Well, my point, on a more calm tone than yesterday, is that the usual argument is along the lines of "_everyone_ needs to be able to open their car's hood, _and_ to personally fix some 500,000 line program written by someone else."
Which is false on both accounts.
Sure, _some_ people are extremely qualified to fix their own car, but they're a small minority. The majority either don't want to personally fix it, or would be better off not even trying.
And by the same note, there's the usual argument that any company could pay 2 hours of work to a coder to fix a bug in 500,000 line open source project, instead of waiting 2 weeks for Microsoft to fix a Windows or Office bug. Which is just as bogus.
As someone who makes a living with code, I can tell you that reading and understanding someone else's code is hard. It's not just me, it's the number one reason why so many people like to rewrite from scratch: understanding other people's code and all the interdependencies is harder and less fun than writing your own code.
And most projects (OSS or otherwise) aren't the linux kernel, they're a twisty maze of little files and functions, all misplaced. Just finding the right file is going to cost more than two hours.
Big companies also aren't in the habit of throwing untested code on their servers. Everything must go through a lot of QA before being allowed anywhere near the productive servers. That's more money.
On the whole, most of them actually do not want to pay to maintain hundreds of thousands of lines of code which aren't theirs.
So instead of answering the actual points, you go onto... what? Nitpicking like whether the $ sign goes before or after the number, and whether it should be written as 2.5 or 2.50? Plus playing the pretending-to-take-it-literally-just-to-seem-retar ded card?
E.g., by being the "alpha cavement", I explicitly meant the attitude and concept of making everything yourself, not that cavemen had cars. But understanding that would require some minimal comprehension skills, eh?
But let's move to your only points, in that sea of trolling:
Ahem... apparently you never heard that "every man ought to be a macho, macho man". This point doesn't lend verisimilitude to your first assertion that you are not a woman.
and
Of course, fixing the car, being more generally essential, is generally considered FAR more sexy than fixing the computer.
Dude... grow up. Get a life. If you actually think that anyone's going to consider you macho or sexy because you can fix a car... well, you're so far out of touch with reality, it's not even funny.
The whole concept of cars having _anything_ to do with being sexually attractive to women, was just a marketting plot from 50 years ago. No more. The car industry was more than happy to take the money of retards who actually thought that buying a Corvette compensates for having a small dick. They were even happier to have you believe that buying a crap quality car and having to fix it yourself every 20 miles, as was the standard back then, counted as macho. When in fact it was just getting shafted by those who sold you that crap.
Of course, in the meantime even the car industry has dropped that implication. In the meantime they discovered that it's more profitable to take the women's money too, than to keep playing the "cars are for men" card.
So you're stuck in... what? A fantasy world that only existed in advertising, a long time ago?
Grow Up. Step away from the crack pipe. Take a 12 step program. Whatever gets you back in touch with reality, really.
Everyone has one (or 10) of those stories along the lines of "I was called to fix the computer of a relative/neighbour/stranger, and they had it fixed by an MCSE/themselves/12 year old kid. And boy, it was so totally messed up. I had to work hours just to fix the drivers/OS/case rivetted shut instead of using screws/whatever. And the drivers/screws/connectors/whatever were installed all wrong. Who the heck allows these idiot users/MCSEs/kids anywhere near a computer?"
Or if someone works in the service department of some computer shop, I'm sure they can tell you a dozen stories of idiots who brought in a cracked CPU and tried to claim they got it like that. Or a burned CPU, because someone forgot to also connect the fan. Or a CPU where some unskilled idiot literally doused it in tons on heat-conductive paste and shortcircuited stuff. Or with bent pins. Or hardware where the wrong screws have obviously been used, by sheer brute force. Etc.
And if there are any professional car mechanics reading Slashdot, I'm sure they have a dozen stories each. Stories where some idiot thought he saved $100 by fixing some trivial stuff himself, but indirectly messed up something else and ended paying up $500 for some more complicated repairs instead.
But when you hear people talking about their own exploits it's always "oh, I save this big old wad of money by doing all myself." Noone comes forwards and says "hi, I'm the idiot MCSE who rivetted the computer case shut, and plugged the connectors the wrong way." And noone ever comes to say, "hi, I'm the idiot you hear about that ruined several thousands dollars worth of engine because I was too cheap to pay $50 to have a professional install that gasket." Or "hi, I'm the idiot who clogged the engine with teflon flakes, because that ad made it sound like a smart thing to do."
So let's leave the selective confirmation aside, and face the facts: home-brewn repairs and upgrades are _the_ number one cause of ruined equipment and needing even bigger repairs down the line. The millions of macho "I know everything, and can repair everything, and saved a big wad of money doing so" types are the number one source of both income and harrassment for the real professionals.
I'm not a woman either, but I _don't_ want to fix my own car, TV, washing machine, etc. If you're the kind of person who'd ask for that: I don't want to fix _yours_ either. (And since the topic does mention OSS, I'll do the horribly non-slashdot thing and say: I don't want to fix your code either.)
The whole closed economy idea where you do everything by yourself went out of fashion a century ago. In fact, debatably it was slowly going out of fashion already around the year 8000 BC. People were already divided into people who can plough the fields, people who can build a fortress, people who know how to operate the water supply, people who can make or fix a bronze spear, people who can fight, etc.
Why? Because it's more efficient that way. So you might as well grow out of being the alpha caveman, and finally get on with living in the 21'st century. The idea nowadays is: specialization. Live with it.
You're going to do... what? Spend 20+ hours a month tweaking and fumbling on that stupid car engine (actually even more for some people), to avoid paying 50$ to a qualified mechanic? Unless you're paid less than 2.5$ per hour, does it even count as saving anything? Either way, I don't know about you, but my time is more valuable than that.
The whole thing is often just a sad exercise in trying to look macho. In which case, you can step outside the whole "Real Men (TM) fix their own car" stupidity for a change. In fact, step outside the whole idea that you have to prove your manhood/mad skillz/whatever to anyone.
Do something better with your time. Read a book. Watch a movie. Or do a couple of hours overtime to pay for that car repair, and you'll still have a lot more time left than if you fixed everything yourself.
I can almost hear some people's Pavlov reflex going "waah, but if I don't fix my own computer/car/whatever _and_ those of every single neighbour, they'll no longer think I'm an uber-skilled god." Well, rest assured that most likely they don't anyway. They just think you're someone to take advantage of.
No sexism meant, but rest assured that that goes double for the female neighbours. Noone'll think "woo, he's so sexy when he fixes my computer or car. I want to have his babies." Sorry to crush your geeky wet dreams, but you can forget about that. Women are smarter than that.
The problem is that you're arguing with a fanboy and wannabe bully.
The fanboy logic works somewhat like this: "My idol is by definition right and more infailible than the Pope. Anyone disaggreeing with my idol is the incarnation of pure evil and deserves a painful death." His issue isn't a free speech issue, it's simly "OMG!!! The bastards are picking on my idol!!! DIE! DIE! DIE!" Hence the double standards, and only supporting free speech for one side of the debate.
I.e., you can argue until you're blue in the face about how free speech should go both ways. I don't expect any fanboy to suddenly understand it, nor to actually start caring about free speech. His issue is the clear and shut case of "you deserve it if you spoke out against HardOCP". That's really what it's all about.
And, you know, I used to think school bullies were bad. In the meantime I've come to somewhat appreciate them. At least those had the "courage" to come punch you in the face personally, and accept whatever consequences that came from doing so. ("Courage" if you were half their size, that is.)
The wannabe internet bully actually manages to be an even lower life form. It's the guy who always wanted to be a bully, but didn't have the balls to actually go beat someone up. But from the anonymity and isolation layer offere by the internet, he'll gladly post your email address for spammers, your phone number for other wannabe vigilantes to abuse, and your home address just in case someone wants to come inflict vigilante justice. Basically, still lacking the balls to personally do something and accept responsibility for it, he'll hope that someone else volunteers to do that for him.
Lame. Real lame. I'm disappointed that such people even exis, but I guess I'll get used to it.
You mean the old idea to make it mandatory for the hard drive's firmware to recognize copyrighted stuff and refuse to store it? That ought to have caught cp, mv, tar and everything else in one fell swoop. If it could possibly work in a non-fantasy universe, that is:)
Wonder what happened with that idea, come to think of it. You'd think something that idiotic and unrealistic would have passed through congress in one afternoon without problems;)
In addition to what was already said about SNR (signal-to-noise ratio), integrated sound traditionally comes with _the_ crappiest, buggiest, most broken drivers.
It's the _norm_, not the exception, that, for example, if you have WinAmp started, you can't get any error sounds, nor the sound notification that Outlook just received an e-mail for you. In truly pathologic cases, an application might even hang up until everyone else stops trying to use the sound.
Also on my NT workstation at work, if I have WinAmp started (not playing, just started!) when I try to shutdown the computer, chances are 50-50 it will just hang up for 15 minutes, then throw a barrage of error messages at me. Go figure.
So, honestly, until the mobo manufacturers stop putting dysfunctional sound chips with dysfunctional drivers on their mobos, I wish they stopped making me pay for that crap.
The problem there is that AI today is Artifficial all right, but isn't anywhere near Intelligent.
E.g., what gets touted as great AI in games is still some hard-coded scripting and some equally hard-coded pathfinding algorithms. E.g., you know those great AI bots in Unreal Tournament? They're really just scripted. The enemies which investigate noises and kneel by corpses in NOLF2? Scripted. Etc.
And those are cases where tha AI really has an easy and well defined job. When you move to understanding written text, it's even more screwed up.
Noone has yet figured out how to really understand semantics. And:
- is that text a parody of another text, but drawing interesting parallels that might interest you nevertheless? (E.g., the "Emperor's New Code" or "Reactive Programming (RiP)" satires about XP on the Software Reality site. Right or wrong, as it may be, but there is some point about XP burried in there.)
- is it about a subset of your search? E.g., an article on "Pair Programming" might be very relevant to someone searching for "Extreme Programming". But the article text itself never says the words "Extreme" or "Programming". How does a search engine know that "Pair Programming" is one of the cornerstones of "Extreme Programming?" (And indeed the most controversial and debated one. So if you're pondering inflicting XP upon an unwilling team, you may want to read about it first.)
- is it a metaphor? E.g., phrases like "Name of the Rose" might be a metaphor or reference to some classic philosophical issue (and used as such in the title of an Umberto Ecco novel), and not actually relevant to your search about actual roses to plant in your garden.
- is it some subtlety or irony in there? Sometimes, in the right context, the same phrase can actually be used to mean the exact opposite or to imply that someone supporting it is nuts. A classic example is "Yeah, right", which actually isn't a wholehearted confirmation. But essentially any other phrase can be mangled to that end.
- is it an informed opinion? E.g., a Harvard professor of economics writing about some trade issue will probably be a lot more relevant to my search, than the ramblings of 12 year old on a blog. E.g., an US Army/Marine Corps/whatever officer's about the M-16 as used in the Gulf War, is probably a lot more relevant than the whine of some 12 year old Counter-Strike player about how it sucks in the game.
- is it even in the right context? See above. When searching, for example, for info on global warming, I'm definitely not interested in seeing 100 pages about some game or movie whose story happens in a post-global-warming world. I.e., I'm interested in stuff which is in the context "Real Life", not in the context "dramatic fiction" or "plot devices".
Etc, etc, etc.
That's all stuff which a machine simply doesn't know. Noone figured how to teach all that stuff to a machine, nor how to make it even understand it.
Now imagine this problem multiplied times 10, because you might have to search in other languages too.
the law is written to be deliberately difficult to understand without a legal education.
Much as I hate spoiling a good conspiracy theory, I really don't think so.
IANAL, but from what I can tell, "legalese" is so verbose because it tries to be watertight and cover all the possible cases. "Normal human beings" say things more concisely, but that relies on the goodwill of the other party to not deliberately find holes in it. When it comes to legal stuff, all that is turned on its head.
Have you ever been in a debate with an RPG or TBS "rules lawyer"? Or have you followed what happens on MUDs or MMORPGs with the rules? (By your sig and username I would assume so.)
The MUD might have a rule that says "Bugs shall be reported. Abusing bugs to gain unfair benefit or advantage will be punished." It's clear, concise, and understandable by everyone, right?
It's however also the prime example of why IRL we need legalese. People will argue until they're blue in the face about stuff like:
- "How do you define a "bug"? I thought that combining these peculiar moves to steal furniture through walls was a feature. Yeah, the overflow error message looked like a feature too."
- "I wasn't abusing it, I was, umm, thoroughly testing it so I can bug-report it later. Yeah, that's why I did it 1000 times. Gotta be sure it's reproductible."
- "I wasn't using it to gain a personal advantage, since I didn't loot the newbies' corpses. I was using it to put someone else at a disadvantage, which isn't against your rule."
- "It wasn't abusing a bug, it was abusing at most people's stupidity. If they fell for that trick, however based on a bug it may have been, the real issue is social engineering, not bug abuse."
Etc, etc, etc.
A MUD or MMORPG gets around this by basically being a dictatorship. The MUD's owner is prosecution, judge and jurry, and will claim to apply "the spirit of the rules, not their letter." I.e., punish you anyway even when the wording of the rules doesn't really cover your crime.
The RL legal system doesn't have this luxury, and we don't want it to have this luxury. Hence, the law and the contracts must be written so they explicitly state any potentially relevant aspects. Which means a very boring read for "normal people", but you'll be grateful for all those words when it ends up in court.
Or in other words, you're another case of the "if you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome, huh?
"Can you imagine race conditions?" Well, can you imagine that there may be _none_?
There are millions of servers out there -- HTTP, mail, whatever -- which work directly on files. And they have _no_ race conditions. Why? Because the operating system itself is built to allow multi-threaded access to those files.
Do those files need random read/write access? I've coded on MUDs which needed no such thing. The majority of files (e.g., items and rooms) can be, for all practical reasons, read-only. Only idiots edit those files all the time, while the game is running. From commercial game I'd expect a more responsible attitude, with a test server and release cycles.
Better yet, when you want to serve hundreds or thousands of players at the same time on a server, you'll want to keep most of that stuff in memory anyway. You do _not_ want to perform an SQL query for each item used, in every single round.
Or at the very least you'll want a cache, which provides enough of a synchronization point. So you have no race conditions. And, no, if the locking is competently done, no scalability problem either.
Does it have to be _relational_? All the MUDs or off-line games I've seen do _not_ need or want relational joins to get their data. They actually benefit far more from the old DB way of storing whole objects together. E.g., storing a player and their inventory together, instead of having 100 inserts in 10 different tables. It's actually a lot faster and more scalable.
Do you actually need stuff like "select all players belonging to Guild X"? Well, that's what manager objects are for. You can get that from data in memory much faster than from an SQL query sprawled across 10 neatly normalized tables.
In fact, you'll probably have all players already registered to their manager objects and viceversa upon loading them, so that select is a list you _already_ _have_. E.g., the least overhead way of broadcasting a chat to all players listening to a channel, is to have the channel object already have a list of players registered to it.
What's the benefit of pulling that list from a relational database, instead of using the one you have in memory? No, seriously. I want to know.
It's more work, yes. But it's probably a lot faster, and if competently done, it doesn't have race conditions or scalability issues either.
So briefly: so far you're telling me that said team actually did some design work, whereas you might be a cargo cultist.
"Cargo cult" refers to what happened when airplanes and ships dropped food and other supplies to savage tribes. When the big metal birds stopped droping crates of food, the tribesmen started carving statues of them, to please the airplane gods and get crates of food again.
Think it's laughable and primitive? Well, that's what happens in the programming industry every day. People who don't understand what a factory or a singleton is, or why do you really need one, build factories of singletons or singletons of factories for everything. Just because they saw it in some tutorial. Or they see some example using XML, so they absolutely must use XML too, in the most idiotic and inapropriate places.
It's the digital equivalent of carving airplane statues. It's carving a digital statue of a singleton, to bring forth the blessing of the singleton gods.
And the same goes for blindly sticking a RDBMS into everything, whether it's needed or not. Congrats. Welcome to the 21'st century digital cargo cult world.
No offense intended, but I'm thinking you might have the wrong idea.
Yes, you are right: the current crop of MMO games are dead boring and involve no strategy. They're a boring, repetitive affair in which you just click on the monster, then wait and see when you have to heal. And, yes, it's such mindless repetition that you could just write a simple script that does it.
(And some people on MUDs do. It's a banning offense on many MUDs.)
Worse yet, there is no story, no plot and no justification at all. Why am I beating these rats with a stick? What have they done to me? Does my beating up rats save the world or anything? Nope, it's just for a level-up. At which point, you'll be allowed to wield a slightly bigger stick against slightly bigger rats.
If the sheer mindless repetition didn't suck all the fun out, the realization that you're doing something pointless, useless and unneeded will. You're asked to do something as pointless as moving a pile of sand from here to there, and then moving it back to where it was. Repeatedly. For no other reason than that you might eventually get a promotion for it. (I.e. level-up.)
That's not gaming, that's _work_.
Worse yet, most of these companies are greedy. They want you to keep p(l)aying for as many months as possible. This is done not by adding more content, but by quickly increasing the time you need to invest for a level-up or other reward. So that promotion which is the only reward or justification, comes less and less often. It gets quickly to the all work and no reward in sight point. Where you have to hack monsters for 6 months for your next promotion.
So not only it's turned into work, it's also turned into being less rewarding than your day job.
IMHO most of the complaints about MMO games stem from these problems.
However, I really don't think that making it a twitch game would really be the answer.
At the end of the day it would still be both repetitive _and_ pointless. Real time or not, you'd still be beating the same rats with the same stick. And still having to beat another thousand of them for your next reward.
Exactly what's the improvement?
Basically what I'm saying is that what needs a total rethink is the very idea of these games. Just tweaking the combat code will at most change the tip of the iceberg.
IANAL, but AFAIK "Innocent until proven guilty" is about criminal justice.
A civil lawsuit, like SCO vs IBM, is mostly about who has the better lawyers and makes a better sounding argument. Neither SCO nor IBM are by default either "guilty" or "innocent". They just have to prove their case convincingly.
The law there just guides how can they make their case, but little more.
Well, it's a nice dream, but we'll need far better search engines before it's actually so.
In practice, one man's valuable stuff to share is another man's garbage polluting the search engines. And some topics are already polluted to death by other men's and women's garbage.
E.g., try searching some something about weapons sometimes. Let's say I'm Joe Average, I just saw a movie where Rambo shoots half an hour straight without changing an AK-47 clip, and I got in an argument with a guest as to whether that's even possible. So all I want to know is "what's the clip capacity and rate of fire on an AK-47".
Because I'm Joe Average, let's further assume that I don't even know what AK-47 stands for, nor already what's Kalashnikov's web site. So I just start searching for "AK-47", "AK-47 clip" and such.
Should be an easy search, right? Wrong.
What you'll get is a million retarded Counter-Strike clan sites, clan bulletin boards, etc. Places where 12 year olds try to outdo their l337 clan members on bragging about how l33t they're with an AK-47, or whining about how the AK-47 sucks. In between just acting like a retard, because apparently that's how you get prestige and respect in about 99% of the clans.
Their valuable information to share is my worthless garbage. I just want a search engine which can filter that garbage out, because it's killing any chance of finding what I really want.
Or try searching something about politics. Chances are 50-50 that you'll land in a maze of whiny blogs, all alike. And all linking to each other.
Again, that may be valuable information to share for them, but for me it's just garbage. Can someone please have mercy and give me a "no blogs" checkbox on the search page?
And then come the "Mr Individualism". The ones so full of themselves, that they actually believe their crap is so important that _everyone_ must see it. Just because it's theirs, it _must_ be important. The ones who actually _want_ their garbage shoved down my throat, whether I want it or not. In fact, _especially_ if I don't want it.
Some of them will even pay money to "Search Engine Optimization Consultants", to make sure that I'll see their garbage right at the top. That as many of my searches as possible are polluted with that crap. Well, gee. Thanks.
Some are companies, some are the bloggers mentioned above.
So basically I'm not necessarily against all that stuff being posted, but I'd sure like some better search engines. Because as it is, more and more topics are burried in garbage. And my time is too valuable to spend hours of it adding 500 words that must _not_ be contained in the result, so I might have a chance to find what I'm looking for.
I didn't say that the system was perfect, nor that the compromises were always perfect. Politicians are still politicians.
Since you mention the doctor fees, well, it's actually a good example of why the process does work for the people. Some things, like making very poor people pay extra fees would have been very unpopular, so they got changed. Seems like democracy at work to me.
It's not perfect, but let's put it like this: you have to choose between two evils:
(A) Bending over to do what will please the voters, even if it's a stupidity and/or waters down the law, or
(B) Bending over to do what will please the corporate sponsors.
Basically I'll take A over B any time. That's what the government is supposed to do in a democracy, in the first place. That's what "democracy" even means.
Class action lawsuits are also less necessary here in the first place, since most stuff is supposed to be handled by the government and its agencies, rather than feeding hordes of lawyers and mangling everything through courts. Not necessarily saying it's a better system. It's just the way it works here, and so far it worked well enough.
It's not bending over to serve the corporations. Au contraire, it's a uniform and centralized (and bureaucratic) way of dealing with them.
E.g., we actually have laws and government agencies that represent the consumers' rights. If you've been sold snake oil, or otherwise were taken advantage of by a company, you can go to them and they _will_ take action. You don't need to get 10,000 people together and give 90% of the proceeds to the lawyers. The government will do the work for you. It's probably not perfect, but it works.
Tax law, well, I wouldn't call it that much of an injustice. Taxes rise exponentially with income, and go all the way up. Whatever loopholes those tax experts will find, still won't really make the rich pay less taxes than the poor.
Essentially it boils down to the fact that the US government and justice seem to have degenerated in little more than a farce. They're so busy rewarding their corporate sponsors and begging for future campaign contributions, that they seem to have forgot who they're really supposed to represent. (Hint: the people.)
In Europe this hasn't happened yet.
I'm not saying that European politicians are born more honest. They're not.
I do say, however, that here the democratic checks still work. The press, the unions, the other parties _and_ the other countries in the EU will raise a ruckus sky-high at the slightest hint that a politician may be bought or acting against the people's interest.
Maybe more important is that here, to the best of my knowledge, all countries have more than two parties. There is no lack of choice for voting someone else into office, if the current lot does a bad job.
Better yet, most often parties have to form fragile alliances to be anywhere near a majority. You can't take "we're the majority" for granted and do whatever you damn please. (I.e., reward those who paid for your campaign.) Often to get your own Law X voted, you have to secure the support of one or two other parties. Which might imply altering the law so they like it too, or supporting their own Law Y, or whatnot.
Chances are good enough that enough of those will do the populist thing and refuse to support stuff that would piss off their voters. Or want to have it changed so it at least looks good to their voters.
Speaking of fragile alliances: having one or two members in the parliament can (and often does) make _the_ difference between being the alliance leader or having to follow. There's a real competition for Joe Average's vote. You don't want to piss off Joe Average too much.
I know that this is/. and the fashionable stance to have is that governments are inherently evil, and and we'd all be better off without them. And I'll call that bullshit.
You mention inner city blacks. Well, how much better would they be _without_ government intervention? Would everyone spontaneously donate some of their money so that the less fortunate can get wellfare? Would everyone spontaneously donate some of their money for public schools? (However badly funded those schools may be, it's still better than nothing.) That's BS. Unless there was a government making you give up that money, noone would.
Without a government doing something about it, chances are those blacks would have been still held at gunpoint to work on plantations until after World War 1. (When eventually agriculture started to have too much manpower, instead of too little.)
No, the government isn't perfect. No, the politicians aren't up to date on all technical issues. No, they're not always honest either.
But history shows that it still works better than just waiting for the problems to go away on their own. Here are some random ideas for you:
- If today you don't get toxic waste dumped wholesale into rivers any more, it's precisely because the government has passed some laws about it. Otherwise the pressure effect I've described would have made everyone dump their toxic waste in rivers. Those trying to use filters couldn't have competed on price and profits with those who dump indiscriminately.
- Ditto about factories spewing crap into the _air_. If you waited for it to go away on its own, you'd still have cement factories without filters, spewing tens of tons of dust in the air. In the _city_. There's some government rules that made that stop.
- Dunno about where you are, but here we have some very strict laws on how much pollution can a car spew. And you know what? I very much enjoy being able to take a walk along a major street in rush hour and not start choking and coughing.
I also happen to know that it was the government that dragged the automobile industry, kicking and screaming, into having seatbelts, airbags, and do at least _some_ effort so you might survive an accident.
In both cases, without government intervention it wouldn't have happened. See the pressure mechanism I've described. Anyone trying to make a safe car couldn't have competed on price with those who sold a death trap on wheels. So you'd still be buying death traps on wheels, if there weren't some laws that changed the playing field.
Etc.
So let's drop the lemming attitude that "governments are inherently evil" and start thinking about how we can use them for our good.
I don't think that the general public wants to be lied and cheated. They want features, yes, but they want to actually get those features. The current "it's normal and expected to get shafted" situation is not normal, and not what that public was asking for.
In fact, it's the textbook study of why society needs laws, and why they have to be applied. Because otherwise what happens is that the crooks create a pressure on everyone else to be a crook too.
E.g., if you let some merchants sell contraband or counterfeit goods, it will create a pressure on the other merchants to start selling contraband or counterfeit too. Otherwise their prices won't be competitive. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others in how much of their merchandise is from dubious sources.
The same happens here. Once a company is allowed to cut costs by shipping non-functional products, it just puts a pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Because otherwise someone who actually spends the time to finish and thoroughly debug a product, can't compete with the snake oil peddlers on either price or time to market. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others on cutting down quality.
That kind of thing doesn't go away by itself. Never did, never will. You need a legal system to stop it.
And saying that everyone needs to waste countless hours of their life trying to avoid getting screwed is, if you'll pardon my saying so, completely idiotic. It's as idiotic as saying that your only recourse to spam should be sorting your mails yourself by hand.
There are laws and courts of law for this kind of thing. If I sell you a house which isn't even built yet, you'd sue the pants off me. If I sell you a car, except what I can give you is just two wheels and a spoiler, you'd sue the pants of me. No "EULA" will let me say it's OK to shaft you, in any other industry.
It's time the same applied to software too. (Yes, including firmware.)
Because this kind of generalized thievery and snake oil peddling is already too high a cost for society as a whole. Not only hundred billions of dollars per year are lost to basically legalized scamming in this industry. We're also talking billions of hours total shaved off people's lives, where they have to work around bugs or to read reviews to make sure their new product will even work at all.
Those hours by themselves are too high a cost.
A murderer can be put to death for... what? Shortening someone's life by, say, 20 years? That's approximately 20 * 365 * 24 = 175,200 hours.
Well, these scammers cost society as a whole a thousand times more hours off everyone's lives. Each year.
Now I'm not asking to actually give those marketroids a death by firing squad. But throwing some of them in state jails would be a damn good start.
Either way, again: history has shown again and again that this kind of thing needs laws. And it needs them actually applied.
Hmm? Remember that Microsoft's goal was to poison the "write once, run everywhere" threat, not to have some proprietary super-Java machine.
If they simply wanted some proprietary ultra-fast Java that noone else has the sources to, they could have done so without pissing off Sun. They could have provided their extensions as DLL's called via the Java standard JNI mechanism.
Even when Sun sued them, what did Microsoft do? Used it as an excuse to bail out of providing an up-to-date standard JVM for Windows, which effectively killed Applets as a viable alternative. (Combined with Sun's idiotic approach of bloating the JDK with every single library. Nowadays it even includes an XML parser. Not many people wanted to download tens of megs on dialup just to run a stupid applet.)
Basically again: Microsoft didn't want to have a super-product and/or make money, it wanted the Java market to fragment and die.
So what's going to keep them from using Open Source to that end? So people are going to get the sources to Microsoft's fork. So some of them will get ported to Linux. All the better, no? It's just helping the fragmentation to spread farther, no?
In fact, if I was Bill and wanted to see Java dead, I'd make sure there's not just one GPL fork. I'd make sure there are 5 fundamentally incompatible GPL'ed forks! And that you need to explicitly check which version of Java and which OS you're running on, to have your program run at all.
Heck, I'd even pay some third party to port some of that incompatible stuff to Linux. As part of some MS utility pack for Linux or some such.
I think he was meaning the exact same thing that you do.
However, I think the real problem aren't untrained people spontaneously wanting to do UI design too. The bigger problem is marketroids trained to prey upon those people's PHBs.
There are whole classes of snake oil products marketted as "hey look, we copied the photoshop interface, so now you can use your graphics artists as web/UI designers." And twice as many marketted as "hey, look, we made a language with the keywords bracketted between < and >, so now you can use your web designers as programmers."
Never mind that not only it's forcing that poor bugger to do something he was never trained for, but also unlike a more normal language:
- it lacks a debugger, - lacks most of the useful libraries available in C or Java, - lacks a choice of good IDE's, - comes with its own quirks and bugs that normal language compilers have already ironed out, etc.
So effectively, that Snake Oil Enterprise Edition (TM) is a liability, instead of the silver bullet.
That's the real problem. PHBs who can't even program their VCR's clock insist that programming is easy. Because the nice friendly snake-oil salesman told them so. And again and again they will buy any snake oil that promises to let them use untrained monkeys as programmers.
PHBs who can't even write a memo that's not offensive to the eyes, insist that UI design is easy. Because the nice friendly snake-oil salesman told them so. And again and again they'll buy any snake oil that promises to let them use untrained monkeys as UI designers. Or which promises to let their own untallented self export the UI templates directly from Word. (Resulting in an abhomination: documents intended for printing make for a very painful read when exported verbatim to the computer screen.)
And there are hordes of dishonest marketroids which make a living by preying upon these PHBs.
The whole lack of responsibility in this industry, combined with the "all that matters is if you make a profit" attitude, have made it not only acceptable to lie to your customers. They made it _expected_. You're actually _expected_ to go lie your ass off to some poor PHB, if that's what it takes to sell some snake oil for a quick buck.
And then some poor programmers or graphics artists or web designers are saddled with that snake oil product and forced to do something that they're not trained for, and which they didn't want to do in the first place.
And people do choose MS products which are inferior due to cluelessness, such as MSIE, where even MS themselves recomend that you should type in URLS, rather than clicking on them. Quite how that is an ease of use ``feature'' is beyond me.
As opposed to choosing... what? Mozilla? Opera?
As long as some 20% of the sites out there only work right in IE, do you really need any other explanation as to why people use IE?
If they wanted to move away from IE: At what cost? You're proposing that they do... what?
- Move their account to another bank, because the old one only really supports IE?
- Stop visiting their favourite sites, just because those are IE-only?
- Change millions of dollars of enterprise software, just because the existing version isn't exactly HTML 4.0 standard conform? (True story: the WebSphere 5.1 admin console doesn't work with Opera.)
Much as I like to define myself as an "Opera user", about half the time I have to fall back to IE. Sad but true.
Want to blame it on something? How about blaming it on Netscape? We stared with a market where Netscape was _the_ browser, and every single web site project explicitly included the requirement to test it all on Netscape too. And ended up with a market where Netscape is less than 1% of the market and noone sane even gives a damn about being compatible with it any more.
What made that possible? Well, several years of not even having a product any more will do that. Presumably on account that everyone was coding for their own fun. Their fun meaning coding grandious frameworks from scratch, including their very own non-standard widgets, and their very own bug tracking system, etc. And it took years for one of them to start actually wanting what Joe Average wanted all along: a working browser.
Except by the time that finally happened, noone was giving a damn about Netscape or compatibility with it any more.
As you can see, you don't really need "cluelessness" to explain why everyone sticks to IE.
No, if that's all you understood from there, you need to RTFA again.
What is also in there is the tragedy of people doing a half-arsed effort to immitate something they don't actually use or understand themselves.
In this case: people who don't understand good GUI design, and likely harbor a lot of contempt for those clueless idiots who need a GUI (instead of editing it all in vi, like us Real Men), make a half arsed GUI.
They don't understand _what_ is it that people really like at Windows GUIs, nor _how_ does that GUI really make life easier. Instead they have some utterly superficial, and utterly wrong, impression like "oh, we just need to throw some buttons and text fields together, and those stupid GUI-lovers will love it."
So they make something with a lot of buttons and text fields, but... it misses the real point by a mile. It actually only adds complexity and confusion, instead of reducing it. Now instead of a well commented config file, you have a catastrophe of a non-obvious mess of dialogs which actually give the user _less_ information.
If only someone tried to actually understand the whole point first...
First of all, my beef is mostly with people who _are_ paid for whatever they're doing. Remember that we were talking about PHBs (a.k.a. managers), at Microsoft and other corporations. Those _are_ paid.
Most of the corporate web sites, for example, aren't done by some volunteer coder in his/her free time, but often are bloated multi-million dollar projects. Yet more than half of them end up an ego-masturbation affair, with zero value for the user.
Having said that, let's get back to your point: of course, when you're doing it for free, noone can force you to code for the user. But then we can all just drop the pretense that "linux is ready for the desktop", and doubly so for the insulting pretense that "people choose the 'inferior' MS products because they're clueless/stupid/Redmond-fanboys/whatever."
Now you know why all those people stick to Microsoft products, no matter how often you tell them about the virtues of OSS. Because with Microsoft's products you _can_ expect that someone designed it for your ease of use, and not just for their own fun when bored enough in the afternoon.
No, sorry, I don't think it's PHBs who make a project usable. You know a PHB has been at work if you see a GUI with:
- a ludicrious colour scheme that 25% of humans physically can't read (two true cases I actually worked on: cyan on blue, and light orange on orange-ish yellow)
- some unreadable font (free hint: Sevenet 7 is a literal pain in the eyes in 1600x1200)
- 250 k of graphics on every single page, including, but not limited to, splattered across the tabs or instead of plain text for text field labels, and with funny roll-overs on every single word
- a fetish for frames in frames in frames
- a pain-in-the-ass navigation, where you have to go through pages after pages of marketting bullshit and self-loving to get to anything that might interest you (free hint: I'm already on your page. You already have my attention. Stop trying to force feed me your marketting. Let me just buy the damn thing I came for, or I'll take my business somewhere else.)
- overkill and mandatory use of javascript and flash. Not to help the user experience (e.g., neat helper functions that recalculate the totals and whatnot). But obtrusive, annoying, abuse of the user's browser and time
Etc.
(As opposed to GUIs made by coders, which tend to be just an illogical, ugly, and haphazard collection of controlls thrown together on a page. With no consideration for aesthetics, grouping or functionality. The user should be thankful that he's getting a GUI at all, right? Real Men edit cryptic config files in vi.)
What Microsoft and Apple have is not PHBs, but usability experts. People who actually have an education and years of experience in making it easy and obvious for the end user. People who will constantly ask themselves and the user "how can we make this better?" instead of jumping to the "RTFM, you fsking n00b!" answer.
As was said, if you have to say "RTFM", then your UI has a problem. Doubly so if you're wantonly making the user learn a new interface instead of applying the standard skills he/she already has, and which would have solved the problem just as well.
Briefly: You are coding for the user. Not for your own ego.
That's something that Apple and Microsoft understood relatively early.
Let's make a quick mental exercise and try to think what's actually needed to really modify the very way a GUI works. I.e., to actually provide a better metaphor than those "boring and pedestrian" files.
Let's think in terms of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm. Even if the actual implementation might make a monolythic screw-up of it, the conceptual difference between the three is still useful.
1. The Model: it's where your data sits. In the case of the aging pedestrian Explorer interface, the "model" is the filesystem.
And here's the scoop: since the old pedestrian paradigm of files and opening them is built into the very structure of the filesystem, this is where some fundamental changes will have to happen.
And once you change that, you're in for one helluva lot more coding work, to actually make an API and all for other applications to be able to use that whole new information hierarchy too. And you'll also need to write a whole new layer of software to enable old "legacy" applications to still function as before, by thinking they're using the old file-based system.
2. The Controller: this is what processes all those mouse-clicks. As the case may be, it may tell the model to change (e.g., delete or move a file), or tell the view to change (e.g., show the contents of a different directory), or both, or something else (e.g., launch an application.)
Again, the current controllers are very much _based_ on that old metaphor of files and opening them. If you're to offer the users a more metaphor-rich experience (whatever that may be), the controller must get one hell of an overhaul. In fact, someone will have to pretty much throw the old one away, and write a new one from scratch.
3. The View: this is the part which not only draws stuff on the screen, but actually decides _what_ should be drawn, and _how_.
Just shoving a browser or a media player here isn't going to magically make your metaphors happen. The actual HTML or DivX rendering is but the very last step of it all.
But you've done nothing to address the "how" and the "what" to draw. Having a media player here does jack squat to address that question.
Even worse, it might not help you that much with the final rendering part either. A media player is a dumb application. It has to receive a media file to play. So what are you going to do? Force the rest of the file manager to encode everything as a movie, which then the media player can finally render? What's the advantage there over just painting your advanced metaphors directly on the screen?
But either way: any way you want to look at it, out of the 3 conceptual components, the media player would be just a tiny part of 1 of them. And even there its contribution is highly debatable if it's worth the programming effort.
So as I've said, if any magic is going to happen, it's going to happen in some DLL's deep behind it all, not in the media player and not in the browser. The browser or media player are going to be not the corner-stone of some conceptual revolution, they're going to be at best 1% of the effort. At which point you can't help noticing that it all could happen just as well _without_ making it mandatory to use something as stupid as a browser or media player as your user interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my point, on a more calm tone than yesterday, is that the usual argument is along the lines of "_everyone_ needs to be able to open their car's hood, _and_ to personally fix some 500,000 line program written by someone else."
Which is false on both accounts.
Sure, _some_ people are extremely qualified to fix their own car, but they're a small minority. The majority either don't want to personally fix it, or would be better off not even trying.
And by the same note, there's the usual argument that any company could pay 2 hours of work to a coder to fix a bug in 500,000 line open source project, instead of waiting 2 weeks for Microsoft to fix a Windows or Office bug. Which is just as bogus.
As someone who makes a living with code, I can tell you that reading and understanding someone else's code is hard. It's not just me, it's the number one reason why so many people like to rewrite from scratch: understanding other people's code and all the interdependencies is harder and less fun than writing your own code.
And most projects (OSS or otherwise) aren't the linux kernel, they're a twisty maze of little files and functions, all misplaced. Just finding the right file is going to cost more than two hours.
Big companies also aren't in the habit of throwing untested code on their servers. Everything must go through a lot of QA before being allowed anywhere near the productive servers. That's more money.
On the whole, most of them actually do not want to pay to maintain hundreds of thousands of lines of code which aren't theirs.
Ahh... A troll. How cute. Mommy, can we keep him?
r ded card?
So instead of answering the actual points, you go onto... what? Nitpicking like whether the $ sign goes before or after the number, and whether it should be written as 2.5 or 2.50? Plus playing the pretending-to-take-it-literally-just-to-seem-reta
E.g., by being the "alpha cavement", I explicitly meant the attitude and concept of making everything yourself, not that cavemen had cars. But understanding that would require some minimal comprehension skills, eh?
But let's move to your only points, in that sea of trolling:
Ahem... apparently you never heard that "every man ought to be a macho, macho man". This point doesn't lend verisimilitude to your first assertion that you are not a woman.
and
Of course, fixing the car, being more generally essential, is generally considered FAR more sexy than fixing the computer.
Dude... grow up. Get a life. If you actually think that anyone's going to consider you macho or sexy because you can fix a car... well, you're so far out of touch with reality, it's not even funny.
The whole concept of cars having _anything_ to do with being sexually attractive to women, was just a marketting plot from 50 years ago. No more. The car industry was more than happy to take the money of retards who actually thought that buying a Corvette compensates for having a small dick. They were even happier to have you believe that buying a crap quality car and having to fix it yourself every 20 miles, as was the standard back then, counted as macho. When in fact it was just getting shafted by those who sold you that crap.
Of course, in the meantime even the car industry has dropped that implication. In the meantime they discovered that it's more profitable to take the women's money too, than to keep playing the "cars are for men" card.
So you're stuck in... what? A fantasy world that only existed in advertising, a long time ago?
Grow Up. Step away from the crack pipe. Take a 12 step program. Whatever gets you back in touch with reality, really.
You know what's funny?
Everyone has one (or 10) of those stories along the lines of "I was called to fix the computer of a relative/neighbour/stranger, and they had it fixed by an MCSE/themselves/12 year old kid. And boy, it was so totally messed up. I had to work hours just to fix the drivers/OS/case rivetted shut instead of using screws/whatever. And the drivers/screws/connectors/whatever were installed all wrong. Who the heck allows these idiot users/MCSEs/kids anywhere near a computer?"
Or if someone works in the service department of some computer shop, I'm sure they can tell you a dozen stories of idiots who brought in a cracked CPU and tried to claim they got it like that. Or a burned CPU, because someone forgot to also connect the fan. Or a CPU where some unskilled idiot literally doused it in tons on heat-conductive paste and shortcircuited stuff. Or with bent pins. Or hardware where the wrong screws have obviously been used, by sheer brute force. Etc.
And if there are any professional car mechanics reading Slashdot, I'm sure they have a dozen stories each. Stories where some idiot thought he saved $100 by fixing some trivial stuff himself, but indirectly messed up something else and ended paying up $500 for some more complicated repairs instead.
But when you hear people talking about their own exploits it's always "oh, I save this big old wad of money by doing all myself." Noone comes forwards and says "hi, I'm the idiot MCSE who rivetted the computer case shut, and plugged the connectors the wrong way." And noone ever comes to say, "hi, I'm the idiot you hear about that ruined several thousands dollars worth of engine because I was too cheap to pay $50 to have a professional install that gasket." Or "hi, I'm the idiot who clogged the engine with teflon flakes, because that ad made it sound like a smart thing to do."
So let's leave the selective confirmation aside, and face the facts: home-brewn repairs and upgrades are _the_ number one cause of ruined equipment and needing even bigger repairs down the line. The millions of macho "I know everything, and can repair everything, and saved a big wad of money doing so" types are the number one source of both income and harrassment for the real professionals.
I'm not a woman either, but I _don't_ want to fix my own car, TV, washing machine, etc. If you're the kind of person who'd ask for that: I don't want to fix _yours_ either. (And since the topic does mention OSS, I'll do the horribly non-slashdot thing and say: I don't want to fix your code either.)
The whole closed economy idea where you do everything by yourself went out of fashion a century ago. In fact, debatably it was slowly going out of fashion already around the year 8000 BC. People were already divided into people who can plough the fields, people who can build a fortress, people who know how to operate the water supply, people who can make or fix a bronze spear, people who can fight, etc.
Why? Because it's more efficient that way. So you might as well grow out of being the alpha caveman, and finally get on with living in the 21'st century. The idea nowadays is: specialization. Live with it.
You're going to do... what? Spend 20+ hours a month tweaking and fumbling on that stupid car engine (actually even more for some people), to avoid paying 50$ to a qualified mechanic? Unless you're paid less than 2.5$ per hour, does it even count as saving anything? Either way, I don't know about you, but my time is more valuable than that.
The whole thing is often just a sad exercise in trying to look macho. In which case, you can step outside the whole "Real Men (TM) fix their own car" stupidity for a change. In fact, step outside the whole idea that you have to prove your manhood/mad skillz/whatever to anyone.
Do something better with your time. Read a book. Watch a movie. Or do a couple of hours overtime to pay for that car repair, and you'll still have a lot more time left than if you fixed everything yourself.
I can almost hear some people's Pavlov reflex going "waah, but if I don't fix my own computer/car/whatever _and_ those of every single neighbour, they'll no longer think I'm an uber-skilled god." Well, rest assured that most likely they don't anyway. They just think you're someone to take advantage of.
No sexism meant, but rest assured that that goes double for the female neighbours. Noone'll think "woo, he's so sexy when he fixes my computer or car. I want to have his babies." Sorry to crush your geeky wet dreams, but you can forget about that. Women are smarter than that.
The problem is that you're arguing with a fanboy and wannabe bully.
The fanboy logic works somewhat like this: "My idol is by definition right and more infailible than the Pope. Anyone disaggreeing with my idol is the incarnation of pure evil and deserves a painful death." His issue isn't a free speech issue, it's simly "OMG!!! The bastards are picking on my idol!!! DIE! DIE! DIE!" Hence the double standards, and only supporting free speech for one side of the debate.
I.e., you can argue until you're blue in the face about how free speech should go both ways. I don't expect any fanboy to suddenly understand it, nor to actually start caring about free speech. His issue is the clear and shut case of "you deserve it if you spoke out against HardOCP". That's really what it's all about.
And, you know, I used to think school bullies were bad. In the meantime I've come to somewhat appreciate them. At least those had the "courage" to come punch you in the face personally, and accept whatever consequences that came from doing so. ("Courage" if you were half their size, that is.)
The wannabe internet bully actually manages to be an even lower life form. It's the guy who always wanted to be a bully, but didn't have the balls to actually go beat someone up. But from the anonymity and isolation layer offere by the internet, he'll gladly post your email address for spammers, your phone number for other wannabe vigilantes to abuse, and your home address just in case someone wants to come inflict vigilante justice. Basically, still lacking the balls to personally do something and accept responsibility for it, he'll hope that someone else volunteers to do that for him.
Lame. Real lame. I'm disappointed that such people even exis, but I guess I'll get used to it.
You mean the old idea to make it mandatory for the hard drive's firmware to recognize copyrighted stuff and refuse to store it? That ought to have caught cp, mv, tar and everything else in one fell swoop. If it could possibly work in a non-fantasy universe, that is :)
Wonder what happened with that idea, come to think of it. You'd think something that idiotic and unrealistic would have passed through congress in one afternoon without problems ;)
You must be joking about AC97 sound, right?
In addition to what was already said about SNR (signal-to-noise ratio), integrated sound traditionally comes with _the_ crappiest, buggiest, most broken drivers.
It's the _norm_, not the exception, that, for example, if you have WinAmp started, you can't get any error sounds, nor the sound notification that Outlook just received an e-mail for you. In truly pathologic cases, an application might even hang up until everyone else stops trying to use the sound.
Also on my NT workstation at work, if I have WinAmp started (not playing, just started!) when I try to shutdown the computer, chances are 50-50 it will just hang up for 15 minutes, then throw a barrage of error messages at me. Go figure.
So, honestly, until the mobo manufacturers stop putting dysfunctional sound chips with dysfunctional drivers on their mobos, I wish they stopped making me pay for that crap.
The problem there is that AI today is Artifficial all right, but isn't anywhere near Intelligent.
E.g., what gets touted as great AI in games is still some hard-coded scripting and some equally hard-coded pathfinding algorithms. E.g., you know those great AI bots in Unreal Tournament? They're really just scripted. The enemies which investigate noises and kneel by corpses in NOLF2? Scripted. Etc.
And those are cases where tha AI really has an easy and well defined job. When you move to understanding written text, it's even more screwed up.
Noone has yet figured out how to really understand semantics. And:
- is that text a parody of another text, but drawing interesting parallels that might interest you nevertheless? (E.g., the "Emperor's New Code" or "Reactive Programming (RiP)" satires about XP on the Software Reality site. Right or wrong, as it may be, but there is some point about XP burried in there.)
- is it about a subset of your search? E.g., an article on "Pair Programming" might be very relevant to someone searching for "Extreme Programming". But the article text itself never says the words "Extreme" or "Programming". How does a search engine know that "Pair Programming" is one of the cornerstones of "Extreme Programming?" (And indeed the most controversial and debated one. So if you're pondering inflicting XP upon an unwilling team, you may want to read about it first.)
- is it a metaphor? E.g., phrases like "Name of the Rose" might be a metaphor or reference to some classic philosophical issue (and used as such in the title of an Umberto Ecco novel), and not actually relevant to your search about actual roses to plant in your garden.
- is it some subtlety or irony in there? Sometimes, in the right context, the same phrase can actually be used to mean the exact opposite or to imply that someone supporting it is nuts. A classic example is "Yeah, right", which actually isn't a wholehearted confirmation. But essentially any other phrase can be mangled to that end.
- is it an informed opinion? E.g., a Harvard professor of economics writing about some trade issue will probably be a lot more relevant to my search, than the ramblings of 12 year old on a blog. E.g., an US Army/Marine Corps/whatever officer's about the M-16 as used in the Gulf War, is probably a lot more relevant than the whine of some 12 year old Counter-Strike player about how it sucks in the game.
- is it even in the right context? See above. When searching, for example, for info on global warming, I'm definitely not interested in seeing 100 pages about some game or movie whose story happens in a post-global-warming world. I.e., I'm interested in stuff which is in the context "Real Life", not in the context "dramatic fiction" or "plot devices".
Etc, etc, etc.
That's all stuff which a machine simply doesn't know. Noone figured how to teach all that stuff to a machine, nor how to make it even understand it.
Now imagine this problem multiplied times 10, because you might have to search in other languages too.
Much as I hate spoiling a good conspiracy theory, I really don't think so.
IANAL, but from what I can tell, "legalese" is so verbose because it tries to be watertight and cover all the possible cases. "Normal human beings" say things more concisely, but that relies on the goodwill of the other party to not deliberately find holes in it. When it comes to legal stuff, all that is turned on its head.
Have you ever been in a debate with an RPG or TBS "rules lawyer"? Or have you followed what happens on MUDs or MMORPGs with the rules? (By your sig and username I would assume so.)
The MUD might have a rule that says "Bugs shall be reported. Abusing bugs to gain unfair benefit or advantage will be punished." It's clear, concise, and understandable by everyone, right?
It's however also the prime example of why IRL we need legalese. People will argue until they're blue in the face about stuff like:
- "How do you define a "bug"? I thought that combining these peculiar moves to steal furniture through walls was a feature. Yeah, the overflow error message looked like a feature too."
- "I wasn't abusing it, I was, umm, thoroughly testing it so I can bug-report it later. Yeah, that's why I did it 1000 times. Gotta be sure it's reproductible."
- "I wasn't using it to gain a personal advantage, since I didn't loot the newbies' corpses. I was using it to put someone else at a disadvantage, which isn't against your rule."
- "It wasn't abusing a bug, it was abusing at most people's stupidity. If they fell for that trick, however based on a bug it may have been, the real issue is social engineering, not bug abuse."
Etc, etc, etc.
A MUD or MMORPG gets around this by basically being a dictatorship. The MUD's owner is prosecution, judge and jurry, and will claim to apply "the spirit of the rules, not their letter." I.e., punish you anyway even when the wording of the rules doesn't really cover your crime.
The RL legal system doesn't have this luxury, and we don't want it to have this luxury. Hence, the law and the contracts must be written so they explicitly state any potentially relevant aspects. Which means a very boring read for "normal people", but you'll be grateful for all those words when it ends up in court.
Or in other words, you're another case of the "if you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome, huh?
"Can you imagine race conditions?" Well, can you imagine that there may be _none_?
There are millions of servers out there -- HTTP, mail, whatever -- which work directly on files. And they have _no_ race conditions. Why? Because the operating system itself is built to allow multi-threaded access to those files.
Do those files need random read/write access? I've coded on MUDs which needed no such thing. The majority of files (e.g., items and rooms) can be, for all practical reasons, read-only. Only idiots edit those files all the time, while the game is running. From commercial game I'd expect a more responsible attitude, with a test server and release cycles.
Better yet, when you want to serve hundreds or thousands of players at the same time on a server, you'll want to keep most of that stuff in memory anyway. You do _not_ want to perform an SQL query for each item used, in every single round.
Or at the very least you'll want a cache, which provides enough of a synchronization point. So you have no race conditions. And, no, if the locking is competently done, no scalability problem either.
Does it have to be _relational_? All the MUDs or off-line games I've seen do _not_ need or want relational joins to get their data. They actually benefit far more from the old DB way of storing whole objects together. E.g., storing a player and their inventory together, instead of having 100 inserts in 10 different tables. It's actually a lot faster and more scalable.
Do you actually need stuff like "select all players belonging to Guild X"? Well, that's what manager objects are for. You can get that from data in memory much faster than from an SQL query sprawled across 10 neatly normalized tables.
In fact, you'll probably have all players already registered to their manager objects and viceversa upon loading them, so that select is a list you _already_ _have_. E.g., the least overhead way of broadcasting a chat to all players listening to a channel, is to have the channel object already have a list of players registered to it.
What's the benefit of pulling that list from a relational database, instead of using the one you have in memory? No, seriously. I want to know.
It's more work, yes. But it's probably a lot faster, and if competently done, it doesn't have race conditions or scalability issues either.
So briefly: so far you're telling me that said team actually did some design work, whereas you might be a cargo cultist.
"Cargo cult" refers to what happened when airplanes and ships dropped food and other supplies to savage tribes. When the big metal birds stopped droping crates of food, the tribesmen started carving statues of them, to please the airplane gods and get crates of food again.
Think it's laughable and primitive? Well, that's what happens in the programming industry every day. People who don't understand what a factory or a singleton is, or why do you really need one, build factories of singletons or singletons of factories for everything. Just because they saw it in some tutorial. Or they see some example using XML, so they absolutely must use XML too, in the most idiotic and inapropriate places.
It's the digital equivalent of carving airplane statues. It's carving a digital statue of a singleton, to bring forth the blessing of the singleton gods.
And the same goes for blindly sticking a RDBMS into everything, whether it's needed or not. Congrats. Welcome to the 21'st century digital cargo cult world.
No offense intended, but I'm thinking you might have the wrong idea.
Yes, you are right: the current crop of MMO games are dead boring and involve no strategy. They're a boring, repetitive affair in which you just click on the monster, then wait and see when you have to heal. And, yes, it's such mindless repetition that you could just write a simple script that does it.
(And some people on MUDs do. It's a banning offense on many MUDs.)
Worse yet, there is no story, no plot and no justification at all. Why am I beating these rats with a stick? What have they done to me? Does my beating up rats save the world or anything? Nope, it's just for a level-up. At which point, you'll be allowed to wield a slightly bigger stick against slightly bigger rats.
If the sheer mindless repetition didn't suck all the fun out, the realization that you're doing something pointless, useless and unneeded will. You're asked to do something as pointless as moving a pile of sand from here to there, and then moving it back to where it was. Repeatedly. For no other reason than that you might eventually get a promotion for it. (I.e. level-up.)
That's not gaming, that's _work_.
Worse yet, most of these companies are greedy. They want you to keep p(l)aying for as many months as possible. This is done not by adding more content, but by quickly increasing the time you need to invest for a level-up or other reward. So that promotion which is the only reward or justification, comes less and less often. It gets quickly to the all work and no reward in sight point. Where you have to hack monsters for 6 months for your next promotion.
So not only it's turned into work, it's also turned into being less rewarding than your day job.
IMHO most of the complaints about MMO games stem from these problems.
However, I really don't think that making it a twitch game would really be the answer.
At the end of the day it would still be both repetitive _and_ pointless. Real time or not, you'd still be beating the same rats with the same stick. And still having to beat another thousand of them for your next reward.
Exactly what's the improvement?
Basically what I'm saying is that what needs a total rethink is the very idea of these games. Just tweaking the combat code will at most change the tip of the iceberg.
IANAL, but AFAIK "Innocent until proven guilty" is about criminal justice.
A civil lawsuit, like SCO vs IBM, is mostly about who has the better lawyers and makes a better sounding argument. Neither SCO nor IBM are by default either "guilty" or "innocent". They just have to prove their case convincingly.
The law there just guides how can they make their case, but little more.
Well, it's a nice dream, but we'll need far better search engines before it's actually so.
In practice, one man's valuable stuff to share is another man's garbage polluting the search engines. And some topics are already polluted to death by other men's and women's garbage.
E.g., try searching some something about weapons sometimes. Let's say I'm Joe Average, I just saw a movie where Rambo shoots half an hour straight without changing an AK-47 clip, and I got in an argument with a guest as to whether that's even possible. So all I want to know is "what's the clip capacity and rate of fire on an AK-47".
Because I'm Joe Average, let's further assume that I don't even know what AK-47 stands for, nor already what's Kalashnikov's web site. So I just start searching for "AK-47", "AK-47 clip" and such.
Should be an easy search, right? Wrong.
What you'll get is a million retarded Counter-Strike clan sites, clan bulletin boards, etc. Places where 12 year olds try to outdo their l337 clan members on bragging about how l33t they're with an AK-47, or whining about how the AK-47 sucks. In between just acting like a retard, because apparently that's how you get prestige and respect in about 99% of the clans.
Their valuable information to share is my worthless garbage. I just want a search engine which can filter that garbage out, because it's killing any chance of finding what I really want.
Or try searching something about politics. Chances are 50-50 that you'll land in a maze of whiny blogs, all alike. And all linking to each other.
Again, that may be valuable information to share for them, but for me it's just garbage. Can someone please have mercy and give me a "no blogs" checkbox on the search page?
And then come the "Mr Individualism". The ones so full of themselves, that they actually believe their crap is so important that _everyone_ must see it. Just because it's theirs, it _must_ be important. The ones who actually _want_ their garbage shoved down my throat, whether I want it or not. In fact, _especially_ if I don't want it.
Some of them will even pay money to "Search Engine Optimization Consultants", to make sure that I'll see their garbage right at the top. That as many of my searches as possible are polluted with that crap. Well, gee. Thanks.
Some are companies, some are the bloggers mentioned above.
So basically I'm not necessarily against all that stuff being posted, but I'd sure like some better search engines. Because as it is, more and more topics are burried in garbage. And my time is too valuable to spend hours of it adding 500 words that must _not_ be contained in the result, so I might have a chance to find what I'm looking for.
I didn't say that the system was perfect, nor that the compromises were always perfect. Politicians are still politicians.
Since you mention the doctor fees, well, it's actually a good example of why the process does work for the people. Some things, like making very poor people pay extra fees would have been very unpopular, so they got changed. Seems like democracy at work to me.
It's not perfect, but let's put it like this: you have to choose between two evils:
(A) Bending over to do what will please the voters, even if it's a stupidity and/or waters down the law, or
(B) Bending over to do what will please the corporate sponsors.
Basically I'll take A over B any time. That's what the government is supposed to do in a democracy, in the first place. That's what "democracy" even means.
Class action lawsuits are also less necessary here in the first place, since most stuff is supposed to be handled by the government and its agencies, rather than feeding hordes of lawyers and mangling everything through courts. Not necessarily saying it's a better system. It's just the way it works here, and so far it worked well enough.
It's not bending over to serve the corporations. Au contraire, it's a uniform and centralized (and bureaucratic) way of dealing with them.
E.g., we actually have laws and government agencies that represent the consumers' rights. If you've been sold snake oil, or otherwise were taken advantage of by a company, you can go to them and they _will_ take action. You don't need to get 10,000 people together and give 90% of the proceeds to the lawyers. The government will do the work for you. It's probably not perfect, but it works.
Tax law, well, I wouldn't call it that much of an injustice. Taxes rise exponentially with income, and go all the way up. Whatever loopholes those tax experts will find, still won't really make the rich pay less taxes than the poor.
The fact is that you even heard about Berlusconi, and someone even makes a fuss about it. That's already an important difference.
But Berlusconi is an exception anyway. He _will_ have to answer a lot of questions later. Can you say the same about the US politicians?
Essentially it boils down to the fact that the US government and justice seem to have degenerated in little more than a farce. They're so busy rewarding their corporate sponsors and begging for future campaign contributions, that they seem to have forgot who they're really supposed to represent. (Hint: the people.)
In Europe this hasn't happened yet.
I'm not saying that European politicians are born more honest. They're not.
I do say, however, that here the democratic checks still work. The press, the unions, the other parties _and_ the other countries in the EU will raise a ruckus sky-high at the slightest hint that a politician may be bought or acting against the people's interest.
Maybe more important is that here, to the best of my knowledge, all countries have more than two parties. There is no lack of choice for voting someone else into office, if the current lot does a bad job.
Better yet, most often parties have to form fragile alliances to be anywhere near a majority. You can't take "we're the majority" for granted and do whatever you damn please. (I.e., reward those who paid for your campaign.) Often to get your own Law X voted, you have to secure the support of one or two other parties. Which might imply altering the law so they like it too, or supporting their own Law Y, or whatnot.
Chances are good enough that enough of those will do the populist thing and refuse to support stuff that would piss off their voters. Or want to have it changed so it at least looks good to their voters.
Speaking of fragile alliances: having one or two members in the parliament can (and often does) make _the_ difference between being the alliance leader or having to follow. There's a real competition for Joe Average's vote. You don't want to piss off Joe Average too much.
I know that this is /. and the fashionable stance to have is that governments are inherently evil, and and we'd all be better off without them. And I'll call that bullshit.
You mention inner city blacks. Well, how much better would they be _without_ government intervention? Would everyone spontaneously donate some of their money so that the less fortunate can get wellfare? Would everyone spontaneously donate some of their money for public schools? (However badly funded those schools may be, it's still better than nothing.) That's BS. Unless there was a government making you give up that money, noone would.
Without a government doing something about it, chances are those blacks would have been still held at gunpoint to work on plantations until after World War 1. (When eventually agriculture started to have too much manpower, instead of too little.)
No, the government isn't perfect. No, the politicians aren't up to date on all technical issues. No, they're not always honest either.
But history shows that it still works better than just waiting for the problems to go away on their own. Here are some random ideas for you:
- If today you don't get toxic waste dumped wholesale into rivers any more, it's precisely because the government has passed some laws about it. Otherwise the pressure effect I've described would have made everyone dump their toxic waste in rivers. Those trying to use filters couldn't have competed on price and profits with those who dump indiscriminately.
- Ditto about factories spewing crap into the _air_. If you waited for it to go away on its own, you'd still have cement factories without filters, spewing tens of tons of dust in the air. In the _city_. There's some government rules that made that stop.
- Dunno about where you are, but here we have some very strict laws on how much pollution can a car spew. And you know what? I very much enjoy being able to take a walk along a major street in rush hour and not start choking and coughing.
I also happen to know that it was the government that dragged the automobile industry, kicking and screaming, into having seatbelts, airbags, and do at least _some_ effort so you might survive an accident.
In both cases, without government intervention it wouldn't have happened. See the pressure mechanism I've described. Anyone trying to make a safe car couldn't have competed on price with those who sold a death trap on wheels. So you'd still be buying death traps on wheels, if there weren't some laws that changed the playing field.
Etc.
So let's drop the lemming attitude that "governments are inherently evil" and start thinking about how we can use them for our good.
I don't think that the general public wants to be lied and cheated. They want features, yes, but they want to actually get those features. The current "it's normal and expected to get shafted" situation is not normal, and not what that public was asking for.
In fact, it's the textbook study of why society needs laws, and why they have to be applied. Because otherwise what happens is that the crooks create a pressure on everyone else to be a crook too.
E.g., if you let some merchants sell contraband or counterfeit goods, it will create a pressure on the other merchants to start selling contraband or counterfeit too. Otherwise their prices won't be competitive. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others in how much of their merchandise is from dubious sources.
The same happens here. Once a company is allowed to cut costs by shipping non-functional products, it just puts a pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Because otherwise someone who actually spends the time to finish and thoroughly debug a product, can't compete with the snake oil peddlers on either price or time to market. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others on cutting down quality.
That kind of thing doesn't go away by itself. Never did, never will. You need a legal system to stop it.
And saying that everyone needs to waste countless hours of their life trying to avoid getting screwed is, if you'll pardon my saying so, completely idiotic. It's as idiotic as saying that your only recourse to spam should be sorting your mails yourself by hand.
There are laws and courts of law for this kind of thing. If I sell you a house which isn't even built yet, you'd sue the pants off me. If I sell you a car, except what I can give you is just two wheels and a spoiler, you'd sue the pants of me. No "EULA" will let me say it's OK to shaft you, in any other industry.
It's time the same applied to software too. (Yes, including firmware.)
Because this kind of generalized thievery and snake oil peddling is already too high a cost for society as a whole. Not only hundred billions of dollars per year are lost to basically legalized scamming in this industry. We're also talking billions of hours total shaved off people's lives, where they have to work around bugs or to read reviews to make sure their new product will even work at all.
Those hours by themselves are too high a cost.
A murderer can be put to death for... what? Shortening someone's life by, say, 20 years? That's approximately 20 * 365 * 24 = 175,200 hours.
Well, these scammers cost society as a whole a thousand times more hours off everyone's lives. Each year.
Now I'm not asking to actually give those marketroids a death by firing squad. But throwing some of them in state jails would be a damn good start.
Either way, again: history has shown again and again that this kind of thing needs laws. And it needs them actually applied.
Hmm? Remember that Microsoft's goal was to poison the "write once, run everywhere" threat, not to have some proprietary super-Java machine.
If they simply wanted some proprietary ultra-fast Java that noone else has the sources to, they could have done so without pissing off Sun. They could have provided their extensions as DLL's called via the Java standard JNI mechanism.
Even when Sun sued them, what did Microsoft do? Used it as an excuse to bail out of providing an up-to-date standard JVM for Windows, which effectively killed Applets as a viable alternative. (Combined with Sun's idiotic approach of bloating the JDK with every single library. Nowadays it even includes an XML parser. Not many people wanted to download tens of megs on dialup just to run a stupid applet.)
Basically again: Microsoft didn't want to have a super-product and/or make money, it wanted the Java market to fragment and die.
So what's going to keep them from using Open Source to that end? So people are going to get the sources to Microsoft's fork. So some of them will get ported to Linux. All the better, no? It's just helping the fragmentation to spread farther, no?
In fact, if I was Bill and wanted to see Java dead, I'd make sure there's not just one GPL fork. I'd make sure there are 5 fundamentally incompatible GPL'ed forks! And that you need to explicitly check which version of Java and which OS you're running on, to have your program run at all.
Heck, I'd even pay some third party to port some of that incompatible stuff to Linux. As part of some MS utility pack for Linux or some such.
I think he was meaning the exact same thing that you do.
However, I think the real problem aren't untrained people spontaneously wanting to do UI design too. The bigger problem is marketroids trained to prey upon those people's PHBs.
There are whole classes of snake oil products marketted as "hey look, we copied the photoshop interface, so now you can use your graphics artists as web/UI designers." And twice as many marketted as "hey, look, we made a language with the keywords bracketted between < and >, so now you can use your web designers as programmers."
Never mind that not only it's forcing that poor bugger to do something he was never trained for, but also unlike a more normal language:
- it lacks a debugger,
- lacks most of the useful libraries available in C or Java,
- lacks a choice of good IDE's,
- comes with its own quirks and bugs that normal language compilers have already ironed out,
etc.
So effectively, that Snake Oil Enterprise Edition (TM) is a liability, instead of the silver bullet.
That's the real problem. PHBs who can't even program their VCR's clock insist that programming is easy. Because the nice friendly snake-oil salesman told them so. And again and again they will buy any snake oil that promises to let them use untrained monkeys as programmers.
PHBs who can't even write a memo that's not offensive to the eyes, insist that UI design is easy. Because the nice friendly snake-oil salesman told them so. And again and again they'll buy any snake oil that promises to let them use untrained monkeys as UI designers. Or which promises to let their own untallented self export the UI templates directly from Word. (Resulting in an abhomination: documents intended for printing make for a very painful read when exported verbatim to the computer screen.)
And there are hordes of dishonest marketroids which make a living by preying upon these PHBs.
The whole lack of responsibility in this industry, combined with the "all that matters is if you make a profit" attitude, have made it not only acceptable to lie to your customers. They made it _expected_. You're actually _expected_ to go lie your ass off to some poor PHB, if that's what it takes to sell some snake oil for a quick buck.
And then some poor programmers or graphics artists or web designers are saddled with that snake oil product and forced to do something that they're not trained for, and which they didn't want to do in the first place.
As opposed to choosing... what? Mozilla? Opera?
As long as some 20% of the sites out there only work right in IE, do you really need any other explanation as to why people use IE?
If they wanted to move away from IE: At what cost? You're proposing that they do... what?
- Move their account to another bank, because the old one only really supports IE?
- Stop visiting their favourite sites, just because those are IE-only?
- Change millions of dollars of enterprise software, just because the existing version isn't exactly HTML 4.0 standard conform? (True story: the WebSphere 5.1 admin console doesn't work with Opera.)
Much as I like to define myself as an "Opera user", about half the time I have to fall back to IE. Sad but true.
Want to blame it on something? How about blaming it on Netscape? We stared with a market where Netscape was _the_ browser, and every single web site project explicitly included the requirement to test it all on Netscape too. And ended up with a market where Netscape is less than 1% of the market and noone sane even gives a damn about being compatible with it any more.
What made that possible? Well, several years of not even having a product any more will do that. Presumably on account that everyone was coding for their own fun. Their fun meaning coding grandious frameworks from scratch, including their very own non-standard widgets, and their very own bug tracking system, etc. And it took years for one of them to start actually wanting what Joe Average wanted all along: a working browser.
Except by the time that finally happened, noone was giving a damn about Netscape or compatibility with it any more.
As you can see, you don't really need "cluelessness" to explain why everyone sticks to IE.
No, if that's all you understood from there, you need to RTFA again.
What is also in there is the tragedy of people doing a half-arsed effort to immitate something they don't actually use or understand themselves.
In this case: people who don't understand good GUI design, and likely harbor a lot of contempt for those clueless idiots who need a GUI (instead of editing it all in vi, like us Real Men), make a half arsed GUI.
They don't understand _what_ is it that people really like at Windows GUIs, nor _how_ does that GUI really make life easier. Instead they have some utterly superficial, and utterly wrong, impression like "oh, we just need to throw some buttons and text fields together, and those stupid GUI-lovers will love it."
So they make something with a lot of buttons and text fields, but... it misses the real point by a mile. It actually only adds complexity and confusion, instead of reducing it. Now instead of a well commented config file, you have a catastrophe of a non-obvious mess of dialogs which actually give the user _less_ information.
If only someone tried to actually understand the whole point first...
First of all, my beef is mostly with people who _are_ paid for whatever they're doing. Remember that we were talking about PHBs (a.k.a. managers), at Microsoft and other corporations. Those _are_ paid.
Most of the corporate web sites, for example, aren't done by some volunteer coder in his/her free time, but often are bloated multi-million dollar projects. Yet more than half of them end up an ego-masturbation affair, with zero value for the user.
Having said that, let's get back to your point: of course, when you're doing it for free, noone can force you to code for the user. But then we can all just drop the pretense that "linux is ready for the desktop", and doubly so for the insulting pretense that "people choose the 'inferior' MS products because they're clueless/stupid/Redmond-fanboys/whatever."
Now you know why all those people stick to Microsoft products, no matter how often you tell them about the virtues of OSS. Because with Microsoft's products you _can_ expect that someone designed it for your ease of use, and not just for their own fun when bored enough in the afternoon.
No, sorry, I don't think it's PHBs who make a project usable. You know a PHB has been at work if you see a GUI with:
- a ludicrious colour scheme that 25% of humans physically can't read (two true cases I actually worked on: cyan on blue, and light orange on orange-ish yellow)
- some unreadable font (free hint: Sevenet 7 is a literal pain in the eyes in 1600x1200)
- 250 k of graphics on every single page, including, but not limited to, splattered across the tabs or instead of plain text for text field labels, and with funny roll-overs on every single word
- a fetish for frames in frames in frames
- a pain-in-the-ass navigation, where you have to go through pages after pages of marketting bullshit and self-loving to get to anything that might interest you (free hint: I'm already on your page. You already have my attention. Stop trying to force feed me your marketting. Let me just buy the damn thing I came for, or I'll take my business somewhere else.)
- overkill and mandatory use of javascript and flash. Not to help the user experience (e.g., neat helper functions that recalculate the totals and whatnot). But obtrusive, annoying, abuse of the user's browser and time
Etc.
(As opposed to GUIs made by coders, which tend to be just an illogical, ugly, and haphazard collection of controlls thrown together on a page. With no consideration for aesthetics, grouping or functionality. The user should be thankful that he's getting a GUI at all, right? Real Men edit cryptic config files in vi.)
What Microsoft and Apple have is not PHBs, but usability experts. People who actually have an education and years of experience in making it easy and obvious for the end user. People who will constantly ask themselves and the user "how can we make this better?" instead of jumping to the "RTFM, you fsking n00b!" answer.
As was said, if you have to say "RTFM", then your UI has a problem. Doubly so if you're wantonly making the user learn a new interface instead of applying the standard skills he/she already has, and which would have solved the problem just as well.
Briefly: You are coding for the user. Not for your own ego.
That's something that Apple and Microsoft understood relatively early.
Let's make a quick mental exercise and try to think what's actually needed to really modify the very way a GUI works. I.e., to actually provide a better metaphor than those "boring and pedestrian" files.
Let's think in terms of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm. Even if the actual implementation might make a monolythic screw-up of it, the conceptual difference between the three is still useful.
1. The Model: it's where your data sits. In the case of the aging pedestrian Explorer interface, the "model" is the filesystem.
And here's the scoop: since the old pedestrian paradigm of files and opening them is built into the very structure of the filesystem, this is where some fundamental changes will have to happen.
And once you change that, you're in for one helluva lot more coding work, to actually make an API and all for other applications to be able to use that whole new information hierarchy too. And you'll also need to write a whole new layer of software to enable old "legacy" applications to still function as before, by thinking they're using the old file-based system.
2. The Controller: this is what processes all those mouse-clicks. As the case may be, it may tell the model to change (e.g., delete or move a file), or tell the view to change (e.g., show the contents of a different directory), or both, or something else (e.g., launch an application.)
Again, the current controllers are very much _based_ on that old metaphor of files and opening them. If you're to offer the users a more metaphor-rich experience (whatever that may be), the controller must get one hell of an overhaul. In fact, someone will have to pretty much throw the old one away, and write a new one from scratch.
3. The View: this is the part which not only draws stuff on the screen, but actually decides _what_ should be drawn, and _how_.
Just shoving a browser or a media player here isn't going to magically make your metaphors happen. The actual HTML or DivX rendering is but the very last step of it all.
But you've done nothing to address the "how" and the "what" to draw. Having a media player here does jack squat to address that question.
Even worse, it might not help you that much with the final rendering part either. A media player is a dumb application. It has to receive a media file to play. So what are you going to do? Force the rest of the file manager to encode everything as a movie, which then the media player can finally render? What's the advantage there over just painting your advanced metaphors directly on the screen?
But either way: any way you want to look at it, out of the 3 conceptual components, the media player would be just a tiny part of 1 of them. And even there its contribution is highly debatable if it's worth the programming effort.
So as I've said, if any magic is going to happen, it's going to happen in some DLL's deep behind it all, not in the media player and not in the browser. The browser or media player are going to be not the corner-stone of some conceptual revolution, they're going to be at best 1% of the effort. At which point you can't help noticing that it all could happen just as well _without_ making it mandatory to use something as stupid as a browser or media player as your user interface.