Yeah you're right, I had tried NWN. I even bought it twice, but that's a long story.
NWN shines because it has a fantastic implementation of the AD&D (3rd ed I think) rules; and those rules are good because AD&D is tried and true. Right from the start, NWN is great because they chose a balanced RPG to build on. Great move; wish other MMOs were that wise. (And hey, there are still some great rulesets out there, game designers. Traveller, Gamma World, GURPs, TMNT, and that TSR spy game I can't remember off the top of my head.)
NWN also has some nice building tools, a decent scripting language, and (in my impression), was relatively bug free.
The big problem was, it wasn't designed to support persistent, distributed worlds. So a few clever folks have hacked on programs that snoop the memory and integrate that way. Honeslty, that stuff should have been built in from the start.
NWN took a LONG time to come out. It was anticipated for quite awhile. During that time, Everquest was exploding in popularity. I'm really surprised they didn't at least put the hooks in to support a distributed, persistent world.
But then again, who knows what sort of licensing restrictions they were under from TSR/Wizardsofhtecoast/whomever. Maybe they were specifically not allowed to support an MMO.
Anyways, my critique would just be:
+ for using a solid game system,
+ for supporting scripting,
+ for encouraging live GM intervention,
- for no built in world persistence (DB hooks),
- for no scalable distribution framework,
If NWN2 supports distributed, persistent worlds, with pluggable rulesets... holy crap! Haven't read anything about it though. Here's to hoping...
I saw my salary double between 1992 and 1997, and again between 1997 and 2001. Then the great tech implosion happened. My salary dropped to half in 2003, and right now I'm just coding "for free" letting the wife work as I watch the kids. Quite a rollercoaster ride, but honestly, I'm happier now than I have ever been. Here's why:
When you work in tech for someone else, you are creatively constrained. You look for creative outlets any way you can, but ultimately, someone else is in control of your destiny. You can tell yourself; hey, the creative, fun stuff I'll do in my free time! Yeah, right; your free time should be with your family and friends, not sitting in front of a computer, just like at work. Or maybe you think: my creative outlet is at work! Yeah, right...
Maybe you're the programmer; cool, someone else gets to decide the architecture. Maybe you are the architect; cool, someone else gets to decide your budget. Maybe you're the CIO, cool, someone else affects the architecture, and someone else actually build the sh*t, and if they do a sh*tty job, you're hosed. Yes, you can't do it all. You need to work on teams to tackle big things. But do you really get to decide, in any way, what those big things are? Or are you just being told to dig a ditch at a certain place, to a certain depth and width and breadth?
If you want to be truly happy, let go of the need for the material crap and focus on taking control of your own creative direction. WORK FOR LESS MONEY but take a greater stake in what you are doing. Freelance. Work on a small team. Work part time and free up time to follow your creative bliss. Or just live off the spouse for awhile. It's ok; 50 years ago it was *normal* for someone to stay at home.
Be proactive and choose who and what you rely on, keep things lean and mean, and INVENT; CREATE. Work hands-on at creating.
Remember this: in 20 years, when you look back, will you think "gosh, I'm glad I had a house with 2 more bedrooms, that extra car, those weekends at the cabin. I'm glad I had that extra TV in the bedroom, and took that trip to Florida every year!" Or will you think, "I made some cool stuff. We lived OK. I followed my dream."
If you're reading this, you're probably in tech. That means you're likely getting paid twice as much as everyone else anyways, simply because tech is still a valued commodity, no matter what the outsourcers or people stuck in dot-com-lala-land say. WORK HALF AS MUCH, and invest that extra time into an open source project that you care about... your karma will thank you.
Well, I certainly saw a number of MUD zones that were based on Marvel comics, Smurfs, or someone's inside joke. Yeah, people can create crap with player created content; no question.
Of course, professional game designers can shovel out crap too. I've spent hard money for EQ expansions that frankly should not have seen the light of day.
Key ways to counter this 1) allow players to vote on which content they enjoy and make sure that content is more prominently "linked" into the world. Players will filter out the crap; 2) provide good building blocks; 3) smartly limit what is possible.
Seriously, would you prefer the world wide web was centrally administered simply because something like Geocities could exist?
Before Java was available in Netscape's browser, you could get it off the Sun website. It ran in a browser supplied by Sun (written, interestingly, in Java). There were a few demo applets, the sorting one is the one I recall. I think it may still be part of the JDKs. An engineer at Control Data showed it to me and I thought, gosh big deal, LPMud has had a VM for a long time.
Then I got asked to write an applet to do calendaring in Java on the client, and the whole time I thought, "gosh this is a buggy crappy client-side GUI toolkit." It did NOT work the same across platforms. AWT was a steaming pile of dung. And funny thing is, it never improved. Enter Swing and now SWT, and Java is finally ready for the client side.
It's funny as a consultant talking to companies about working in Java for 10 years and they are usually highly skeptical. That's ok though, it wasn't worth much back then anyways and the language has changed so much since then, I don't think those extra years of experience are worth anything anyhoo.
(Now if only I'd bought some Sun stock back then and sold it in 2000.;)
Yes I know Raph started out with MUDs, but his attitude towards players expressed on his personal website led me to believe he saw them as sheep rather than an important creative resource. I went looking around to tread up on his background after experiencing the horror of Star Wars Galaxies post-launch, and frankly I was unimpressed.
He seemed more worried about analyzing the player community to manipulate it for his ends than harnessing it for the player's ends. Proper respect to him and all for earning a living designing games, but... I won't play another of his games again. Simply not enough "power to the people" and way to crappy an attitude towards the players.
That's why MUDs were great -- you sank in enough time, you typically got to a point where you could affect the world in a dynamic way; be part of the administration; be a god of some portion of the world. Players actually had some power; they could obtain the ability to affect the game in ways that were typically left to designers.
Now the crafting system in SWG was nice, and I understand about the player housing in SWG and EQ2, but I have yet to see a Sony game that lets players expand the world in ways that text MUDs provided in the early 90s.
It can be done; it can work; but it takes some faith in the players and I don't see that in Raph.
And yeah, I did explore NWN and its scripting system but you have to do memory-snooping to make it a distributed, persistent world. Online games DMing with a group of RL friends is fun and all, but the joy of mudding was meeting strangers and playing with 100s (or 1000s) of people. NWN isn't the game for that.
Yeah yeah, I originally got interested in Java when the first betas showed up on Sun's website in part because I'd seen such interesting things done with another virtual machine, the LPC VM that is part of LPMud. I knew that virtual machines had some solid advantages when it came to server security, and I see that is where Java has planted its roots most deeply.
The folks at Sony (Raph, etc.) are responsible for their own problems with EQ2. They rushed to get that game out the door as close as they could to WoW, even though WoW was much farther along in testing. If they hadn't made hasty decisions in order to try to contain the "virtually" certain EQ exodus to WoW, and instead had invested that time on producing a truly innovative game, they could have won back mindshare from WoW when it hit its inevitable "fallout" with players: the (similarly rushed) launch of "battlegrounds".
Now I'm not saying WoW wasn't rushed too,.. solid PvP should have been there at day 1..., (hey it is Warcraft right?),... but EQ2 was chucked out the door similar to Star Wars Galaxies. Sony is more worried about keeping the subscription teat lactating than producing something revolutionary and polished. (Of course, one need merely look to other genres like the movie and music biz to know that very few of the big names are doing more than churning out crap these days.)
Now, on the topic of WoW, I played it to the "uber" end of the game, as I did with EQ for many years, so I know what I'm saying when I say that WoW was a rather big disappointment for me. I've been playing MUDs since 1990, and writing them since 1992, so I feel I have a good idea with what has been done and what remains to be done in this repackaged world of distributed MUDs with 3d graphics and perty textures. In short, WoW was disappointing in its inability to deliver a good mechanism for player-created content.
So basically WoW delivers an experience of "EQ like it should have been" (gosh I thought that a lot playing the game), but it was hardly revolutionary. Once you've explored the content in these games, it is up to you to make the content, or simply to get used to doing the same thing again and again. Its not so easy to build games "on the game", and the games that are there just become a treadmill for the powerlevelers. (E.g. battlegrounds "flag cap" trading.)
Now, I realize that many people will never hit the top levels of these games, and they may enjoy the journey, never "see it all" or even come close, and certainly try the game from the shoes of multiple classes. More power to them. Personally, I think I'd find that boring after awhile too. After all, there is only so much variety the game can deliver with their quest and combat engines.
Now back to what remains to be done... I think that's clear to me. Way back in the days of Diku and LPMUD, when players got to a certain point in the game they became "gods" or "wizards" and contributed content. With LPMUD (or MudOS) and some other dynamic engines, players could actually contribute code! (And yes as a Java developer for the last 10 years I know damn well about the inherent security risks and how to mitigate them.)
I want a fantasy (or scifi, or spy, or whatever) MMORPG that lets me contribute content and code to a dynamic world. I guarantee you a game like that will be innovative because the players will make it that way. And there are ways to keep balance, manage exploits, etc.; if you don't think so, go and look at the text MUDs that have been dealing with this for 15+ years. This is not just another "oh gosh he wants dynamic content, its too hard to do!" post -- like I said, go look at the numerous text MUDs that have been working on these issues for a decade or more. (And yes, I am personally working on my own solutions to these problems, "for the good of open source" (tm). Links to sourceforge project in my profile when I put it there).
Now before anyone links "Second Life" and such, let me remind you that those "games" are hollow in not having the cool backstory and "out of the box" content that something like WoW delivers. You need both, really, and I think running around buying jet packs and clothes in second life sounds as exciting as playing Sims Online, and we've seen how that is going.
Opening a "DOC" document in OpenOffice.org needs to work even if Word isn't installed. Therefore, to navigate the "DOC" structure, OpenOffice.org has to have its own code intrepret the DOC format. (I'm just speculating on this; perhaps it uses something else, so I reserve the right to be wrong.)
An export program (script/plugin) from within Word could navigate the document model using COM or VB for Applications. It would then output the XML based on this walking of the document structure.
The difference is which code is intrepreting the Word document. In the case you suggest, it is OpenOffice.org code, which may simply be wrong. In the "export" plugin case, it is Word itself which is exposing the structure of the document, and therefore must always be right!
It's sort of like bending with your attacker and using their own momentum to cause them to fall on your sword.
Yes, you're right. That is a proactive and powerful strategy for the open source community.
VB for Applications (and I think just COM itself) allows for the manipulation of Office documents *within Office.* The VB code would simply need to navigate through the document, producing an XML output file that conforms to the open standard.
Microsoft cannot block this strategy without crippling VB for Applications, which would hurt their customers who have already built on Office.
I think this is the right way to tackle the problem, and it doesn't rely on Microsoft to code anything new.
Why did the parent post get moderated as a troll? Someone with modpoints, please undo that injustice.
Granted, the parent post is making a joke, and whether you think it's funny or not, it speaks to the fact that once we relinquish control of our hardware to a 3rd party, there's a precident for things this silly.
If your Blu-Ray player can tell on you and disable itself because you've violated some sort of EULA, that same sort of mechanism could enable governments to turn off your hardware when they decide your doing something with it they don't think is kosher.
"Gosh honey, I shouldn't have tried to play that Fahrenheit 9/11 Blu-Ray disk. GD Patriot Act 3."
I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say the first killer app was probably pr0n.
Even if it was 20 character wide, uppercase ASCII, downloaded on a 110 baud accoustic-coupled modem and printed to a teletype machine hooked up to a CDC mainframe.
That was probably the point where someone said, "holy crap, this computer thing is gonna take off!"
I agree with you to a great extent, including that (hopefully) no one is convicted on this sort of "evidence" alone. Yes, absolutely law enforcement would need probable cause to be siezing and searching a computer, but there are cases (the workplace, repair shop, etc.) where a 3rd party can stumble on to something.
Of course, a remote compromise of your computer could also generate the traffic (say an HTTP request to the White House with a special message) that gives law enforcement probable cause.
I just have grave concerns that our legal and law enforcement systems haven't fully grasped the ease at which a machine can be *remotely* compromised, "evidence" planted, and tracks covered up. One would hope every defense attorney would understand this. I'm just concerned that it will take a decade or two before the courts understand this all as well as they understand matching typerwriters and DNA.
I just love how our legislatures are so busy fighting over everything else that they can't pass laws PROACTIVELY as technology involves. Instead, we get to let the courts interpret ancient laws against new technology.
People get to become human labrats in the legal system, having their lives turned upside down, because our lawmakers are basically fat, lazy do-nothings.
The problem with your argument is that if one file can be written to your hard drive thanks to a compromised system, any number can be written.
What's even better is that the hacker can erase all their tracks.
Bits are bits. You can't very well determine WHY those bits are there. Whether an individual went through the steps to download the bits themselves, over the course of weeks, or they got dumped there in one pass by someone in China over your broadband connection.
It could happen to ANYONE READING THIS. You could be framed so easily, and some "forensic expert" isn't going to be able to tell the difference.
I loved how "Ultima Underground", in the early 90s(?) had a funky halucination if you ate mushrooms.
Probably not prior art of this specific "innovation", but... WTF, yet another stupid patent.
This is why we have revolutions folks. You can expect vested interests to change things without heads rolling, bloodshed, etc.
Rather than being so worried about what is there or not, the deeper and far more difficult question is: why is it there?
With the existence of zero-day exploits, spyware-zombies-for-sale, broadband, etc., how can anyone convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that someone put the bits there THEMSELF without a confession or video of them actually putting the content there?
People are going to jail because of this shit. Digital evidence is an oxymoron.
You're missing the point. I'm not claiming that exceptions wouldn't be thrown in.Net if there was a networking error. I'm pointing out that Java has something called a checked exception. A checked exception is something you declare on an API and all clients of the API *must* either redeclare that exception, or catch it. You cannot ignore it.
In the example you give, what if the developer querying the SQL server DOESN'T put in a catch statement? Maybe they're a novice, or they are sloppy, or whatever. In Java, there would be a compile time error indicating that a checked exception wasn't redeclared or caught. In.NET the exception would just roll up the stack at runtime, and you'd better hope someone at a higher level used a catch statement, or your process will exit.
This was a concious design decision made by Microsoft. I believe it was a bad one.
Or learn Java; probably a better option for you these days.:)
So getting back to the great-grandparent post which claimed ".Net has easier exception handling"... it is only easier in that it is more unsafe. A typical Microsoft design decision. I pity Microsoft; they're going to really be hurting when the new virtualization flags in the new AMD/Intel CPUs force them to run alongside other OS's. Then people will see how much of a waste it is for them to pay for Windows when Linux, etc. are free.
Reading through these "great ideas", I'm reminded why true innovation usually comes from the little guy who later approaches VC, not the other way around. Senior citizens need PCs to rent monthly, folks! And the world needs another recommendation engine.
When people are quoting "Vignette" as one of their success stories, I have to chortle. What a piece of crap that software is, and clearly the market agrees.
I can't wait for the day when the patent system switches to "first to file" and we're practically forced ot chase VC before we invent anything. "Gosh that idea you have sounds great, but I'm really looking to invest in a souped up Craigslist."
Yeah, easier in that there's no mechanism to force the client of an API to acknowledge important exceptions, a concept known as "checked exceptions".
I'd hardly call that a feature, though.
(warning pissed off flame ahead) Of course, considering how sloppy style-wise most "graduated from VB" coders are, I'm sure they love not being forced to think about important things like whether or not a call is going over a network. (see RemoteException in the Java API.) (end of pissed off flame)
Big surprise, the lawyers make a cool $2 million off this. That's right, they made $2m out of the $15m that "might" be collected by the deadline ONE MONTH FROM NOW. Quit tech, folks, and go into Law.
You're absolutely correct: the law is not prepared to deal with digital "logs" as evidence. The simple fact is that any set of bits written on a hard drive could be FORGED and placed there by a hacker with absolutely no trace as to their true source. Its a huge problem with "digital evidence" that judges, juries, and lawyers just don't completely understand. But we, as techies, understand all too well how an exploit can compromise a machine, be used to plant something, and then every trace cleaned up. Sure, there are ways to counter this, like creating hard-copy logs on a printer as they are generated, but seriously -- who does that for their weblogs? That's a lot of paper. People are rotting in jail right now because the law and the courts are behind the times. Technology is outpacing law in every way and the reactive nature of the legislative process is going to continue to ruin lives. Having had an uncle go to prison because of exactly this kind of crap, it makes me bitter when I see people worrying about being sued because of bits sitting on a hard drive somewhere; bits that, again, could have been planted as easily as legitamately created. It's only going to get worse; technology isn't slowing down, but the legal system is.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah you're right, I had tried NWN. I even bought it twice, but that's a long story.
NWN shines because it has a fantastic implementation of the AD&D (3rd ed I think) rules; and those rules are good because AD&D is tried and true. Right from the start, NWN is great because they chose a balanced RPG to build on. Great move; wish other MMOs were that wise. (And hey, there are still some great rulesets out there, game designers. Traveller, Gamma World, GURPs, TMNT, and that TSR spy game I can't remember off the top of my head.)
NWN also has some nice building tools, a decent scripting language, and (in my impression), was relatively bug free.
The big problem was, it wasn't designed to support persistent, distributed worlds. So a few clever folks have hacked on programs that snoop the memory and integrate that way. Honeslty, that stuff should have been built in from the start.
NWN took a LONG time to come out. It was anticipated for quite awhile. During that time, Everquest was exploding in popularity. I'm really surprised they didn't at least put the hooks in to support a distributed, persistent world.
But then again, who knows what sort of licensing restrictions they were under from TSR/Wizardsofhtecoast/whomever. Maybe they were specifically not allowed to support an MMO.
Anyways, my critique would just be:
+ for using a solid game system,
+ for supporting scripting,
+ for encouraging live GM intervention,
- for no built in world persistence (DB hooks),
- for no scalable distribution framework,
If NWN2 supports distributed, persistent worlds, with pluggable rulesets... holy crap! Haven't read anything about it though. Here's to hoping...
I saw my salary double between 1992 and 1997, and again between 1997 and 2001. Then the great tech implosion happened. My salary dropped to half in 2003, and right now I'm just coding "for free" letting the wife work as I watch the kids. Quite a rollercoaster ride, but honestly, I'm happier now than I have ever been. Here's why:
When you work in tech for someone else, you are creatively constrained. You look for creative outlets any way you can, but ultimately, someone else is in control of your destiny. You can tell yourself; hey, the creative, fun stuff I'll do in my free time! Yeah, right; your free time should be with your family and friends, not sitting in front of a computer, just like at work. Or maybe you think: my creative outlet is at work! Yeah, right...
Maybe you're the programmer; cool, someone else gets to decide the architecture. Maybe you are the architect; cool, someone else gets to decide your budget. Maybe you're the CIO, cool, someone else affects the architecture, and someone else actually build the sh*t, and if they do a sh*tty job, you're hosed. Yes, you can't do it all. You need to work on teams to tackle big things. But do you really get to decide, in any way, what those big things are? Or are you just being told to dig a ditch at a certain place, to a certain depth and width and breadth?
If you want to be truly happy, let go of the need for the material crap and focus on taking control of your own creative direction. WORK FOR LESS MONEY but take a greater stake in what you are doing. Freelance. Work on a small team. Work part time and free up time to follow your creative bliss. Or just live off the spouse for awhile. It's ok; 50 years ago it was *normal* for someone to stay at home.
Be proactive and choose who and what you rely on, keep things lean and mean, and INVENT; CREATE. Work hands-on at creating.
Remember this: in 20 years, when you look back, will you think "gosh, I'm glad I had a house with 2 more bedrooms, that extra car, those weekends at the cabin. I'm glad I had that extra TV in the bedroom, and took that trip to Florida every year!" Or will you think, "I made some cool stuff. We lived OK. I followed my dream."
If you're reading this, you're probably in tech. That means you're likely getting paid twice as much as everyone else anyways, simply because tech is still a valued commodity, no matter what the outsourcers or people stuck in dot-com-lala-land say. WORK HALF AS MUCH, and invest that extra time into an open source project that you care about... your karma will thank you.
Well, I certainly saw a number of MUD zones that were based on Marvel comics, Smurfs, or someone's inside joke. Yeah, people can create crap with player created content; no question.
Of course, professional game designers can shovel out crap too. I've spent hard money for EQ expansions that frankly should not have seen the light of day.
Key ways to counter this
1) allow players to vote on which content they enjoy and make sure that content is more prominently "linked" into the world. Players will filter out the crap;
2) provide good building blocks;
3) smartly limit what is possible.
Seriously, would you prefer the world wide web was centrally administered simply because something like Geocities could exist?
Before Java was available in Netscape's browser, you could get it off the Sun website. It ran in a browser supplied by Sun (written, interestingly, in Java). There were a few demo applets, the sorting one is the one I recall. I think it may still be part of the JDKs. An engineer at Control Data showed it to me and I thought, gosh big deal, LPMud has had a VM for a long time.
;)
Then I got asked to write an applet to do calendaring in Java on the client, and the whole time I thought, "gosh this is a buggy crappy client-side GUI toolkit." It did NOT work the same across platforms. AWT was a steaming pile of dung. And funny thing is, it never improved. Enter Swing and now SWT, and Java is finally ready for the client side.
It's funny as a consultant talking to companies about working in Java for 10 years and they are usually highly skeptical. That's ok though, it wasn't worth much back then anyways and the language has changed so much since then, I don't think those extra years of experience are worth anything anyhoo.
(Now if only I'd bought some Sun stock back then and sold it in 2000.
Yes I know Raph started out with MUDs, but his attitude towards players expressed on his personal website led me to believe he saw them as sheep rather than an important creative resource. I went looking around to tread up on his background after experiencing the horror of Star Wars Galaxies post-launch, and frankly I was unimpressed.
... I won't play another of his games again. Simply not enough "power to the people" and way to crappy an attitude towards the players.
He seemed more worried about analyzing the player community to manipulate it for his ends than harnessing it for the player's ends. Proper respect to him and all for earning a living designing games, but
That's why MUDs were great -- you sank in enough time, you typically got to a point where you could affect the world in a dynamic way; be part of the administration; be a god of some portion of the world. Players actually had some power; they could obtain the ability to affect the game in ways that were typically left to designers.
Now the crafting system in SWG was nice, and I understand about the player housing in SWG and EQ2, but I have yet to see a Sony game that lets players expand the world in ways that text MUDs provided in the early 90s.
It can be done; it can work; but it takes some faith in the players and I don't see that in Raph.
And yeah, I did explore NWN and its scripting system but you have to do memory-snooping to make it a distributed, persistent world. Online games DMing with a group of RL friends is fun and all, but the joy of mudding was meeting strangers and playing with 100s (or 1000s) of people. NWN isn't the game for that.
Yeah yeah, I originally got interested in Java when the first betas showed up on Sun's website in part because I'd seen such interesting things done with another virtual machine, the LPC VM that is part of LPMud. I knew that virtual machines had some solid advantages when it came to server security, and I see that is where Java has planted its roots most deeply.
A couple of thoughts ....
.. solid PvP should have been there at day 1 ..., (hey it is Warcraft right?), ... but EQ2 was chucked out the door similar to Star Wars Galaxies. Sony is more worried about keeping the subscription teat lactating than producing something revolutionary and polished. (Of course, one need merely look to other genres like the movie and music biz to know that very few of the big names are doing more than churning out crap these days.)
The folks at Sony (Raph, etc.) are responsible for their own problems with EQ2. They rushed to get that game out the door as close as they could to WoW, even though WoW was much farther along in testing. If they hadn't made hasty decisions in order to try to contain the "virtually" certain EQ exodus to WoW, and instead had invested that time on producing a truly innovative game, they could have won back mindshare from WoW when it hit its inevitable "fallout" with players: the (similarly rushed) launch of "battlegrounds".
Now I'm not saying WoW wasn't rushed too,
Now, on the topic of WoW, I played it to the "uber" end of the game, as I did with EQ for many years, so I know what I'm saying when I say that WoW was a rather big disappointment for me. I've been playing MUDs since 1990, and writing them since 1992, so I feel I have a good idea with what has been done and what remains to be done in this repackaged world of distributed MUDs with 3d graphics and perty textures. In short, WoW was disappointing in its inability to deliver a good mechanism for player-created content.
So basically WoW delivers an experience of "EQ like it should have been" (gosh I thought that a lot playing the game), but it was hardly revolutionary. Once you've explored the content in these games, it is up to you to make the content, or simply to get used to doing the same thing again and again. Its not so easy to build games "on the game", and the games that are there just become a treadmill for the powerlevelers. (E.g. battlegrounds "flag cap" trading.)
Now, I realize that many people will never hit the top levels of these games, and they may enjoy the journey, never "see it all" or even come close, and certainly try the game from the shoes of multiple classes. More power to them. Personally, I think I'd find that boring after awhile too. After all, there is only so much variety the game can deliver with their quest and combat engines.
Now back to what remains to be done... I think that's clear to me. Way back in the days of Diku and LPMUD, when players got to a certain point in the game they became "gods" or "wizards" and contributed content. With LPMUD (or MudOS) and some other dynamic engines, players could actually contribute code! (And yes as a Java developer for the last 10 years I know damn well about the inherent security risks and how to mitigate them.)
I want a fantasy (or scifi, or spy, or whatever) MMORPG that lets me contribute content and code to a dynamic world. I guarantee you a game like that will be innovative because the players will make it that way. And there are ways to keep balance, manage exploits, etc.; if you don't think so, go and look at the text MUDs that have been dealing with this for 15+ years. This is not just another "oh gosh he wants dynamic content, its too hard to do!" post -- like I said, go look at the numerous text MUDs that have been working on these issues for a decade or more. (And yes, I am personally working on my own solutions to these problems, "for the good of open source" (tm). Links to sourceforge project in my profile when I put it there).
Now before anyone links "Second Life" and such, let me remind you that those "games" are hollow in not having the cool backstory and "out of the box" content that something like WoW delivers. You need both, really, and I think running around buying jet packs and clothes in second life sounds as exciting as playing Sims Online, and we've seen how that is going.
The difference is this:
Opening a "DOC" document in OpenOffice.org needs to work even if Word isn't installed. Therefore, to navigate the "DOC" structure, OpenOffice.org has to have its own code intrepret the DOC format. (I'm just speculating on this; perhaps it uses something else, so I reserve the right to be wrong.)
An export program (script/plugin) from within Word could navigate the document model using COM or VB for Applications. It would then output the XML based on this walking of the document structure.
The difference is which code is intrepreting the Word document. In the case you suggest, it is OpenOffice.org code, which may simply be wrong. In the "export" plugin case, it is Word itself which is exposing the structure of the document, and therefore must always be right!
It's sort of like bending with your attacker and using their own momentum to cause them to fall on your sword.
Yes, you're right. That is a proactive and powerful strategy for the open source community.
VB for Applications (and I think just COM itself) allows for the manipulation of Office documents *within Office.* The VB code would simply need to navigate through the document, producing an XML output file that conforms to the open standard.
Microsoft cannot block this strategy without crippling VB for Applications, which would hurt their customers who have already built on Office.
I think this is the right way to tackle the problem, and it doesn't rely on Microsoft to code anything new.
Why did the parent post get moderated as a troll? Someone with modpoints, please undo that injustice.
Granted, the parent post is making a joke, and whether you think it's funny or not, it speaks to the fact that once we relinquish control of our hardware to a 3rd party, there's a precident for things this silly.
If your Blu-Ray player can tell on you and disable itself because you've violated some sort of EULA, that same sort of mechanism could enable governments to turn off your hardware when they decide your doing something with it they don't think is kosher.
"Gosh honey, I shouldn't have tried to play that Fahrenheit 9/11 Blu-Ray disk. GD Patriot Act 3."
I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say the first killer app was probably pr0n.
Even if it was 20 character wide, uppercase ASCII, downloaded on a 110 baud accoustic-coupled modem and printed to a teletype machine hooked up to a CDC mainframe.
That was probably the point where someone said, "holy crap, this computer thing is gonna take off!"
Now how about the JDK? :D
I agree completely, both in terms of what market they are seeking to affect, and what they will consider success.
All AMD has to do is get Intel to back off a bit from stuff that would get them in hot water legally, and AMD has invested the lawsuit money wisely.
They don't need to win, they merely need to get Intel to be a bit more paranoid about sticking to the letter of the law in their dealings with OEMs.
I really wish AMD the best with this lawsuit, because in my opinion, they make a superior product, for less money. YMMV.
I agree with you to a great extent, including that (hopefully) no one is convicted on this sort of "evidence" alone. Yes, absolutely law enforcement would need probable cause to be siezing and searching a computer, but there are cases (the workplace, repair shop, etc.) where a 3rd party can stumble on to something.
Of course, a remote compromise of your computer could also generate the traffic (say an HTTP request to the White House with a special message) that gives law enforcement probable cause.
I just have grave concerns that our legal and law enforcement systems haven't fully grasped the ease at which a machine can be *remotely* compromised, "evidence" planted, and tracks covered up. One would hope every defense attorney would understand this. I'm just concerned that it will take a decade or two before the courts understand this all as well as they understand matching typerwriters and DNA.
I just love how our legislatures are so busy fighting over everything else that they can't pass laws PROACTIVELY as technology involves. Instead, we get to let the courts interpret ancient laws against new technology.
People get to become human labrats in the legal system, having their lives turned upside down, because our lawmakers are basically fat, lazy do-nothings.
The problem with your argument is that if one file can be written to your hard drive thanks to a compromised system, any number can be written.
What's even better is that the hacker can erase all their tracks.
Bits are bits. You can't very well determine WHY those bits are there. Whether an individual went through the steps to download the bits themselves, over the course of weeks, or they got dumped there in one pass by someone in China over your broadband connection.
It could happen to ANYONE READING THIS. You could be framed so easily, and some "forensic expert" isn't going to be able to tell the difference.
How does that make you feel?
I loved how "Ultima Underground", in the early 90s(?) had a funky halucination if you ate mushrooms. Probably not prior art of this specific "innovation", but ... WTF, yet another stupid patent.
This is why we have revolutions folks. You can expect vested interests to change things without heads rolling, bloodshed, etc.
Rather than being so worried about what is there or not, the deeper and far more difficult question is: why is it there?
With the existence of zero-day exploits, spyware-zombies-for-sale, broadband, etc., how can anyone convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that someone put the bits there THEMSELF without a confession or video of them actually putting the content there?
People are going to jail because of this shit. Digital evidence is an oxymoron.
In the example you give, what if the developer querying the SQL server DOESN'T put in a catch statement? Maybe they're a novice, or they are sloppy, or whatever. In Java, there would be a compile time error indicating that a checked exception wasn't redeclared or caught. In .NET the exception would just roll up the stack at runtime, and you'd better hope someone at a higher level used a catch statement, or your process will exit.
This was a concious design decision made by Microsoft. I believe it was a bad one.
You can educate yourself here.
Or learn Java; probably a better option for you these days. :)
So getting back to the great-grandparent post which claimed ".Net has easier exception handling" ... it is only easier in that it is more unsafe. A typical Microsoft design decision. I pity Microsoft; they're going to really be hurting when the new virtualization flags in the new AMD/Intel CPUs force them to run alongside other OS's. Then people will see how much of a waste it is for them to pay for Windows when Linux, etc. are free.
Internet polls are such teh scientific !1!!
When people are quoting "Vignette" as one of their success stories, I have to chortle. What a piece of crap that software is, and clearly the market agrees.
I can't wait for the day when the patent system switches to "first to file" and we're practically forced ot chase VC before we invent anything. "Gosh that idea you have sounds great, but I'm really looking to invest in a souped up Craigslist."
These business ideas need more cowbell.
> Easier exception handling.
Yeah, easier in that there's no mechanism to force the client of an API to acknowledge important exceptions, a concept known as "checked exceptions".
I'd hardly call that a feature, though.
(warning pissed off flame ahead)
Of course, considering how sloppy style-wise most "graduated from VB" coders are, I'm sure they love not being forced to think about important things like whether or not a call is going over a network. (see RemoteException in the Java API.)
(end of pissed off flame)
I completely agree. This single point alone screams, "ignore this study! it's biased!"
Either the people writing the study are purposefully distorting their own data, or they are idiots, or both.
Expect more acts of desperation from Microsoft marketing as Java continues to dominate the enterprise server space.
Big surprise, the lawyers make a cool $2 million off this. That's right, they made $2m out of the $15m that "might" be collected by the deadline ONE MONTH FROM NOW.
Quit tech, folks, and go into Law.
You're absolutely correct: the law is not prepared to deal with digital "logs" as evidence. The simple fact is that any set of bits written on a hard drive could be FORGED and placed there by a hacker with absolutely no trace as to their true source.
Its a huge problem with "digital evidence" that judges, juries, and lawyers just don't completely understand. But we, as techies, understand all too well how an exploit can compromise a machine, be used to plant something, and then every trace cleaned up. Sure, there are ways to counter this, like creating hard-copy logs on a printer as they are generated, but seriously -- who does that for their weblogs? That's a lot of paper.
People are rotting in jail right now because the law and the courts are behind the times. Technology is outpacing law in every way and the reactive nature of the legislative process is going to continue to ruin lives.
Having had an uncle go to prison because of exactly this kind of crap, it makes me bitter when I see people worrying about being sued because of bits sitting on a hard drive somewhere; bits that, again, could have been planted as easily as legitamately created.
It's only going to get worse; technology isn't slowing down, but the legal system is.