I don't think this is an interesting question. The USSR and China were/are both quasi-democratic, I agree they are not the bastions of democratic idealism that we'd like but they have the basis of democracy in them somewhere.
I think perhaps communism is not fundamentally compatible with true democracy. Democracy by nature is support of the idea of "collective self-interest", wherein communism seeks to achieve balance for everyone. Such a system has to be centrally managed, people cannot decide what is fair for everyone including themselves, only what is best for everyone else. You can't be objective when it comes to you and yours. It's the basis fo almost any stable legal system for that reason.
Communism is just not compatible with human nature, for the simple reason that I and I alone am in it for myself. Throw in the fact that the vast majority of people feel this way (however deeply they may hide it) and the system breaks.
There's good stuff to be learned from those types of philosophies, but they're not sustainable in their purest senses.
Then why have small form factor PCs failed to sell? They're not new, and certainly desireable aesthetically.
I think you are wrong, everyone opens up their PC at some point. Usually it's the kid who puts in the fast video card. Sometimes it's more memory, sometimes it's a bigger HD. Often it's done by CompUSA or BestBuy in the upgrade center, rather than by the owner, but I've never been in those stores without seeing a line at the upgrade counter. I agree most people will not replace a motherboard or CPU since by the time that comes around technology is too far out of sync, but a lot of people cause that box to be cracked open.
Dell is #1 because they're affordable, come with the right collection of stuff and upgradeable ENOUGH for most people. You can add a new video card, new memory and a new HD easily. Outside of that, they're a bitch to upgrade, but I accept that most people do not see that as they will never use other features.
People who use Apple are different, they are willing to make sacrifices on functionality for aesthetics and lower hassle. They can't use the majority of the software in the world, yet pay $3000 for computers. That seems like the niche market, and I suspect this will work only for Apple.
I always use tower PCs because it's easy to swap in/out equipment. The miniature desktop type machines always seem to have some non-standard boards or inadequate expansion slots.
That's also the reason I rarely buy HP/Dell/Compaq/brand name machines, I can't do anything with them once i own them. I'd rather go buy a cheapo tower that can take an ATX motherboard of my choosing...it's cheaper to deal with.
What Apple does is probably good for the people who use Apples and want a smaller, cuter LOOKING computer, but the market of people that use Apple is different than the market of people who use PCs.
Apples are the closest thing you can get to a car with the hood welded shut. They can get away with form factor changes. PCs are the closest you can get to a "generic" car: any engine, any wheels, any frame, etc. It's still not totally generic, but 5 years ago a PC without an intel chip was essentially defunct, now a PC without an Intel chip is normal. All we have to do is get rid of MS.
The Chinese government is disturbed by a trend amongst urban chinese related to sex and relationships. Apparently there's been a surge in partner swapping or just very short lived marriages, and lots more not getting married and just sleeping around. This is particularly evident amongst the young.
So like American parents, they blame video games and TV. With more force than american mothers however, they manage to ban things they don't like (some of which I am sure is political). I doubt this will be problematic to young chinese boys in search of the games.
You're wrong. Developers need to think like businessmen too.
It's quite possible to develop the concept of something, work out it's details and figure out what it's going to be, then right before you implement it or seek funding, stop. Then think more practically. Who wants this, how do I know? How much is this going to cost to develop? How many people are going to like this? Then maybe change some things to make it more palatable to someone who would pay for it.
Artists have been doing this for ages, the best artists figure out how to convey their message or idea, or whatever it is that's the spirit of their creation, yet still make it palatable to people who would fund their work. Sometimes they even make things that are downright insulting to their owners but well disguised.
1) Is that most "peer group" targetted games fail. Mostly they appeal to too small a segment of the population to make any money even if they make it out of development. Many don't get that far as they get too complex and too niche.
2) Games like Katamari Damacy that come out of left field screw up his pre-existing business of selling licensed sports games, another FPS with fancy new graphics etc. etc. I.e. innovation takes away some of his market share. Until he owns it, he's losing money.
This isn't really new. Look at Hollywood. Most movies are nothing but old ideas with new faces designed to target a specific market and get some easy cash. But we do rarely get a new, good movie that stands above the rest. They're hard to pick out, but they're out there.
Businessmen are classically short sighted. They only see things as they are now, and make decisions that way. Once something new comes in they're scared until they can make money from it. Then they love it. If you made a bundle off every gas powered car sale, wouldn't you be afraid of someone who sold electric cars?
It's not very well known outside of academia. The only time I ever felt like TeX was better than all others was for highly mathematical school papers.
Anyhow XML/XHTML has a somewhat different purpose/market. The purpose is not to create a perfect typeset document but a template that can be used for any given XML document that fits the genre. You could do this to some degree with TeX and it's references (it's been a loooong time), but I think these systems do it better.
Which in itself is why we need to standardize on a binary format. Ad hoc formats are springing up out of necessity, either it becomes a good standard or people will embrace some corporate version.
Note in my original post I described a need for a validator, precisely to catch and detect MSisms.
It's not a matter of respecting, it's a matter of noting a weakness, exploiting the weakness and eventually providing an alternative.
What is text? It's a binary code that a computer translates into graphical glyphs. Is it proprietary? Not any more. Your computer is what turns that binary code into something that means something to you. It doesn't even mean something to everyone (in fact iirc the first line in an xml file identifies a code page for using the intended symbols). So firstly, opaqueness even on "text" is not quite black and white. Second, what is transparent to YOU may be completely opaque to software, I'll elaborate on this later.
So what could binary XML be? It's a binary code that translates into XML syntax. Except it's easier to deal with for software, there's no processing. Let me present this example, which I will endeavor to use over and over. . I could write this in binary as 0001010203, obviously to do that i'd have to store the strings "mytag", "is", "simple" in a string table elsewhere, but this is just a simple example. I made "0x00" mean "a tag", the first "0x01" mean 1 attribute, and the rest are string references. Reading this tag would be very simple, fread(buffer,10,1,file) (i picked the two middle numbers out of the air since we have not really defined this format).
Saying that binary is proprietary makes absolutely no sense. Proprietary means property of an owner (usually a business). A file can't be proprietary. It's contents, the format of it's contents, certainly. But a binary file is atomic, it's like the sky. It just is what it is. Binary XML COULD become proprietary, but it will not NECESSARILY happen. Nothing is inherently proprietary about a binary file. If the binary XML format satisfies the constraints of a standard in my first post, it will absolutely not be proprietary by construction, or so I think. I don't work in standards groups, people more experienced with their goings on may point out additional refinements.
Your next point, recovering data. What do you use to read XML files? A text editor usually. What does that do? It reads a binary file (uh a text file!), applies some understanding of what the ASCII code (as an example) means, and displays it to you. Most of it is usually character data, but not always, there's a bunch of special characters that text editors often respond to for formatting or other things. Unix and PCs can't agree even on how to terminate a line. The point being even right now you can't totally say plain text XML is transparent, magic happens for you to just see it. Nothing about its presentation is defined (nor should be, imho). So what could binary XML be viewed with? Only slightly more overhead. You could "textify" as a preprocessing step to be viewed in a text editor. bin2txt myfile.bin.xml > myfile.txt.xml as an example. Or you could write your xml in plain text, and do the opposite. It's one to one, no loss. XML is just a syntax.
Now as for processing, I'll admit to waving my hands and skipping a few pieces. The XML syntax is defined clearly, there's no ambiguity (that i know of). However the step of choosing text-like strings to declare the syntax elements is where it gets hairy. Your first step in writing a parser is to grab the syntax elements out of their native text string. This is disgusting as compiler writers, language developers, etc. understand. You have to make lexx/yac scripts or workalikes to generate code, or worse, write your own (no one should do this but that's purely my opinion and not defendable). Theres a complicated state machine, some funny thing called LRM, and some other gotchas. All this just to take and break it into it's constituent elements. Usually then you have a tree structure or some hierarchy that a computer can understand.
Take a look at some common XML libraries: xerces, libxml, a few others I can't remember. They're pretty damn big. Mostly, I argue, due to the text nature of their data. A lot of work goes into making text files useable by a program. A lot (but not all) of cruft can be cut by adopting a format that is simpler for softare to understand.
Well organized communism is synonymous with total failure. Also with naive idealism and youthful over-exuberance. Either way anyone who is a true communist, in my opinion, is a fool, as are all idealists. Even China isn't communist, their government is quite clever and quite pragmatic (for now), but not true communists. There are no true communist governments left.
Socialism is a nicer ideal (without the nasty government issue) that does not take into account the human factor. On average, people don't fundamentally care about anyone but themselves. Society is still a grudging acceptance that the whole can achieve more than the sum of its parts. The parts still prefer to believe they are independent. Much like world peace, it's something to be sought after, but never to seriously implement. Socialists are funny.
Similarly capitalism is a failed philosophy, it doesn't take into account the greed factor. It is every bit as idealistic as socialism. In reality someone is going to reap great rewards for hard work and will want to act to solidify his future earnings. He will in fact prevent competition and prevent capitalism. Ultimately either government, or the actions of a great amount of poor unhappy people will destroy this person or his assets, assuming a competitor doesn't snake him out. I like capitalists, they're often pragmatic, short term, and headed to an early grave. There are no true capitalist countries in the world, don't kid yourself, the US is a long, long way from it.
The only philosophy that anyone in the world has seriously and sustainably implemented is bureacratism. Nothing has changed in several thousand years except literacy levels. All stable governments are institutions with tenuous holds on power that are fundamentally unable to act consistently intelligent for any length of time due to the continued refusal of individuals to want to do more than make a token effort at cooperation. Thus we have politics: strange double talk between ideals, pragmatism and power grabs. This is somehow a relatively stable government, and, to put it blunt, it sucks ass through a thin straw. Yet it survives.
Idealists are always foolish. I ask you though if Bill Gates is perhaps a pot calling the kettle black? Aren't his enemies his own creation? Isn't his market saturation the result of backlash against his aggressive growth? Isn't he experiencing the ultimate folly of his own ideal?
As long as it's standardized, the standard is freely available to anyone who wants it, it does not depend on an external library, and it is unencumbered by any sort of patent, it isn't proprietary.
I hate XML right now because of all the string processing and parsing. Text is a sloppy way of defining something, and it begets lots of big processing libraries. It's OK for big PC memory hog apps, but I can't build a small enough one that is still robust enough to want to integrate it into the work I do (small, compact stuff). I find myself doing other, backwards things, or worse, fracturing XML into useable subsets. It somewhat defeats its utility.
Binary XML sounds like a great idea to me, as long as we're clear on a few things. One, it has to be totally documented in a standard (see above for my definition). Two, the standard must define a tool that can read an XML file and say "Yes this is XML" or "No, this is some [microsoft] non-compliant crap". Three, keep it simple: no compression, no outside library dependencies, no cruft.
If those things cannot be achieved then it will not reach maximum utility and something proprietary will swoop down and take over (*cough* microsoft *cough*).
Dynamic content in most (not every) MMOG is still a dream. I would fully expect WoW to charge for expansions but to offer some bit for free. It turns out that the content of quality considered acceptable to us is expensive to create.
The question of whether there is some room in our monthly fee to squeeze in some new content development is not answerable, except to say that there are so many MMOGs out and/or coming out, that if someone COULD do it, they SHOULD.
Personally I think having a scriptwriter who changes some fraction of quests on a monthly basis could work out. I'm annoyed that the EQ world I lived in 6 years ago is the same one I live in now. But fundamentally it was an enjoyable enough game that overlooked it. WoW beat EQ for my money, it offered more and better for the same $.
Anyhow the only way to get change is to talk with your wallet, and hope some smart person figures out there's money he can grab.
They're only role playing in terms of you have to know your class and play your class well. Clerics should be healing, warriors should be tanking etc. To that end some of these games are excellent role players. EQ1 forced you to play your class role, and play it well if you wanted to get anywhere.
Anyhow your point is taken in another dimension. There'd always be one zone in each expansion that was "where it's at", so essentially all your money went to that one zone. If you couldn't get there, you were screwed because EVERYONE wanted to be in the new place (often there'd be an xp bonus for being there).
CoH has a nice way of doing expansions, if the gameplay were just a bit deeper I could probably get in to it.
Moving the memory onto the CPU has been done for almost 20 years. It's of course always a speed improvement, yet the size of applications, data etc. have also been increasing for 20 years. My 286 had a 20MB hard drive, some CPU caches are approaching that now. However, these days applications are also much bigger.
In reality the bulk of memory is always going to be off chip. I agree with you optics is not the answer, since a single copper wire can transmit data fast enough to saturate a CPU. It's the memory devices themselves that are too slow.
DRAM itself is slow, but it's the cheapest and fastest technology available. It'd be great if someone could invent a faster memory that could be made so cheaply. They'd get rich fast.
Similarly Hard Drives are still a bunch of spinning platters with a mechanical arm flying around inside. To say it's slow is an understatement. Yet in terms of capacity...can't beat it.
Anyone who solves these problems or provides an alternative will become insanely rich beyond his wildest dreams. Obviously it's easier said than done.
It's a lot greyer then that, I doubt anyone even evaluates the cost of operation that explicitly. In most companies the COST of something is very near secret. I may be the only person in my company who knows how much the product I built actually costs, and I'm not allowed to discuss it (and my manager has a different idea that he doesn't share with me, that includes factory costs). It's all compartmentalized.
Price of course is usually public, depending on the type of business (B2B sometimes keep prices secret too). If someone knows your costs they can run you out of business, even if their costs are higher.
All that is for sure is that they require a monthly fee for the pretty massive server maintenance costs and bandwidth, and that opens the door. Otherwise from their standpoint we're already used to paying for software and expansions/add-ons, so they can charge for that too.
Much like every other product we may want to buy, we have to figure out if the investment is worthwhile. I look around me and see $500k 3 bedroom houses that are not much bigger than my apartment, "not worth it" to me, but people buy them. What these people do for a living I know not, but I want in.
We don't know how much it costs to build a Civic, but I'm sure it's not even close to $13k.
We don't know how much it costs to build blue jeans, but I know it's not $50.
You can go on like this for every single object around you. Probably only the subway/bus you ride to work on costs more to operate than it receives in ticket sales.
Pay the fee if you think it's worth it, don't pay the fee if you think it's not. It's that simple.
Historically their expansions have also added new features and gameplay enhancements bundled with "new content" (that 90% of the players couldn't benefit from). They'd usually give you a new zone or two for free (required to access new content anyhow), but to get the useful new features (and content) you'd have to pay the $$$. Often these "features" were seen by players as deficiencies or bug fixes from the original release...
They also have a history of making dependencies in their expansions: to finish the "epic" quests in the Omens of War expansion, you also had to have every other expansion. Lame.
It's greed, pure and simple. Expansions are fine if advertised clearly what they will and will not do. What SOE releases I consider "Extortion Packs".
While I find EQ2 to be a total loss, they could earn back some lost reputation by releasing gameplay/interface updates for free, and only charging for new expansions. Also indicating that xyz expansion will be (solo/group/raid) based with endgame content requiring xyz is helpful too.
Unfortunately by doing so, very few people would be buying expansions, a very telling story of the nature of their game.
I agree, he sounded especially passionate on that single topic, as if he was really threatened by the pinko bastards. It's obvious to me however that his DRM stuff is gaining acceptance in much the same way as Dan Quayle.
Anyhow the problem is greater than microsoft, our IP system is actually slowing down progress and allowing foreign interests (who selectively ignore various int'l laws) to outpace us. Calling IP reform communist isn't even rational, it's quite a selfish...I mean capitalist pursuit.
Watching how my own company works, it tries to develop a single new product, loaded/protected with patents and milks it for all it's worth until the patents run out. Not that newer, better ideas don't exist, just they're not "cost effective" compared to one R&D investment and over a decade of money farming.
It seems strange if you think about technology in consumer terms where people throw stuff out in 3 years and you can buy the competitor. In telecom however these boxes are designed to last for decades and there is no real competition. We were stuck on analog modems a long time for a reason and we're going to be stuck with DSL/cable a long time too.
OpenVPN works nicely too. I'm bridged to my home network as I post this. All my non-internal internet traffic is rerouted as well.
Still, it's possible, however unlikely that my company has installed other logging facilities on this machine. While I do format/reinstall regularly they're sneaky bitches and it'd be perfectly legal.
I don't see blogs as being significant scientifically, culturally or practically. At best a few blogs offer genuinely useful and accurate data, that is more helpful than university web pages. At worst they're a pseudo-political highly biased rant against "all them" that the author disagrees with.
More commonly they are about what's happening on some lame teeny bop TV show or worse, trying to live some lame teeny bop TV show life and documenting it.
I've never found a single good reason to read a blog. If, like many fads, they disappear tomorrow I doubt anyone will notice. In the mean time I'm tired of seeing "bloggers this" and "bloggers that" on slashdot. The only good thing blogging has done for the internet is give consumers a good excuse for running servers at home, a practise that is also increasingly less common.
I agree. I learned computers on a commodore 64, to play games, I learned one step at a time. First, how to load the game, how to copy games, how to pirate games. The games were better than the Coleco/Atari or often than the Nintendo when it came out. They were sometimes different, sometimes more involved, and always in greater quantity.
Inevitably something didn't work, I had to debug that and fix it. I wanted to play the Fsck'ing game. Thus I learned, so did many my age.
Then came DOS and PCs and autoexec.bat's and config.sys's, high memory, expanded memory, extended memory, mouse drivers, sound drivers, oh my. Yeah, a Mac user would rightfully say "BAD OS DESIGN", but cutting edge games were on PCs precisely because it allowed expansion, reconfiguration and the ability to pick and choose what's running. It was a huge pain in the ass, but I had all the time in the world, I was a kid. Sounds kinda like Linux is now?
So I stayed on the PC, it was a long time before wing commander ran on the mac. I resisted Windows, it didn't play games. I resisted the Mac, it didn't play good games. I had consoles out the wazoo, but most of the games weren't as good. A few buttons and a control pad, not much there for real innovation.
All I know is most kids who I'd consider to be kindred spirits right now are those who probably never used DOS and are Windows addicts. Their idea of debugging is reinstalling something. Why? Because that's where the games are. They can do much more, many have linux installed for fun but don't understand it. This will make it hard to attract a new generation of users and people who want more from their OS than pretty pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this is an interesting question. The USSR and China were/are both quasi-democratic, I agree they are not the bastions of democratic idealism that we'd like but they have the basis of democracy in them somewhere.
I think perhaps communism is not fundamentally compatible with true democracy. Democracy by nature is support of the idea of "collective self-interest", wherein communism seeks to achieve balance for everyone. Such a system has to be centrally managed, people cannot decide what is fair for everyone including themselves, only what is best for everyone else. You can't be objective when it comes to you and yours. It's the basis fo almost any stable legal system for that reason.
Communism is just not compatible with human nature, for the simple reason that I and I alone am in it for myself. Throw in the fact that the vast majority of people feel this way (however deeply they may hide it) and the system breaks.
There's good stuff to be learned from those types of philosophies, but they're not sustainable in their purest senses.
We'll come liberate Sweden next. Your corporations are horribly repressed by these copyright laws, this must stop.
- The United States of America, making the world safe for Corporate interests since 1776.
Then why have small form factor PCs failed to sell? They're not new, and certainly desireable aesthetically.
I think you are wrong, everyone opens up their PC at some point. Usually it's the kid who puts in the fast video card. Sometimes it's more memory, sometimes it's a bigger HD. Often it's done by CompUSA or BestBuy in the upgrade center, rather than by the owner, but I've never been in those stores without seeing a line at the upgrade counter. I agree most people will not replace a motherboard or CPU since by the time that comes around technology is too far out of sync, but a lot of people cause that box to be cracked open.
Dell is #1 because they're affordable, come with the right collection of stuff and upgradeable ENOUGH for most people. You can add a new video card, new memory and a new HD easily. Outside of that, they're a bitch to upgrade, but I accept that most people do not see that as they will never use other features.
People who use Apple are different, they are willing to make sacrifices on functionality for aesthetics and lower hassle. They can't use the majority of the software in the world, yet pay $3000 for computers. That seems like the niche market, and I suspect this will work only for Apple.
I always use tower PCs because it's easy to swap in/out equipment. The miniature desktop type machines always seem to have some non-standard boards or inadequate expansion slots.
That's also the reason I rarely buy HP/Dell/Compaq/brand name machines, I can't do anything with them once i own them. I'd rather go buy a cheapo tower that can take an ATX motherboard of my choosing...it's cheaper to deal with.
What Apple does is probably good for the people who use Apples and want a smaller, cuter LOOKING computer, but the market of people that use Apple is different than the market of people who use PCs.
Apples are the closest thing you can get to a car with the hood welded shut. They can get away with form factor changes. PCs are the closest you can get to a "generic" car: any engine, any wheels, any frame, etc. It's still not totally generic, but 5 years ago a PC without an intel chip was essentially defunct, now a PC without an Intel chip is normal. All we have to do is get rid of MS.
The Chinese government is disturbed by a trend amongst urban chinese related to sex and relationships. Apparently there's been a surge in partner swapping or just very short lived marriages, and lots more not getting married and just sleeping around. This is particularly evident amongst the young.
So like American parents, they blame video games and TV. With more force than american mothers however, they manage to ban things they don't like (some of which I am sure is political). I doubt this will be problematic to young chinese boys in search of the games.
You're wrong. Developers need to think like businessmen too.
It's quite possible to develop the concept of something, work out it's details and figure out what it's going to be, then right before you implement it or seek funding, stop. Then think more practically. Who wants this, how do I know? How much is this going to cost to develop? How many people are going to like this? Then maybe change some things to make it more palatable to someone who would pay for it.
Artists have been doing this for ages, the best artists figure out how to convey their message or idea, or whatever it is that's the spirit of their creation, yet still make it palatable to people who would fund their work. Sometimes they even make things that are downright insulting to their owners but well disguised.
He's got two problems:
1) Is that most "peer group" targetted games fail. Mostly they appeal to too small a segment of the population to make any money even if they make it out of development. Many don't get that far as they get too complex and too niche.
2) Games like Katamari Damacy that come out of left field screw up his pre-existing business of selling licensed sports games, another FPS with fancy new graphics etc. etc. I.e. innovation takes away some of his market share. Until he owns it, he's losing money.
This isn't really new. Look at Hollywood. Most movies are nothing but old ideas with new faces designed to target a specific market and get some easy cash. But we do rarely get a new, good movie that stands above the rest. They're hard to pick out, but they're out there.
Businessmen are classically short sighted. They only see things as they are now, and make decisions that way. Once something new comes in they're scared until they can make money from it. Then they love it. If you made a bundle off every gas powered car sale, wouldn't you be afraid of someone who sold electric cars?
It's not very well known outside of academia. The only time I ever felt like TeX was better than all others was for highly mathematical school papers.
Anyhow XML/XHTML has a somewhat different purpose/market. The purpose is not to create a perfect typeset document but a template that can be used for any given XML document that fits the genre. You could do this to some degree with TeX and it's references (it's been a loooong time), but I think these systems do it better.
Which in itself is why we need to standardize on a binary format. Ad hoc formats are springing up out of necessity, either it becomes a good standard or people will embrace some corporate version.
Note in my original post I described a need for a validator, precisely to catch and detect MSisms.
It's not a matter of respecting, it's a matter of noting a weakness, exploiting the weakness and eventually providing an alternative.
gah i got mungified
(angle) mytag is='simple'(angle)
What is text? It's a binary code that a computer translates into graphical glyphs. Is it proprietary? Not any more. Your computer is what turns that binary code into something that means something to you. It doesn't even mean something to everyone (in fact iirc the first line in an xml file identifies a code page for using the intended symbols). So firstly, opaqueness even on "text" is not quite black and white. Second, what is transparent to YOU may be completely opaque to software, I'll elaborate on this later.
So what could binary XML be? It's a binary code that translates into XML syntax. Except it's easier to deal with for software, there's no processing. Let me present this example, which I will endeavor to use over and over. . I could write this in binary as 0001010203, obviously to do that i'd have to store the strings "mytag", "is", "simple" in a string table elsewhere, but this is just a simple example. I made "0x00" mean "a tag", the first "0x01" mean 1 attribute, and the rest are string references. Reading this tag would be very simple, fread(buffer,10,1,file) (i picked the two middle numbers out of the air since we have not really defined this format).
Saying that binary is proprietary makes absolutely no sense. Proprietary means property of an owner (usually a business). A file can't be proprietary. It's contents, the format of it's contents, certainly. But a binary file is atomic, it's like the sky. It just is what it is. Binary XML COULD become proprietary, but it will not NECESSARILY happen. Nothing is inherently proprietary about a binary file. If the binary XML format satisfies the constraints of a standard in my first post, it will absolutely not be proprietary by construction, or so I think. I don't work in standards groups, people more experienced with their goings on may point out additional refinements.
Your next point, recovering data. What do you use to read XML files? A text editor usually. What does that do? It reads a binary file (uh a text file!), applies some understanding of what the ASCII code (as an example) means, and displays it to you. Most of it is usually character data, but not always, there's a bunch of special characters that text editors often respond to for formatting or other things. Unix and PCs can't agree even on how to terminate a line. The point being even right now you can't totally say plain text XML is transparent, magic happens for you to just see it. Nothing about its presentation is defined (nor should be, imho). So what could binary XML be viewed with? Only slightly more overhead. You could "textify" as a preprocessing step to be viewed in a text editor. bin2txt myfile.bin.xml > myfile.txt.xml as an example. Or you could write your xml in plain text, and do the opposite. It's one to one, no loss. XML is just a syntax.
Now as for processing, I'll admit to waving my hands and skipping a few pieces. The XML syntax is defined clearly, there's no ambiguity (that i know of). However the step of choosing text-like strings to declare the syntax elements is where it gets hairy. Your first step in writing a parser is to grab the syntax elements out of their native text string. This is disgusting as compiler writers, language developers, etc. understand. You have to make lexx/yac scripts or workalikes to generate code, or worse, write your own (no one should do this but that's purely my opinion and not defendable). Theres a complicated state machine, some funny thing called LRM, and some other gotchas. All this just to take and break it into it's constituent elements. Usually then you have a tree structure or some hierarchy that a computer can understand.
Take a look at some common XML libraries: xerces, libxml, a few others I can't remember. They're pretty damn big. Mostly, I argue, due to the text nature of their data. A lot of work goes into making text files useable by a program. A lot (but not all) of cruft can be cut by adopting a format that is simpler for softare to understand.
Sure, people who write MS Word (i.e.
Well organized communism is synonymous with total failure. Also with naive idealism and youthful over-exuberance. Either way anyone who is a true communist, in my opinion, is a fool, as are all idealists. Even China isn't communist, their government is quite clever and quite pragmatic (for now), but not true communists. There are no true communist governments left.
Socialism is a nicer ideal (without the nasty government issue) that does not take into account the human factor. On average, people don't fundamentally care about anyone but themselves. Society is still a grudging acceptance that the whole can achieve more than the sum of its parts. The parts still prefer to believe they are independent. Much like world peace, it's something to be sought after, but never to seriously implement. Socialists are funny.
Similarly capitalism is a failed philosophy, it doesn't take into account the greed factor. It is every bit as idealistic as socialism. In reality someone is going to reap great rewards for hard work and will want to act to solidify his future earnings. He will in fact prevent competition and prevent capitalism. Ultimately either government, or the actions of a great amount of poor unhappy people will destroy this person or his assets, assuming a competitor doesn't snake him out. I like capitalists, they're often pragmatic, short term, and headed to an early grave. There are no true capitalist countries in the world, don't kid yourself, the US is a long, long way from it.
The only philosophy that anyone in the world has seriously and sustainably implemented is bureacratism. Nothing has changed in several thousand years except literacy levels. All stable governments are institutions with tenuous holds on power that are fundamentally unable to act consistently intelligent for any length of time due to the continued refusal of individuals to want to do more than make a token effort at cooperation. Thus we have politics: strange double talk between ideals, pragmatism and power grabs. This is somehow a relatively stable government, and, to put it blunt, it sucks ass through a thin straw. Yet it survives.
Idealists are always foolish. I ask you though if Bill Gates is perhaps a pot calling the kettle black? Aren't his enemies his own creation? Isn't his market saturation the result of backlash against his aggressive growth? Isn't he experiencing the ultimate folly of his own ideal?
That's the dumbest statement I've ever heard.
As long as it's standardized, the standard is freely available to anyone who wants it, it does not depend on an external library, and it is unencumbered by any sort of patent, it isn't proprietary.
I hate XML right now because of all the string processing and parsing. Text is a sloppy way of defining something, and it begets lots of big processing libraries. It's OK for big PC memory hog apps, but I can't build a small enough one that is still robust enough to want to integrate it into the work I do (small, compact stuff). I find myself doing other, backwards things, or worse, fracturing XML into useable subsets. It somewhat defeats its utility.
Binary XML sounds like a great idea to me, as long as we're clear on a few things. One, it has to be totally documented in a standard (see above for my definition). Two, the standard must define a tool that can read an XML file and say "Yes this is XML" or "No, this is some [microsoft] non-compliant crap". Three, keep it simple: no compression, no outside library dependencies, no cruft.
If those things cannot be achieved then it will not reach maximum utility and something proprietary will swoop down and take over (*cough* microsoft *cough*).
...but not today.
Dynamic content in most (not every) MMOG is still a dream. I would fully expect WoW to charge for expansions but to offer some bit for free. It turns out that the content of quality considered acceptable to us is expensive to create.
The question of whether there is some room in our monthly fee to squeeze in some new content development is not answerable, except to say that there are so many MMOGs out and/or coming out, that if someone COULD do it, they SHOULD.
Personally I think having a scriptwriter who changes some fraction of quests on a monthly basis could work out. I'm annoyed that the EQ world I lived in 6 years ago is the same one I live in now. But fundamentally it was an enjoyable enough game that overlooked it. WoW beat EQ for my money, it offered more and better for the same $.
Anyhow the only way to get change is to talk with your wallet, and hope some smart person figures out there's money he can grab.
They're only role playing in terms of you have to know your class and play your class well. Clerics should be healing, warriors should be tanking etc. To that end some of these games are excellent role players. EQ1 forced you to play your class role, and play it well if you wanted to get anywhere.
Anyhow your point is taken in another dimension. There'd always be one zone in each expansion that was "where it's at", so essentially all your money went to that one zone. If you couldn't get there, you were screwed because EVERYONE wanted to be in the new place (often there'd be an xp bonus for being there).
CoH has a nice way of doing expansions, if the gameplay were just a bit deeper I could probably get in to it.
Moving the memory onto the CPU has been done for almost 20 years. It's of course always a speed improvement, yet the size of applications, data etc. have also been increasing for 20 years. My 286 had a 20MB hard drive, some CPU caches are approaching that now. However, these days applications are also much bigger.
In reality the bulk of memory is always going to be off chip. I agree with you optics is not the answer, since a single copper wire can transmit data fast enough to saturate a CPU. It's the memory devices themselves that are too slow.
DRAM itself is slow, but it's the cheapest and fastest technology available. It'd be great if someone could invent a faster memory that could be made so cheaply. They'd get rich fast.
Similarly Hard Drives are still a bunch of spinning platters with a mechanical arm flying around inside. To say it's slow is an understatement. Yet in terms of capacity...can't beat it.
Anyone who solves these problems or provides an alternative will become insanely rich beyond his wildest dreams. Obviously it's easier said than done.
Each of these MMOGs is a full time, all night, every night ordeal. There's really enough room in our lives (and wallets) for one at a time.
I think he needs to stick with writing, there's plenty of MMOGs now and they're getting pretty good.
It's a lot greyer then that, I doubt anyone even evaluates the cost of operation that explicitly. In most companies the COST of something is very near secret. I may be the only person in my company who knows how much the product I built actually costs, and I'm not allowed to discuss it (and my manager has a different idea that he doesn't share with me, that includes factory costs). It's all compartmentalized.
Price of course is usually public, depending on the type of business (B2B sometimes keep prices secret too). If someone knows your costs they can run you out of business, even if their costs are higher.
All that is for sure is that they require a monthly fee for the pretty massive server maintenance costs and bandwidth, and that opens the door. Otherwise from their standpoint we're already used to paying for software and expansions/add-ons, so they can charge for that too.
Much like every other product we may want to buy, we have to figure out if the investment is worthwhile. I look around me and see $500k 3 bedroom houses that are not much bigger than my apartment, "not worth it" to me, but people buy them. What these people do for a living I know not, but I want in.
We don't know how much it costs to build a Civic, but I'm sure it's not even close to $13k.
We don't know how much it costs to build blue jeans, but I know it's not $50.
You can go on like this for every single object around you. Probably only the subway/bus you ride to work on costs more to operate than it receives in ticket sales.
Pay the fee if you think it's worth it, don't pay the fee if you think it's not. It's that simple.
Historically their expansions have also added new features and gameplay enhancements bundled with "new content" (that 90% of the players couldn't benefit from). They'd usually give you a new zone or two for free (required to access new content anyhow), but to get the useful new features (and content) you'd have to pay the $$$. Often these "features" were seen by players as deficiencies or bug fixes from the original release...
They also have a history of making dependencies in their expansions: to finish the "epic" quests in the Omens of War expansion, you also had to have every other expansion. Lame.
It's greed, pure and simple. Expansions are fine if advertised clearly what they will and will not do. What SOE releases I consider "Extortion Packs".
While I find EQ2 to be a total loss, they could earn back some lost reputation by releasing gameplay/interface updates for free, and only charging for new expansions. Also indicating that xyz expansion will be (solo/group/raid) based with endgame content requiring xyz is helpful too.
Unfortunately by doing so, very few people would be buying expansions, a very telling story of the nature of their game.
I agree, he sounded especially passionate on that single topic, as if he was really threatened by the pinko bastards. It's obvious to me however that his DRM stuff is gaining acceptance in much the same way as Dan Quayle.
Anyhow the problem is greater than microsoft, our IP system is actually slowing down progress and allowing foreign interests (who selectively ignore various int'l laws) to outpace us. Calling IP reform communist isn't even rational, it's quite a selfish...I mean capitalist pursuit.
Watching how my own company works, it tries to develop a single new product, loaded/protected with patents and milks it for all it's worth until the patents run out. Not that newer, better ideas don't exist, just they're not "cost effective" compared to one R&D investment and over a decade of money farming.
It seems strange if you think about technology in consumer terms where people throw stuff out in 3 years and you can buy the competitor. In telecom however these boxes are designed to last for decades and there is no real competition. We were stuck on analog modems a long time for a reason and we're going to be stuck with DSL/cable a long time too.
OpenVPN works nicely too. I'm bridged to my home network as I post this. All my non-internal internet traffic is rerouted as well.
Still, it's possible, however unlikely that my company has installed other logging facilities on this machine. While I do format/reinstall regularly they're sneaky bitches and it'd be perfectly legal.
I don't see blogs as being significant scientifically, culturally or practically. At best a few blogs offer genuinely useful and accurate data, that is more helpful than university web pages. At worst they're a pseudo-political highly biased rant against "all them" that the author disagrees with.
More commonly they are about what's happening on some lame teeny bop TV show or worse, trying to live some lame teeny bop TV show life and documenting it.
I've never found a single good reason to read a blog. If, like many fads, they disappear tomorrow I doubt anyone will notice. In the mean time I'm tired of seeing "bloggers this" and "bloggers that" on slashdot. The only good thing blogging has done for the internet is give consumers a good excuse for running servers at home, a practise that is also increasingly less common.
I agree. I learned computers on a commodore 64, to play games, I learned one step at a time. First, how to load the game, how to copy games, how to pirate games. The games were better than the Coleco/Atari or often than the Nintendo when it came out. They were sometimes different, sometimes more involved, and always in greater quantity.
Inevitably something didn't work, I had to debug that and fix it. I wanted to play the Fsck'ing game. Thus I learned, so did many my age.
Then came DOS and PCs and autoexec.bat's and config.sys's, high memory, expanded memory, extended memory, mouse drivers, sound drivers, oh my. Yeah, a Mac user would rightfully say "BAD OS DESIGN", but cutting edge games were on PCs precisely because it allowed expansion, reconfiguration and the ability to pick and choose what's running. It was a huge pain in the ass, but I had all the time in the world, I was a kid. Sounds kinda like Linux is now?
So I stayed on the PC, it was a long time before wing commander ran on the mac. I resisted Windows, it didn't play games. I resisted the Mac, it didn't play good games. I had consoles out the wazoo, but most of the games weren't as good. A few buttons and a control pad, not much there for real innovation.
All I know is most kids who I'd consider to be kindred spirits right now are those who probably never used DOS and are Windows addicts. Their idea of debugging is reinstalling something. Why? Because that's where the games are. They can do much more, many have linux installed for fun but don't understand it. This will make it hard to attract a new generation of users and people who want more from their OS than pretty pictures.