
Flash might be considered more questionable than PDF, except that it's basically a collateral descendant of hypercard and is widely used to implement websites. That it's used to implement so-called "websites" doesn't qualify -- you could implement a "website" as an ActiveX control, but I don't think that qualifies either. At the very least, it wouldn't be a good target for a standard.
I have never seen a viable alternative to SMTP, period. And I've never seen a system which is sufficiently open as to replace SMTP, without also allowing spam.
I get at least a few hundred spams a day -- I wouldn't be surprised if it's approaching 500-1000 -- at the email address I use here, which is in public, in plaintext, in a few places. Last time I really checked, I got no false positives -- nowdays, I barely touch the Spam folder, and mostly sort through the Unsure folder.
No more than 10 spams per day, and usually about 5, make it to Unsure. Maybe one or two false positives, occasionally.
And maybe one, once a week or so, makes it to my Inbox.
For the record, I use Bogofilter. That's it, aside from a custom retraining script over IMAP.
And I get no more than one spam a day, at one of my two Gmail addresses -- and Gmail does automatically mark them as spam.
Spam lacks sufficient definition. While there are certain things that most of us can agree are spam, there is a sufficiently large gray area that it's not really possible to define clearly as law.
However, some things are absurdly easy to define -- take freedom of speech. You are allowed to say pretty much what you want, where you want, short of "Fire!" in a crowded theater. No one has yet found a way to twist the First Amendment into meaning something it doesn't -- into somehow meaning, for example, that all speech except blasphemy is protected.
Murder is another one. Killing someone on purpose is murder, short of self-defense or actual war.
I think net neutrality is sufficiently easy to define that if we can get any law right, it should be this one. ISPs should transfer all packets to where they are addressed, with no preference given to one packet over another -- except for a specific customer, at their explicit request (if I ask for a spamfilter, they may intercept port 25.)
Granted, telcos may subvert the process, but I'd rather at least try than have no legislation at all.
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable... I don't suppose Google or Sony has got the memo? Or Apple, for that matter?
Parent might be worded as a troll, but it is also insightful -- it is scary as hell that the people (Ted Stevens) most directly responsible for legislating the future of the Internet are so completely clueless as to the nature of the beast.
I don't mean that every congressman needs to become an expert on every niche domain of knowledge humans have ever dreamed of -- but at the very least, if you're going to legislate something, learn something about it, or delegate to someone who has.
While on the one hand I see no reason whatsoever for child porn-related sites to even exist let alone have anyone visit them, censorship by ISPs is a very obvious slippery slope. Simple: True, enforced freedom of speech is a boolean, not a scalar. Freenet takes the position that any amount of censorship, or even the ability to censor, is unacceptable.
Child porn and other, worse things, are the price we pay for freedom of speech.
Voice chat is great for small groups. It even works pretty well for short messages from one player to another. It really doesn't work so well for chat groups of 100. Nothing really works well for chat groups of 100. Voice chat can be done on that scale, though -- you just have to setup channels properly.
There are other reasons to want a keyboard -- keyboards have far more buttons than controllers, meaning more actions, and MMOs can be complex. And there's the registration, login, etc.
People sit pretty far back from their televisions, and even HD displays really aren't very high-res compared to PC screens. People do sit pretty far back. But HD is 1920x1080. Raise your hand if you have a computer monitor that high. The biggest I have is 1600x1200, which is not widescreen, and is 153,600 pixels fewer than a 1080p screen.
MMOs take four to five years to build. People keep trying to convince themselves that they can do it in three years, but they're wrong. So what? Good MMOs are continuously updated for five to ten years. No reason to think you couldn't port it to a different platform and give it a graphical update in that time.
Many, many people play MMOs (and other games for that matter) in pairs. I've played 6 different MMOs with my wife. Lots of people play with their spouses, siblings, or kids. And many, many people play console games in pairs, trios, or quartets. We tolerated split-screen for Goldeneye on the N64, where each player might get, what, 180x140 worth of screen space? And now we're on HD displays.
Console MMOs really need to support split-screen play on a single machine, which adds to the development complexity. And developing for a single platform, instead of the "PC platform" of whatever the fsck the user decided to buy, should reduce development complexity.
There were some good points here, and I'll stick with my PC platform as long as I can -- on Linux -- but I don't see anything compelling.
Here's one thing that does matter: MMOs are big, and getting bigger. Much of them must be download in patches. It's difficult to buy a computer with a hard drive less than 80 gigs these days. It's difficult to buy a console with a hard drive more than 60 gigs, unless something's changed.
Oh, and consoles very likely won't allow mods. Many people live by their WoW UI mods, custom voice chat, etc.
Well, following the open source philosophy you are supposed to release your output Yes. Exactly as much as you want.
it is practically guaranteed that some other company (probably your competitor) will find it useful to improve their own business. Which, depending how much you've done, is free advertising for you. Also, consider the kind of software which is most often contracted (or done in house), and not sold: either very, very closely tied to the way that company operates (so isn't portable to a competitor), or it's actually got nothing to do with their core business.
As a simple example, suppose Wal-Mart released a CMS, or a CRM. It's not as though there's a competitor who is suddenly going to become a major threat to Wal-Mart because they have a shiny new website.
Another point is that both you and your competitor may find it cheaper to do open source. Think of it as an ad-hoc strategic parnership -- if two companies are contributing code, each only has to do half the work to develop/maintain the software. If a large community is maintaining the code, each company only has to scratch their own itch -- send patches for functionality they care about. The advantage you gave to your competitor is completely overwhelmed by the advantage your entire industry gets by spending less on software.
2) Causing less demand for software developers because you've release code that already works. Well, firstly, that's some value of "already works." It's always possible someone who would never have considered software development, will discover that there's an open source project that's 99% of what they want, and the cost of that last 1% of development is acceptable. Maybe they would've bought a proprietary product instead -- or maybe no proprietary product would've filled that niche.
Second, there will always be new and interesting problems to solve in software development. If your whole complaint is that you can't sell yet another text editor, or yet another CRM system, you know what? Fuck you. I don't know why you program. I program to invent things, not to duplicate them.
Oh, OK, you're talking about NAPLPS vs that French teletext system versus ANSI graphics? Or are you talking about finger vs FTP vs gopher? ...what?
I'm talking about TCP and IP, which you've mentioned, which are low-level Internet protocols. It's right there in the name -- Internet Protocol. I'm not really sure what the rest has to do with the WWW.
We were still having Battling Browsers in 2000... um, make that 2005. Arguably even 2008. And all those battling browsers spoke some dialect of HTML over HTTP over TCP over IP. And most websites will work on all of them -- and would in 2000.
That's like putting off the HTML spec until we have antialiased fonts. Who's "putting it off"? The first hypertext formats Hypothetical analogy.
Arbitrary texture libraries We already have this -- the <img> tag on the Web. Just point the texture at a URL.
arbitrary skeletons This just involves working out a common format, then, same as above.
reverse kinematic rules, arbitrary mesh flexibility Doesn't have to be JavaScript specifically, but that does seem like something that would be solved by a standardized scripting language.
arbitrary mesh layers (some worlds only allow one layer, others have up to a dozen and others let you combine arbitrary numbers of meshes that can move independently). Is there a particular reason not to simply mandate arbitrary numbers of meshes? Sounds like a superset of the other two.
Xanadu is over 30 years old, and we STILL have battling hypertext formats. Yeah, we have HTML, and HTML, and, oh, HTML. I'm not sure it counts as a battle given that I haven't even heard of whatever else you were going to suggest.
One that violated and continues to violate the standards it's claiming to implement. Of course. I'm a web developer, I know. Point is, I think at Windows 95, you can pretty much mark it as mainstream.
Ok, question, though: Is this actually moving towards a world where I could actually walk through a portal in which opposing sides of the portal are actually on separate servers -- and through which I can see the other side?
Or one-way links, functioning essentially the way, oh, a Quake 3 teleporter does? (You can see what's on the other side, and when you step through, you instantly go there, but there's not necessarily a way back.)
Because that's another thing I like about the Web -- in theory (if people actually followed HTTP), it's prefetchable, and in practice, it still can be pretty instantaneous going from one page to another.
I'm not convinced such a web of trust would work well, or would scale. For one thing:
it's hard to infect the system with bad data without breaking into an existing server trusted by others. So all it takes is one break-in at a "trusted" server to bring down the whole network that way...
Since we're talking about virtual worlds here, and not necessarily games, I don't see why we have to trust clients at all.
And it took years of work to make that happen, to bring together TCP/IP, UUCP, BITNET, BBSes, FIDO, the various online services like Compuserve and Delphi, and later AOL and MSN, and have it all fall together into the World Wide Web. Actually, you're talking about the Internet. There's a difference.
3d is a pretty complex problem And it's pretty solved. Read triangle from file here, upload to OpenGL here. Add lighting, shaders, effects. Add scripting.
I mean, yes, there's the problem of collision detection, all the various types of culling (occlusion, backface, view frustrum), and so on, but these are really implementation details. That's like putting off the HTML spec until we have antialiased fonts.
the technology to make arbitrary constructs and avatars from different sources work well with any kind of realism I'm not quite sure what you mean here. "Arbitrary constructs" meaning, what, meshes? Pretty standard there, and that would cover avatars, too.
limiting it to some sort of common subset of all the possible ways people are making it happen. Common subset only has to be for what's communicated.
There are a number of standards being developed, but we're in early years yet. VRML is 14 years old. Not that I think VRML is necessarily a good spec, but... It's 14 years old! Tim Berners-Lee wrote a spec in 1989, and the first web browser was released in 1990. Windows 95 was released in (can you guess?) 1995, and every copy came bundled with a browser.
Six years from spec to mainstream adoption.
I get that this stuff can be hard, but given that a number of virtual worlds exist already, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for a standard implementation -- or for even one of the existing ones to at least make itself interoperable in some way.
I'm not necessarily talking about "standard" as in "ratified by w3c" -- it seems even that first step of coming up with a spec which could one day become a standard hasn't been done yet.
Probable for the same reason security-conscious people have an issue with users using a single username/password combination for every network and site they visit. OpenID doesn't require that, it only supports it.
If you really, really care that a compromise of your Slashdot account affects your Myspace account, and you really want to sign up for a dozen different services, there are plenty of OpenID providers, and you can generally have multiple accounts at each one.
By the way, security-conscious people wouldn't lose passwords. Consider that I can run my own OpenID server, and I can lock it down with actual public-key encryption, or any other authentication method I like.
Consider also that most people use a single password across multiple websites. A compromise of one of those websites might reveal the password -- and you can't control the security of those respective websites. (I can't make Slashdot use SSL, as far as I know.) With OpenID, I can at least ensure that the actual authentication step is secure.
But what does any of this have to do with virtual worlds?
But I'd like to see how you would rework Doom's controls for iPhone. Virtual joystick for movement, virtual mouse for look. Turn it sideways, play with your thumbs -- the new one has multitouch.
The game you linked appears to require jailbreak. For now.
There has to be some code that goes out and checks the dongle, then returns "yes this is authorized" or "no let's not run". Just zap that bit and the dongle goes away. Well, in theory, you could have a dongle which returns an encryption key, or which does the decryption itself.
Not saying it's uncrackable, just not as trivial as software, especially when the key is physically on the dongle and cannot be retrieved.
For that matter, if the key never leaves the dongle, and it's reasonably tamper-proof, all patches would still have to be cracked by someone who has the dongle.
Unfortunately not. If you have no money when a reasonable product is offered to you In that case, you are not the target market. Someone who has no money isn't going to buy your product anyway. Giving them a copy for free is not a lost sale.
When your competitors have higher prices and make even more people copy their stuff, the dam is broken and you stand even less of a chance to be paid a reasonable price. Erm... That makes no sense.
If your competitors have higher prices, wouldn't that suggest that customers would gravitate towards you, who charge a reasonable price?
Provide an actual service instead of trying to keep a certain sequence of bytes a secret and hand it out selectively. So, basically, you're saying that we should consider all books, movies, songs, TV shows, single-player games, etc, to be public domain?
Keeping it a secret might be ridiculous, but charging for it is reasonable.
There aren't multiple World Wide Webs. There's just one.
There aren't multiple "Email Networks" -- again, just one.
Why are all the exciting, new, "Web 2.0" technologies all such walled gardens? I understand why I can't take my World of Warcraft character to Age of Conan. I don't understand why I need one login for Slashdot, another for Myspace, yet another for Flickr, and so on -- OpenID, people, please!
I've seen a few attempts to make this happen, but it seems that the most open virtual world we have now is Second Life, which is entirely controlled by the whim of one company (Linden Labs). Where's my general-purpose, open source Virtual World Browser? Why can't I simply walk from one "virtual site" to another -- each controlled, run, and maintained by different people?
This is a very well documented interface - even though it wasn't documented by apple. Erm... no. Does not count as "open" if it had to be reverse-engineered first.
Consider Microsoft's Office formats. The old binary ones, before they released official documentation. Yes, OpenOffice could open them, among others. It was a reasonably understood format -- but only because of reverse engineering. It absolutely is not what anyone would call an "open" format.
Plus there's the difference that the ipod is supposed to play music/movies and thats it And as a so-called "open" platform, even if it's only supposed to play music/movies, it should be able to play Flac, Vorbis, and Theora, right? While I'm at it, can we get a Matroska container format with that codec goodness?
Nope, you've got to crack it and put Linux or RockBox on it first.
where as the iphone is really a pda with a phone attached. Its easy to argue thats there's far more interest in developing apps for the iphone over the ipod. Which is completely irrelevant.
"Open platform" should be an easy concept to understand, yet somehow you've managed to confuse it with "Works with Linux", "Has been reverse-engineered", and "A platform no one wants to write apps for."
So you just hold your thumb at the side of the screen and let the game figure out all the pathing, right? Pretty much, except the game will happily run you into a pit of death. So you'll have to be more specific than that.
I'm thinking kgoldrunner -- sorry, can't find a non-KDE version, but this is a 2D sideview game (not exactly sidescrolling, but close enough) in which the mouse is the preferred input device.
And how long would it take for players to adapt to these controls at the speed of modern Tetris? Remember Halo on the Xbox vs Halo on the PC? Or Quake 3 on the Dreamcast vs Quake 3 on the PC? WASD + Mouse is pretty much unbeatable as a UI for FPS games, if all you care about is score.
I think the Halo series is fun in its own right, though, and it does feel just slightly more immersive to not be able to turn around instantly. Just because I'd be a better player with a mouse doesn't mean it's less fun to play with a joystick.
So the short answer to your question is: Players would adapt, probably fairly quickly. They might never be as good as with real buttons, but that's not a reason to dismiss the interface out of hand.
Slashdot Mirror
The years of work that go into an MMO are, what, content, server load balancing issues, content, client update management, content, less-laggy network play, and oh yeah, content. Maybe I'm completely out of my league here, but it doesn't seem like the client is such a huge problem -- more like that you'd pick up any off-the-shelf engine and adapt it.
Making that content scale might be difficult, but then, take Half-Life 2 -- plays reasonably what was mid-range hardware for 2005, yet scales up with things like HDR. I think it could be done better still -- keep in mind, MMOs don't need to have absolutely bleeding-edge graphics. Just create very high-res models, and scale them down programmatically. And MMOs are considerably more complex than goldeneye. Are MMO clients that much more complex than goldeneye? Also, try fitting the chat text into 1/4 of a TV screen. Voice. Also, TFA mentions that, done properly, the split screen on the console could be a huge selling point since people play together. True, but it seems to kind of weaken the "barriers" listed. The excuse here is not trying to fit stuff into 1/4th of a screen -- more likely 1/2, I'd guess (think couples playing) -- but that it would increase development complexity.
I have never seen a viable alternative to SMTP, period. And I've never seen a system which is sufficiently open as to replace SMTP, without also allowing spam.
I get at least a few hundred spams a day -- I wouldn't be surprised if it's approaching 500-1000 -- at the email address I use here, which is in public, in plaintext, in a few places. Last time I really checked, I got no false positives -- nowdays, I barely touch the Spam folder, and mostly sort through the Unsure folder.
No more than 10 spams per day, and usually about 5, make it to Unsure. Maybe one or two false positives, occasionally.
And maybe one, once a week or so, makes it to my Inbox.
For the record, I use Bogofilter. That's it, aside from a custom retraining script over IMAP.
And I get no more than one spam a day, at one of my two Gmail addresses -- and Gmail does automatically mark them as spam.
Spam lacks sufficient definition. While there are certain things that most of us can agree are spam, there is a sufficiently large gray area that it's not really possible to define clearly as law.
However, some things are absurdly easy to define -- take freedom of speech. You are allowed to say pretty much what you want, where you want, short of "Fire!" in a crowded theater. No one has yet found a way to twist the First Amendment into meaning something it doesn't -- into somehow meaning, for example, that all speech except blasphemy is protected.
Murder is another one. Killing someone on purpose is murder, short of self-defense or actual war.
I think net neutrality is sufficiently easy to define that if we can get any law right, it should be this one. ISPs should transfer all packets to where they are addressed, with no preference given to one packet over another -- except for a specific customer, at their explicit request (if I ask for a spamfilter, they may intercept port 25.)
Granted, telcos may subvert the process, but I'd rather at least try than have no legislation at all.
Parent might be worded as a troll, but it is also insightful -- it is scary as hell that the people (Ted Stevens) most directly responsible for legislating the future of the Internet are so completely clueless as to the nature of the beast.
I don't mean that every congressman needs to become an expert on every niche domain of knowledge humans have ever dreamed of -- but at the very least, if you're going to legislate something, learn something about it, or delegate to someone who has.
Child porn and other, worse things, are the price we pay for freedom of speech.
There are other reasons to want a keyboard -- keyboards have far more buttons than controllers, meaning more actions, and MMOs can be complex. And there's the registration, login, etc. People sit pretty far back from their televisions, and even HD displays really aren't very high-res compared to PC screens. People do sit pretty far back. But HD is 1920x1080. Raise your hand if you have a computer monitor that high. The biggest I have is 1600x1200, which is not widescreen, and is 153,600 pixels fewer than a 1080p screen. MMOs take four to five years to build. People keep trying to convince themselves that they can do it in three years, but they're wrong. So what? Good MMOs are continuously updated for five to ten years. No reason to think you couldn't port it to a different platform and give it a graphical update in that time. Many, many people play MMOs (and other games for that matter) in pairs. I've played 6 different MMOs with my wife. Lots of people play with their spouses, siblings, or kids. And many, many people play console games in pairs, trios, or quartets. We tolerated split-screen for Goldeneye on the N64, where each player might get, what, 180x140 worth of screen space? And now we're on HD displays. Console MMOs really need to support split-screen play on a single machine, which adds to the development complexity. And developing for a single platform, instead of the "PC platform" of whatever the fsck the user decided to buy, should reduce development complexity.
There were some good points here, and I'll stick with my PC platform as long as I can -- on Linux -- but I don't see anything compelling.
Here's one thing that does matter: MMOs are big, and getting bigger. Much of them must be download in patches. It's difficult to buy a computer with a hard drive less than 80 gigs these days. It's difficult to buy a console with a hard drive more than 60 gigs, unless something's changed.
Oh, and consoles very likely won't allow mods. Many people live by their WoW UI mods, custom voice chat, etc.
As a simple example, suppose Wal-Mart released a CMS, or a CRM. It's not as though there's a competitor who is suddenly going to become a major threat to Wal-Mart because they have a shiny new website.
Another point is that both you and your competitor may find it cheaper to do open source. Think of it as an ad-hoc strategic parnership -- if two companies are contributing code, each only has to do half the work to develop/maintain the software. If a large community is maintaining the code, each company only has to scratch their own itch -- send patches for functionality they care about. The advantage you gave to your competitor is completely overwhelmed by the advantage your entire industry gets by spending less on software. 2) Causing less demand for software developers because you've release code that already works. Well, firstly, that's some value of "already works." It's always possible someone who would never have considered software development, will discover that there's an open source project that's 99% of what they want, and the cost of that last 1% of development is acceptable. Maybe they would've bought a proprietary product instead -- or maybe no proprietary product would've filled that niche.
Second, there will always be new and interesting problems to solve in software development. If your whole complaint is that you can't sell yet another text editor, or yet another CRM system, you know what? Fuck you. I don't know why you program. I program to invent things, not to duplicate them.
I'm talking about TCP and IP, which you've mentioned, which are low-level Internet protocols. It's right there in the name -- Internet Protocol. I'm not really sure what the rest has to do with the WWW. We were still having Battling Browsers in 2000... um, make that 2005. Arguably even 2008. And all those battling browsers spoke some dialect of HTML over HTTP over TCP over IP. And most websites will work on all of them -- and would in 2000. That's like putting off the HTML spec until we have antialiased fonts. Who's "putting it off"? The first hypertext formats Hypothetical analogy. Arbitrary texture libraries We already have this -- the <img> tag on the Web. Just point the texture at a URL. arbitrary skeletons This just involves working out a common format, then, same as above. reverse kinematic rules, arbitrary mesh flexibility Doesn't have to be JavaScript specifically, but that does seem like something that would be solved by a standardized scripting language. arbitrary mesh layers (some worlds only allow one layer, others have up to a dozen and others let you combine arbitrary numbers of meshes that can move independently). Is there a particular reason not to simply mandate arbitrary numbers of meshes? Sounds like a superset of the other two. Xanadu is over 30 years old, and we STILL have battling hypertext formats. Yeah, we have HTML, and HTML, and, oh, HTML. I'm not sure it counts as a battle given that I haven't even heard of whatever else you were going to suggest. One that violated and continues to violate the standards it's claiming to implement. Of course. I'm a web developer, I know. Point is, I think at Windows 95, you can pretty much mark it as mainstream.
Ok, question, though: Is this actually moving towards a world where I could actually walk through a portal in which opposing sides of the portal are actually on separate servers -- and through which I can see the other side?
Or one-way links, functioning essentially the way, oh, a Quake 3 teleporter does? (You can see what's on the other side, and when you step through, you instantly go there, but there's not necessarily a way back.)
Because that's another thing I like about the Web -- in theory (if people actually followed HTTP), it's prefetchable, and in practice, it still can be pretty instantaneous going from one page to another.
Yes, I've seen them.
The other problem is, of course, it's based on Squeak. I like some of the ideas of Smalltalk, and Squeak in general, but I want my 64-bit support!
Contrast with the WWW, where the scripting platform is JavaScript, which is not bound to any particular architecture or implementation.
Since we're talking about virtual worlds here, and not necessarily games, I don't see why we have to trust clients at all.
I mean, yes, there's the problem of collision detection, all the various types of culling (occlusion, backface, view frustrum), and so on, but these are really implementation details. That's like putting off the HTML spec until we have antialiased fonts. the technology to make arbitrary constructs and avatars from different sources work well with any kind of realism I'm not quite sure what you mean here. "Arbitrary constructs" meaning, what, meshes? Pretty standard there, and that would cover avatars, too. limiting it to some sort of common subset of all the possible ways people are making it happen. Common subset only has to be for what's communicated. There are a number of standards being developed, but we're in early years yet. VRML is 14 years old. Not that I think VRML is necessarily a good spec, but... It's 14 years old! Tim Berners-Lee wrote a spec in 1989, and the first web browser was released in 1990. Windows 95 was released in (can you guess?) 1995, and every copy came bundled with a browser.
Six years from spec to mainstream adoption.
I get that this stuff can be hard, but given that a number of virtual worlds exist already, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for a standard implementation -- or for even one of the existing ones to at least make itself interoperable in some way.
I'm not necessarily talking about "standard" as in "ratified by w3c" -- it seems even that first step of coming up with a spec which could one day become a standard hasn't been done yet.
If you really, really care that a compromise of your Slashdot account affects your Myspace account, and you really want to sign up for a dozen different services, there are plenty of OpenID providers, and you can generally have multiple accounts at each one.
By the way, security-conscious people wouldn't lose passwords. Consider that I can run my own OpenID server, and I can lock it down with actual public-key encryption, or any other authentication method I like.
Consider also that most people use a single password across multiple websites. A compromise of one of those websites might reveal the password -- and you can't control the security of those respective websites. (I can't make Slashdot use SSL, as far as I know.) With OpenID, I can at least ensure that the actual authentication step is secure.
But what does any of this have to do with virtual worlds?
Not saying it's uncrackable, just not as trivial as software, especially when the key is physically on the dongle and cannot be retrieved.
For that matter, if the key never leaves the dongle, and it's reasonably tamper-proof, all patches would still have to be cracked by someone who has the dongle.
If your competitors have higher prices, wouldn't that suggest that customers would gravitate towards you, who charge a reasonable price?
Keeping it a secret might be ridiculous, but charging for it is reasonable.
There aren't multiple World Wide Webs. There's just one.
There aren't multiple "Email Networks" -- again, just one.
Why are all the exciting, new, "Web 2.0" technologies all such walled gardens? I understand why I can't take my World of Warcraft character to Age of Conan. I don't understand why I need one login for Slashdot, another for Myspace, yet another for Flickr, and so on -- OpenID, people, please!
I've seen a few attempts to make this happen, but it seems that the most open virtual world we have now is Second Life, which is entirely controlled by the whim of one company (Linden Labs). Where's my general-purpose, open source Virtual World Browser? Why can't I simply walk from one "virtual site" to another -- each controlled, run, and maintained by different people?
Consider Microsoft's Office formats. The old binary ones, before they released official documentation. Yes, OpenOffice could open them, among others. It was a reasonably understood format -- but only because of reverse engineering. It absolutely is not what anyone would call an "open" format. Plus there's the difference that the ipod is supposed to play music/movies and thats it And as a so-called "open" platform, even if it's only supposed to play music/movies, it should be able to play Flac, Vorbis, and Theora, right? While I'm at it, can we get a Matroska container format with that codec goodness?
Nope, you've got to crack it and put Linux or RockBox on it first. where as the iphone is really a pda with a phone attached. Its easy to argue thats there's far more interest in developing apps for the iphone over the ipod. Which is completely irrelevant.
"Open platform" should be an easy concept to understand, yet somehow you've managed to confuse it with "Works with Linux", "Has been reverse-engineered", and "A platform no one wants to write apps for."
I'm thinking kgoldrunner -- sorry, can't find a non-KDE version, but this is a 2D sideview game (not exactly sidescrolling, but close enough) in which the mouse is the preferred input device. And how long would it take for players to adapt to these controls at the speed of modern Tetris? Remember Halo on the Xbox vs Halo on the PC? Or Quake 3 on the Dreamcast vs Quake 3 on the PC? WASD + Mouse is pretty much unbeatable as a UI for FPS games, if all you care about is score.
I think the Halo series is fun in its own right, though, and it does feel just slightly more immersive to not be able to turn around instantly. Just because I'd be a better player with a mouse doesn't mean it's less fun to play with a joystick.
So the short answer to your question is: Players would adapt, probably fairly quickly. They might never be as good as with real buttons, but that's not a reason to dismiss the interface out of hand.