Speaking as an author who actually does have to deal with 500 page manuscripts on a regular basis, I've learned quite a bit about printers. I started off with a dot matrix when I was in university, and then, when I was moving to my apartment in Kingston, had to choose between a laser and an inkjet.
I'll freely admit, even now, that a dot matrix is much more economical than an inkjet. But, for the purposes of writing, they're just too slow. I don't have the time to have my printer occupied for an entire day printing out that book that I'm sending off to the publisher. So, the dot matrix was cancelled out immediately.
When I did my research on the inkjets, I learned one important thing - the inkjet printers sell for less than they cost to make. Every time an inkjet printer is sold, it's at a loss to the company making it. They make their money off the ink. I'm not sure if it's honest or not - I imagine if you're just going to be printing out the occasional webpage, it doesn't matter all that much. For a writer, though, it would be a disaster.
On to the laser printer. At the time I bought, the lasers were printing at least ten pages per minute, and the toner cartridges lasted (and still do) for around 3-6,000 sheets (I use a Brother). I can't complain about the print quality at all. As an author, the laser was the logical choice.
But here's the thing - I'm an author, but most people aren't. There are a lot of casual users who don't use that much paper with their computer at all. It takes them a year to print out what I would print out in a month. To them, a dot matrix or a laser printer is overkill.
I wonder, however, just how many people bother to do the research that I did before deciding which printer to buy.
The discussion here honestly reminds me of an episode of TV Nation. The show decided to examine what gets the most donations and sympathy in a mailing campaign: personal tragedy, a registered charity, or somebody famous.
For the somebody famous section, the show chose Jeffrey Dahmer, and declared in their letters that it was a matter of basic rights and freedoms, and that people should be allowed to eat whatever and whoever they want.
At the end of a month, personal tragedy was in last place, the registered charity had gotten some money, and a flood of cash came in for "Friends of Jeffrey Dahmer."
Truth be told, given the choice, I'd rather have the sicko reading about something like cannibalism than actually doing it. I also think that it falls under freedom of expression - nobody is forcing anybody to actually see these sites, and so long as they aren't actually advocating that you go out and eat your fellow man/woman, it comes down to a matter of taste (if you'll pardon the expression). Just because you don't like what they have to say, doesn't mean they don't have a right to say it.
Besides, somehow I can't help thinking of it in terms of a Mastercard commercial...
Putting up a site about cannibalism, etc....tasteless.
Actually eating somebody after reading about it on the site...stupid and sick.
Bragging about it later...dumb enough to qualify for a Darwin Award.
Getting put in jail because you were stupid enough to look at a site, eat somebody, and brag about it later...priceless.
I'm utterly amazed at how quicky this virus has spread itself, I really am. Particularly considering the way it is delivered.
I mean, it relies on people being stupid. This isn't like Nimda, which had a little string of script in the body of the email to ensure that the virus executed the moment the message was touched. This actually requires the user to load the virus themselves, which requires them not to realize that if somebody you don't know sends you an attachment you've never seen, it isn't out of the good of their hearts.
Isn't this rather like handing random people a gun, asking them to see if it works by shooting themselves in the foot, and then having 9 out of 10 people say "yes"?
On the plus side, it might prove the existence of God. If the majority of the human race is this stupid, the only way our species could survive is through divine intervention...
Well, the Internet is sort of a good news/bad news situation when it comes to communication and being social. The good news is that it allows you to do it far more frequently. The bad news is that it doesn't allow you to do it terribly well.
If you actually break down communication, only about 25% or less is actually verbal. This makes it very difficult to tell the subtext of what somebody is saying.
For example, let's say you're chatting with somebody and they type "I REALLY like you." It could be enthusiasm...or it could be sarcasm. The two would look identical on the screen. Inflection becomes very important (and makes up about another 25% of communication).
To make matters even worse, another 50% or more is body language. If the body language isn't there, even the inflection can fail.
When you're on the 'net, all you have is the verbal component. So, you can communicate with far more people than you would be able to otherwise, but the odds of making a true connection are actually quite slim - you just don't have enough information to really do it.
(Aside from which, when it comes down to it, when you're chatting on the 'net, or typing something into a forum, you're still sitting by yourself in front of a keyboard. There is something missing.)
I used to do something like that for DAS Software - it was called "search engine optimization". When I was doing the initial audit, I had to first work out the phrase that somebody looking for the product or service would be most likely to use, and then try to reword the content of the site so that it still said the same thing, but got a higher ranking for the key phrase.
It is something that is quite legitimate, at least what I was doing was - I mean, it isn't all that helpful if you're selling Bog Rat Widgets (to use a silly example), and you don't show up in the rankings when somebody searches Google for "Bog Rat Widgets".
However, trying to insert a sex site into the rankings under "Bog Rat Widgets" is rather on the scummy side...
My first professional publication was a review of Myth II for Computer Gaming World, which was published in April 1999. In order to write it and make my deadline, I had to play Myth II from start to finish - in a week.
I literally spent 8 hours a day for five days playing that game. By the second day, my eyes were burning at the end of the day. Once I finished playing it, I put it down, and to this day I have never played it again. I've played Myth I, but never Myth II.
The fact of the matter is that SCO has probably managed to put itself out of business with their litigation. Microsoft can get away with a very poor reputation, but that's because they control most of the home PC market - most people use MS more out of having maximum compatibility than anything else.
SCO isn't nearly as lucky. And, by going after their own customers and threatening their potential customers, they have created an environment for themselves where it doesn't matter if they create an uber-prodcut - nobody new will do buy their products, and their existing customers are probably looking for ways to migrate away.
Essentially, they've shot themselves in the foot with a bazooka - this may be remembered as one of the poorest business decisions in history.
Well, having followed a bit of the Lindows/Microsoft case, this reminds me a bit of SCO.
Microsoft has tried on numerious occasions to get an injunction like this in the United States, and been turned down every time. So, they've gone and gotten the injunctions from Scandanavia (where english is not a first language).
But, since Lindows is based out of the United States, as is Microsoft, there is absolutely no way to enforce this on the main battlefield, unless you're distributing in Scandanavia, in which case they'd have to change the name for the units sold in Scandanavia.
Well assuming that it is a hoax (and, being the cautious type, I do have to concede the possibility that it may be legitimate - stranger things have happened), I honestly don't find myself terribly surprised that they have taken this route.
If you really look at it, SCO has been trying to create an atmosphere of fear - all of which was brought to an abrupt end when the judge commanded them to put up or shut up, essentially. I don't know if they could issue another press release about how their IP is in Linux without irritating the judge, which would destroy any chance they have of actually winning the case.
So, how do you continue to remain active and relevent?
Well, if they can demonstrate that this attack came from the open source community, they can gain some public support, which puts pressure on IBM (as they are representing open source), all without even mentioning the oft-repeated "SCO IP is in Linux" line.
It could even be elegant, if SCO hadn't blown the case out of proportion with their press blitz and threats earlier.
Okay, I think there is certainly room for both our points of view, now that you've explained this.
As a Canadian, I had honestly never heard of a "judicial activist" before - we have precident law being used to interpret the established law, but I can see how somebody using precident to create a new law would be a problem.
An example: The founding fathers knew from experience that a strong central (federal) government was a bad thing. In recent times, both the legislative and judicial branches of American government have supported a power grab by the federal government, transferring power from the states to the Capitol. The founding fathers were right, but in the name of expediency and modern values, we are losing the freedoms the founders gave us. We are repeating very old mistakes, and that is short-sighted. Anything important enough to override the founders' framework should be important enough to win a constitutional ammendment, and very few things do. Unfortunately, we have judicial activists who are willing to subvert the system.
Okay, NOW I see where you're going with this. Yes, you are correct that we must be mindful of history and the proven consequences of actions. I think there is a thin line to be walked when balancing the original intent of, say, the founding fathers, and the needs of the present society, particularly when there's a good two centuries between them.
I think copyright law is the perfect example. The original intent was to encourage creative minds to produce by guaranteeing rights to their work for a limited time. Of course, back in the 18th century, most laws in place were more likely to protect the publisher than the actual creator (in Shakespeare's time it was truly horrible - what passed as a copyright was the publisher calling dibs on publishing something first, with absolutely no protection for the author at all). The idea of ensuring that an author had a right to his/her own work was probably absolutely revolutionary back then.
In the here and now, though, society is different enough that people like Benjamin Franklin wouldn't even recognize the society they had built. We are more enlightened - we recognize racial and gender equality, for example - but we also have a much higher literacy rate, and the ability to easily copy printed material with little expense. We also have a much more global society than existed two hundred years ago. So, the original execution of the copyright legislation simply does not serve its purpose in the early 21st century. The intent of encouraging intellectual growth remains intact, but the change in society requires a change in legislation to ensure that the original intention is met.
(And, there has certainly been some evidence that perhaps the Berne Convention doesn't cover everything it needs to in the here and now. I think part of the issues around the DMCA have come about because the legislators are still wrapping their minds around what the Internet means to intellectual rights, and I think we'll see more than one revision before it sorts itself out.)
"First, the Constitution was written in 1787. What the founding fathers intended is not irrelevant today; it is only made so by short-sighted people who are ignorant of history and doomed to repeat it. It is the revisionists and judicial activists who have lost sight of the true goal and will cause our downfall."
I stand corrected on the date. My degree is in Medieval history and literature, not American history.
Well, I'm not going to get into a prolonged argument about this - as somebody's sig file once very aptly said, being in a flame war is a no-win scenario...even if you win, you're still a moron for getting into the argument in the first place.
I have to wonder, though - what is a "judicial activist"? From the verbiage, it sounds like somebody who is involved in changing the legal system, which is not necessarily a bad thing (up here in Canada, there are old laws on the books which are laughable today, such as criminal charges for a man taking off his shirt in public - they aren't enforced, but they were never removed either).
I also have to wonder just what is wrong with questioning history? Even if the answer turns out to be the traditional one, surely the question should be asked, if for no other reason than to better understand the period in question.
Aside from which, I would like to know how recognizing that the society and values of the early 21st century is not the same as the society and values of the late 18th century, and that 21st century issues should not be considered in terms of 18th century values consists of short sightedness.
Okay, this is one of those things that REALLY pisses me off. I happen to be a bona fide author (two books out and counting), and in order to avoid being screwed over, you need to understand certain things about copyright law. And there are some arguments that I am simply sick to death of:
1. The founding fathers never meant for copyright law to last past the creator's death.
This may be true, but the founding fathers lived over TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO. Society has changed a great deal since then, and quite frankly, creative work is far more respected now than it was back then. For that matter, certain ideas of individual rights were still developing at that point in time (how long was it before women had equal rites?).
What the founding fathers intended in 1776 is irrelevant in 2003. What is important is how our society is NOW. And now, not only according to U.S. Copyright law, but to the Berne Convention, I own my own work, and for fifty years (Berne Convention - I live in Canada) after my death, my family controls my literary estate. The fact that I have the temerity to share my work with the world does not make it the property of the world.
2. Open source is a clear example of how the public domain proves that copyright is flawed.
Um, no. Mainly because open source is NOT the public domain. The GPL allows you to make use of and alter a product, so long as you give back as well as receive. It is an agreement about distribution rights, with the copyrights to the program remaining in the hands of the creators. It is the same as my selling the first print rights of a book to a publisher, with permission for him to give away copies for free.
3. Copyrights suppress creativity and enslave creators - just look at the recording industry as an example.
Again, no. I will certainly concede that the recording industry treats its artists horribly, but most copyright holders are people who just don't want to see their hard work stolen from them. The fact of the matter is that right now the Berne Convention is there to protect creators, and that helps.
What copyright prevents is people stealing things. Quite frankly, if somebody is going to take the time and effort to create something for others to enjoy, they should be respected for it, and the terms under which they choose to share their work should be respected as well. If that means paying money for a book or some music, so be it! If that means making any changes to the source code public so that others can benefit, again, so be it!
The worst practice I've come across is double billing. I got hit with this one around February and March, as the power was deregulated. Around that time, the price of electricity was also capped after some people had a very hard time with soaring electrical bills.
The cap goes into action, and I get a bill that is about double what I expect. When I look over it, I realize that I've been billed twice for the same electricity. I complain about it, and I'm told that it was a mistake because of the cap, and that it will be credited to my next bill.
The next bill comes, and the charge is still there, and earning interest. I'm now at the point of having to manually calculate my bills (partially because when the cap went into effect, the utilities company took about three months to adjust their billing system), complaining every couple of months, and even writing the occasional letter regarding these errors.
And then, in October, I get a notice that because of my debit, I have to pay what I owe ASAP or they will require a deposit. Let's just say I didn't take this well. After calming down, I wrote them a polite letter where I pointed out that you cannot bill somebody twice for the same electricity, enclosed a copy of the bill where the mistake first appeared, and requested a meeting within two days.
The bill was corrected the next day, and both the double billing and the interest it had accrued were removed. I swear, though, if they had charged me a deposit fee, I would have gone to my lawyer and sued their asses. Nobody screws around with me like that and gets away with it.
One of the drafts of the script was posted online (I don't recall exactly where, though). If they shot that version of the script, the end result should be interesting, assuming it's well acted. It would even be good.
The problem is it wouldn't be Battlestar Galactica. The script had elements of it, but the heart and soul of the story isn't Battlestar at all.
I just wish they'd quit remaking things. For crying out loud, give us something new! Something we haven't seen before! At this point, televised SF has become somewhat on the tired side, methinks...
This does remind me of when the cable companies up here in Ontario tried to get away with negative billing - "if you don't want us to give you these new channels and charge us extra for it, you have to tell us not to." I wonder if there will be a similar backlash...
I may not be an open source person or a Linux user, but I have been following this case for some time now. You see, as a writer, IP is a cornerstone of what I do. If I can't protect the rights to my writing, it makes it very easy for people to rip me off.
That's one reason that McBride's comments just leave me shuddering. It's not so much what will happen in court, or to SCO for that matter. SCO seems to have reorganized itself in such a way that it cannot possibly do business.
Will the court case actually succeed? I very much doubt it. IBM has a much better legal team, and SCO has demonstrated again and again that it is blowing hot hair.
Will SCO survive? Again, I very much doubt it. McBride has to answer to his stockholders and Board of Directors, but they are not what makes the company run. It's the customers who make the company run. Without customers, there is no income, and without income, the company flounders. SCO has probably already generated enough ill will to drive away most of its customer base - what is left will vanish the moment he launches a lawsuit against one of them.
No, what worries me is public image. SCO is presenting a very innaccurate version of copyright law to the public, and the problem is that as a large company, SCO would appear to be a credible source to the uninformed. This just encourages the already considerable number of people who would tread on creator's rights.
(I am also sometimes worried about that retroactive billing idiocy, but I doubt that will stand the light of day. Nobody in their right mind would let somebody bill them that way.)
I hate to say it, but they might have quite the task ahead of them. With any new MMORPG, you're looking at facing the "been there, done that" syndrome - that's what you get when you're playing a type of game that's been around since Islands of Kesmai in 1985 (earlier if you count MUDs). With this game, though, Turbine may find it ten times as hard.
As far as MMORPGs go, they first have to deal with competing against the online juggernaut, EverQuest, which is already doing pretty much exactly what they're going to be looking at doing. So long as they realize that the key to success isn't so much game mechanics, but instead good gameplay combined with VERY strong community building, they can make a mark for themselves. But that's the easy part - I'm expecting that they already know that.
The big problem is twofold:
1. The class restrictions of Dungeons and Dragons are not actually terribly well suited for an MMORPG. In 3.5 Ed. AD&D, regular characters have a level cap up to 20, at which point they become epic characters and use different rulesets. This is fine when you've got a set story to work your way through, but an MMORPG doesn't tend to have one - it is a persistent world. This means that players will build their characters up, hit the limits, and then have nowhere to go. So, in order to work, the game will have to have upwards scalability beyond what is possible now.
2. They are going to have to deal with Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. This is probably the largest of the two problems, as NWN has not only been quite successful, but it is flexible enough to be a true role-playing engine. There are already several persistent worlds that fans have put together using the NWN toolset - why should a player pay a monthly fee to play on a persistent world when s/he can simply buy NWN and then log into any NWN Persistent World servers s/he wishes for free?
These are not insurmountable problems, but they will be issues that Turbine has to face. So long as the product is solid and based around building community, it should be fine. If it doesn't, though - especially if at the same time Turbine doesn't learn from the mistakes of the past - this MMORPG may fade very quickly into obscurity.
Actually, there's already plenty of applications that can open documents created by other applications. With the latest WordPerfect I can open up Word files, and I imagine that Open Office is similar in compatibility.
What blows my mind is that if you take a close look at the statement, it's basically describing the situation between applications that has existed for the last decade and a half as though it is something new and amazing. After all, the only way a good desktop app. can be competitive now is to be interoperable with everybody else (even Microsoft tries to do it with Word).
One thing I find very interesting about this article and issue is that MS hasn't actually learned from it's own history.
Specifically, I'm referring to the comment about how Windows once became more important than DOS, and supplanted it. MS might be trying to prevent that from happening again, but they don't understand WHY it happened.
If you look at DOS and Windows 3.0, and then 3.1, Windows was honestly easier to use. The Mac had been using a GUI for its OS for years, and MS was playing catch up with the features. Of course Windows won over DOS - it was BETTER.
But now, about the only thing that is progressing is Windows. MS might have the market share, but when it comes to Word Processing, WordPerfect beats Word any day. Web browsing and email? Netscape, Mozilla, they're all better. So why aren't they winning now?
Well, how easy is it for an "average" user to get their hands on Netscape? It isn't sold in stores, and the download is actually quite long if you're not using high speed. WordPerfect doesn't seem to be that widely distributed, but there's also a common belief that if everybody's using Word files, you may as well get Word.
The big question in my mind is how long this will go before it changes. I don't think there's a lot of good will towards MS at this point in time. People don't like dealing with security holes, or word processors that require the equivalent of a special university degree just to change the margins. But Microsoft is starting to fall behind. The latest WordPerfect has built-in support for Word files now - once it has the distribution it needs, it will be easier to use, cheaper, and fully compatible, and a lot of businesses will be asking themselves why they're still dealing with MS.
I have a funny feeling that history is getting ready to repeat itself. The Windows OS is probably going to be around for a while, but all of the add-ons are in the process of becoming obsolete, and soon MS might just be losing their monopoly just because they couldn't be bothered to keep up.
I honestly don't understand the logic of spammers. I've been contacted by a spamming service before (they spammed me offering their services), and it just blew my mind.
At this point, I think there is a mass-marketing laziness about the entire thing. In order to get the spam email through all the filters, you have to have a fake email address. You also have to keep changing email addresses, as the filters will pick up on your email address and you'll only get to use it once or twice at best.
And yet, with all this in mind, I still have received more than one spam talking about how wonderful spamming is as a marketing tool. Reach hundreds of millions, they advertise!
This certainly demonstrates one of the paradoxes of the MMORPG. On one hand, it has to be fun, and everybody has to be able to do everything in it. On the other hand, you somehow have to create the illusion of a living, working world.
And it is an illusion. To satisfy the first condition, the moment you have a built-in quest, the players are rendered powerless to change the world around that quest - a town in danger from a Dragon is always in danger from a Dragon, no matter how many times the Dragon is slain.
But, there are certain concerns that make running an MMORPG a very tricky balancing act:
1. The company must retain control over the game. This essentially renders democracy in an MMORPG impossible. The moment the players actually have a controlling interest in the game itself, the creator of the game is placed in the impossible situation of being responsible for what happens inside the game, but being to control it.
(This is the reason, for example, that when you create a character in any MMORPG, the company running the MMORPG owns the character. If you own the character, you can make demands on the company that are unreasonable in the greater scheme of things, the company HAS to give in [as the character is your property], and since the company owns the game, they are liable for anything you do.)
2. For the game to survive, the players must form a viable community. This means that the game must be fun, but also encourage people to contribute to the world in ways other than slaughtering monsters (such as creating items in UO and EverQuest). In the end, it is the people that the regular players come back for, not the game itself.
3. The game must be balanced, both in design and community. And that is the hardest of the lot, considering the first two factors. Too much inflation and the majority of the players are driven away. Have a closed system, such as the real world, and all of the resources get eaten up by the first players in the game, leaving everybody else in a state of poverty (which happened in the early days of UO). The tax system in Second Life is an interesting solution, and possibly the best I've heard so far (as just pushing new and better stuff into the economy creates inflation).
The big issue is whether democracy can end up existing in an MMORPG. Quite frankly, I don't think it can. It is one thing to petition a developer for a change, which is what the protest basically amounts to, but quite another for the players to dictate to the developers what can and can't be done in the game. The moment you have the gamers in full control of the game, the game will start to die - there will just be too many voices fighting for control at once.
Unfortunately, I've become convinced that we live in a society that is petrified of personal responsibility. Suing a computer game company is an easy answer - it means that the families of the victims and the culprits don't have to actually ask the deeper, harder questions, and that we as a society can assuage ourselves that it isn't really their fault, their environment made them do it.
It is, in a word, horsesh*t. And I'm sick to death of it.
However, regarding Elizabeth Wooley and her son Shawn, there is a much different story. I know this because I just had a book released about EverQuest by McGraw-Hill (it's titled "The EverQuest Companion"), and I covered the issue of EverQuest addiction. To do this, I talked at length with Mrs. Wooley, and got a complete timeline of what happened.
First of all, Shawn Wooley was an adult. While he was living at home, once EQ became a problem, his family TRIED to keep him away from it, but to no avail. When he was living on his own, the family could do virtually nothing about it. After all, what he did in his own home was his own business.
What was not covered in any of the news reports, however, was the fact that the Wooley family spent the better part of two years trying to get Shawn psychological help. They were turned away almost everywhere, by psychologists who would not acknowledge that a psychological addiction could exist, much less one to a computer game. In the rare instances where they were able to find some help, the symptoms were treated, but never the addiction itself. The lawsuit she pressed was to get Sony Online Entertainment to release their logs of what happened in the last hours of Shawn's life, as I recall.
So please don't paint Liz Wooley with the same brush as this nitwit lawyer who is suing Take 2 and Sony. Particularly when the details of the Wooley case only just got properly published two weeks ago.
Best to all,
Robert B. Marks, author of the EverQuest Companion
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as an author who actually does have to deal with 500 page manuscripts on a regular basis, I've learned quite a bit about printers. I started off with a dot matrix when I was in university, and then, when I was moving to my apartment in Kingston, had to choose between a laser and an inkjet.
I'll freely admit, even now, that a dot matrix is much more economical than an inkjet. But, for the purposes of writing, they're just too slow. I don't have the time to have my printer occupied for an entire day printing out that book that I'm sending off to the publisher. So, the dot matrix was cancelled out immediately.
When I did my research on the inkjets, I learned one important thing - the inkjet printers sell for less than they cost to make. Every time an inkjet printer is sold, it's at a loss to the company making it. They make their money off the ink. I'm not sure if it's honest or not - I imagine if you're just going to be printing out the occasional webpage, it doesn't matter all that much. For a writer, though, it would be a disaster.
On to the laser printer. At the time I bought, the lasers were printing at least ten pages per minute, and the toner cartridges lasted (and still do) for around 3-6,000 sheets (I use a Brother). I can't complain about the print quality at all. As an author, the laser was the logical choice.
But here's the thing - I'm an author, but most people aren't. There are a lot of casual users who don't use that much paper with their computer at all. It takes them a year to print out what I would print out in a month. To them, a dot matrix or a laser printer is overkill.
I wonder, however, just how many people bother to do the research that I did before deciding which printer to buy.
The discussion here honestly reminds me of an episode of TV Nation. The show decided to examine what gets the most donations and sympathy in a mailing campaign: personal tragedy, a registered charity, or somebody famous.
For the somebody famous section, the show chose Jeffrey Dahmer, and declared in their letters that it was a matter of basic rights and freedoms, and that people should be allowed to eat whatever and whoever they want.
At the end of a month, personal tragedy was in last place, the registered charity had gotten some money, and a flood of cash came in for "Friends of Jeffrey Dahmer."
Truth be told, given the choice, I'd rather have the sicko reading about something like cannibalism than actually doing it. I also think that it falls under freedom of expression - nobody is forcing anybody to actually see these sites, and so long as they aren't actually advocating that you go out and eat your fellow man/woman, it comes down to a matter of taste (if you'll pardon the expression). Just because you don't like what they have to say, doesn't mean they don't have a right to say it.
Besides, somehow I can't help thinking of it in terms of a Mastercard commercial...
Putting up a site about cannibalism, etc....tasteless.
Actually eating somebody after reading about it on the site...stupid and sick.
Bragging about it later...dumb enough to qualify for a Darwin Award.
Getting put in jail because you were stupid enough to look at a site, eat somebody, and brag about it later...priceless.
I'm utterly amazed at how quicky this virus has spread itself, I really am. Particularly considering the way it is delivered.
I mean, it relies on people being stupid. This isn't like Nimda, which had a little string of script in the body of the email to ensure that the virus executed the moment the message was touched. This actually requires the user to load the virus themselves, which requires them not to realize that if somebody you don't know sends you an attachment you've never seen, it isn't out of the good of their hearts.
Isn't this rather like handing random people a gun, asking them to see if it works by shooting themselves in the foot, and then having 9 out of 10 people say "yes"?
On the plus side, it might prove the existence of God. If the majority of the human race is this stupid, the only way our species could survive is through divine intervention...
Well, the Internet is sort of a good news/bad news situation when it comes to communication and being social. The good news is that it allows you to do it far more frequently. The bad news is that it doesn't allow you to do it terribly well.
If you actually break down communication, only about 25% or less is actually verbal. This makes it very difficult to tell the subtext of what somebody is saying.
For example, let's say you're chatting with somebody and they type "I REALLY like you." It could be enthusiasm...or it could be sarcasm. The two would look identical on the screen. Inflection becomes very important (and makes up about another 25% of communication).
To make matters even worse, another 50% or more is body language. If the body language isn't there, even the inflection can fail.
When you're on the 'net, all you have is the verbal component. So, you can communicate with far more people than you would be able to otherwise, but the odds of making a true connection are actually quite slim - you just don't have enough information to really do it.
(Aside from which, when it comes down to it, when you're chatting on the 'net, or typing something into a forum, you're still sitting by yourself in front of a keyboard. There is something missing.)
I used to do something like that for DAS Software - it was called "search engine optimization". When I was doing the initial audit, I had to first work out the phrase that somebody looking for the product or service would be most likely to use, and then try to reword the content of the site so that it still said the same thing, but got a higher ranking for the key phrase.
It is something that is quite legitimate, at least what I was doing was - I mean, it isn't all that helpful if you're selling Bog Rat Widgets (to use a silly example), and you don't show up in the rankings when somebody searches Google for "Bog Rat Widgets".
However, trying to insert a sex site into the rankings under "Bog Rat Widgets" is rather on the scummy side...
My first professional publication was a review of Myth II for Computer Gaming World, which was published in April 1999. In order to write it and make my deadline, I had to play Myth II from start to finish - in a week.
I literally spent 8 hours a day for five days playing that game. By the second day, my eyes were burning at the end of the day. Once I finished playing it, I put it down, and to this day I have never played it again. I've played Myth I, but never Myth II.
I can see where the reviewer was coming from.
The fact of the matter is that SCO has probably managed to put itself out of business with their litigation. Microsoft can get away with a very poor reputation, but that's because they control most of the home PC market - most people use MS more out of having maximum compatibility than anything else.
SCO isn't nearly as lucky. And, by going after their own customers and threatening their potential customers, they have created an environment for themselves where it doesn't matter if they create an uber-prodcut - nobody new will do buy their products, and their existing customers are probably looking for ways to migrate away.
Essentially, they've shot themselves in the foot with a bazooka - this may be remembered as one of the poorest business decisions in history.
Well, having followed a bit of the Lindows/Microsoft case, this reminds me a bit of SCO.
Microsoft has tried on numerious occasions to get an injunction like this in the United States, and been turned down every time. So, they've gone and gotten the injunctions from Scandanavia (where english is not a first language).
But, since Lindows is based out of the United States, as is Microsoft, there is absolutely no way to enforce this on the main battlefield, unless you're distributing in Scandanavia, in which case they'd have to change the name for the units sold in Scandanavia.
But, it makes for great publicity...
Well assuming that it is a hoax (and, being the cautious type, I do have to concede the possibility that it may be legitimate - stranger things have happened), I honestly don't find myself terribly surprised that they have taken this route.
If you really look at it, SCO has been trying to create an atmosphere of fear - all of which was brought to an abrupt end when the judge commanded them to put up or shut up, essentially. I don't know if they could issue another press release about how their IP is in Linux without irritating the judge, which would destroy any chance they have of actually winning the case.
So, how do you continue to remain active and relevent?
Well, if they can demonstrate that this attack came from the open source community, they can gain some public support, which puts pressure on IBM (as they are representing open source), all without even mentioning the oft-repeated "SCO IP is in Linux" line.
It could even be elegant, if SCO hadn't blown the case out of proportion with their press blitz and threats earlier.
Okay, I think there is certainly room for both our points of view, now that you've explained this.
As a Canadian, I had honestly never heard of a "judicial activist" before - we have precident law being used to interpret the established law, but I can see how somebody using precident to create a new law would be a problem.
An example: The founding fathers knew from experience that a strong central (federal) government was a bad thing. In recent times, both the legislative and judicial branches of American government have supported a power grab by the federal government, transferring power from the states to the Capitol. The founding fathers were right, but in the name of expediency and modern values, we are losing the freedoms the founders gave us. We are repeating very old mistakes, and that is short-sighted. Anything important enough to override the founders' framework should be important enough to win a constitutional ammendment, and very few things do. Unfortunately, we have judicial activists who are willing to subvert the system.
Okay, NOW I see where you're going with this. Yes, you are correct that we must be mindful of history and the proven consequences of actions. I think there is a thin line to be walked when balancing the original intent of, say, the founding fathers, and the needs of the present society, particularly when there's a good two centuries between them.
I think copyright law is the perfect example. The original intent was to encourage creative minds to produce by guaranteeing rights to their work for a limited time. Of course, back in the 18th century, most laws in place were more likely to protect the publisher than the actual creator (in Shakespeare's time it was truly horrible - what passed as a copyright was the publisher calling dibs on publishing something first, with absolutely no protection for the author at all). The idea of ensuring that an author had a right to his/her own work was probably absolutely revolutionary back then.
In the here and now, though, society is different enough that people like Benjamin Franklin wouldn't even recognize the society they had built. We are more enlightened - we recognize racial and gender equality, for example - but we also have a much higher literacy rate, and the ability to easily copy printed material with little expense. We also have a much more global society than existed two hundred years ago. So, the original execution of the copyright legislation simply does not serve its purpose in the early 21st century. The intent of encouraging intellectual growth remains intact, but the change in society requires a change in legislation to ensure that the original intention is met.
(And, there has certainly been some evidence that perhaps the Berne Convention doesn't cover everything it needs to in the here and now. I think part of the issues around the DMCA have come about because the legislators are still wrapping their minds around what the Internet means to intellectual rights, and I think we'll see more than one revision before it sorts itself out.)
"First, the Constitution was written in 1787. What the founding fathers intended is not irrelevant today; it is only made so by short-sighted people who are ignorant of history and doomed to repeat it. It is the revisionists and judicial activists who have lost sight of the true goal and will cause our downfall."
I stand corrected on the date. My degree is in Medieval history and literature, not American history.
Well, I'm not going to get into a prolonged argument about this - as somebody's sig file once very aptly said, being in a flame war is a no-win scenario...even if you win, you're still a moron for getting into the argument in the first place.
I have to wonder, though - what is a "judicial activist"? From the verbiage, it sounds like somebody who is involved in changing the legal system, which is not necessarily a bad thing (up here in Canada, there are old laws on the books which are laughable today, such as criminal charges for a man taking off his shirt in public - they aren't enforced, but they were never removed either).
I also have to wonder just what is wrong with questioning history? Even if the answer turns out to be the traditional one, surely the question should be asked, if for no other reason than to better understand the period in question.
Aside from which, I would like to know how recognizing that the society and values of the early 21st century is not the same as the society and values of the late 18th century, and that 21st century issues should not be considered in terms of 18th century values consists of short sightedness.
Okay, this is one of those things that REALLY pisses me off. I happen to be a bona fide author (two books out and counting), and in order to avoid being screwed over, you need to understand certain things about copyright law. And there are some arguments that I am simply sick to death of:
1. The founding fathers never meant for copyright law to last past the creator's death.
This may be true, but the founding fathers lived over TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO. Society has changed a great deal since then, and quite frankly, creative work is far more respected now than it was back then. For that matter, certain ideas of individual rights were still developing at that point in time (how long was it before women had equal rites?).
What the founding fathers intended in 1776 is irrelevant in 2003. What is important is how our society is NOW. And now, not only according to U.S. Copyright law, but to the Berne Convention, I own my own work, and for fifty years (Berne Convention - I live in Canada) after my death, my family controls my literary estate. The fact that I have the temerity to share my work with the world does not make it the property of the world.
2. Open source is a clear example of how the public domain proves that copyright is flawed.
Um, no. Mainly because open source is NOT the public domain. The GPL allows you to make use of and alter a product, so long as you give back as well as receive. It is an agreement about distribution rights, with the copyrights to the program remaining in the hands of the creators. It is the same as my selling the first print rights of a book to a publisher, with permission for him to give away copies for free.
3. Copyrights suppress creativity and enslave creators - just look at the recording industry as an example.
Again, no. I will certainly concede that the recording industry treats its artists horribly, but most copyright holders are people who just don't want to see their hard work stolen from them. The fact of the matter is that right now the Berne Convention is there to protect creators, and that helps.
What copyright prevents is people stealing things. Quite frankly, if somebody is going to take the time and effort to create something for others to enjoy, they should be respected for it, and the terms under which they choose to share their work should be respected as well. If that means paying money for a book or some music, so be it! If that means making any changes to the source code public so that others can benefit, again, so be it!
The worst practice I've come across is double billing. I got hit with this one around February and March, as the power was deregulated. Around that time, the price of electricity was also capped after some people had a very hard time with soaring electrical bills.
The cap goes into action, and I get a bill that is about double what I expect. When I look over it, I realize that I've been billed twice for the same electricity. I complain about it, and I'm told that it was a mistake because of the cap, and that it will be credited to my next bill.
The next bill comes, and the charge is still there, and earning interest. I'm now at the point of having to manually calculate my bills (partially because when the cap went into effect, the utilities company took about three months to adjust their billing system), complaining every couple of months, and even writing the occasional letter regarding these errors.
And then, in October, I get a notice that because of my debit, I have to pay what I owe ASAP or they will require a deposit. Let's just say I didn't take this well. After calming down, I wrote them a polite letter where I pointed out that you cannot bill somebody twice for the same electricity, enclosed a copy of the bill where the mistake first appeared, and requested a meeting within two days.
The bill was corrected the next day, and both the double billing and the interest it had accrued were removed. I swear, though, if they had charged me a deposit fee, I would have gone to my lawyer and sued their asses. Nobody screws around with me like that and gets away with it.
One of the drafts of the script was posted online (I don't recall exactly where, though). If they shot that version of the script, the end result should be interesting, assuming it's well acted. It would even be good.
The problem is it wouldn't be Battlestar Galactica. The script had elements of it, but the heart and soul of the story isn't Battlestar at all.
I just wish they'd quit remaking things. For crying out loud, give us something new! Something we haven't seen before! At this point, televised SF has become somewhat on the tired side, methinks...
This does remind me of when the cable companies up here in Ontario tried to get away with negative billing - "if you don't want us to give you these new channels and charge us extra for it, you have to tell us not to." I wonder if there will be a similar backlash...
I may not be an open source person or a Linux user, but I have been following this case for some time now. You see, as a writer, IP is a cornerstone of what I do. If I can't protect the rights to my writing, it makes it very easy for people to rip me off.
That's one reason that McBride's comments just leave me shuddering. It's not so much what will happen in court, or to SCO for that matter. SCO seems to have reorganized itself in such a way that it cannot possibly do business.
Will the court case actually succeed? I very much doubt it. IBM has a much better legal team, and SCO has demonstrated again and again that it is blowing hot hair.
Will SCO survive? Again, I very much doubt it. McBride has to answer to his stockholders and Board of Directors, but they are not what makes the company run. It's the customers who make the company run. Without customers, there is no income, and without income, the company flounders. SCO has probably already generated enough ill will to drive away most of its customer base - what is left will vanish the moment he launches a lawsuit against one of them.
No, what worries me is public image. SCO is presenting a very innaccurate version of copyright law to the public, and the problem is that as a large company, SCO would appear to be a credible source to the uninformed. This just encourages the already considerable number of people who would tread on creator's rights.
(I am also sometimes worried about that retroactive billing idiocy, but I doubt that will stand the light of day. Nobody in their right mind would let somebody bill them that way.)
I hate to say it, but they might have quite the task ahead of them. With any new MMORPG, you're looking at facing the "been there, done that" syndrome - that's what you get when you're playing a type of game that's been around since Islands of Kesmai in 1985 (earlier if you count MUDs). With this game, though, Turbine may find it ten times as hard.
As far as MMORPGs go, they first have to deal with competing against the online juggernaut, EverQuest, which is already doing pretty much exactly what they're going to be looking at doing. So long as they realize that the key to success isn't so much game mechanics, but instead good gameplay combined with VERY strong community building, they can make a mark for themselves. But that's the easy part - I'm expecting that they already know that.
The big problem is twofold:
1. The class restrictions of Dungeons and Dragons are not actually terribly well suited for an MMORPG. In 3.5 Ed. AD&D, regular characters have a level cap up to 20, at which point they become epic characters and use different rulesets. This is fine when you've got a set story to work your way through, but an MMORPG doesn't tend to have one - it is a persistent world. This means that players will build their characters up, hit the limits, and then have nowhere to go. So, in order to work, the game will have to have upwards scalability beyond what is possible now.
2. They are going to have to deal with Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. This is probably the largest of the two problems, as NWN has not only been quite successful, but it is flexible enough to be a true role-playing engine. There are already several persistent worlds that fans have put together using the NWN toolset - why should a player pay a monthly fee to play on a persistent world when s/he can simply buy NWN and then log into any NWN Persistent World servers s/he wishes for free?
These are not insurmountable problems, but they will be issues that Turbine has to face. So long as the product is solid and based around building community, it should be fine. If it doesn't, though - especially if at the same time Turbine doesn't learn from the mistakes of the past - this MMORPG may fade very quickly into obscurity.
Actually, there's already plenty of applications that can open documents created by other applications. With the latest WordPerfect I can open up Word files, and I imagine that Open Office is similar in compatibility.
What blows my mind is that if you take a close look at the statement, it's basically describing the situation between applications that has existed for the last decade and a half as though it is something new and amazing. After all, the only way a good desktop app. can be competitive now is to be interoperable with everybody else (even Microsoft tries to do it with Word).
One thing I find very interesting about this article and issue is that MS hasn't actually learned from it's own history.
Specifically, I'm referring to the comment about how Windows once became more important than DOS, and supplanted it. MS might be trying to prevent that from happening again, but they don't understand WHY it happened.
If you look at DOS and Windows 3.0, and then 3.1, Windows was honestly easier to use. The Mac had been using a GUI for its OS for years, and MS was playing catch up with the features. Of course Windows won over DOS - it was BETTER.
But now, about the only thing that is progressing is Windows. MS might have the market share, but when it comes to Word Processing, WordPerfect beats Word any day. Web browsing and email? Netscape, Mozilla, they're all better. So why aren't they winning now?
Well, how easy is it for an "average" user to get their hands on Netscape? It isn't sold in stores, and the download is actually quite long if you're not using high speed. WordPerfect doesn't seem to be that widely distributed, but there's also a common belief that if everybody's using Word files, you may as well get Word.
The big question in my mind is how long this will go before it changes. I don't think there's a lot of good will towards MS at this point in time. People don't like dealing with security holes, or word processors that require the equivalent of a special university degree just to change the margins. But Microsoft is starting to fall behind. The latest WordPerfect has built-in support for Word files now - once it has the distribution it needs, it will be easier to use, cheaper, and fully compatible, and a lot of businesses will be asking themselves why they're still dealing with MS.
I have a funny feeling that history is getting ready to repeat itself. The Windows OS is probably going to be around for a while, but all of the add-ons are in the process of becoming obsolete, and soon MS might just be losing their monopoly just because they couldn't be bothered to keep up.
I honestly don't understand the logic of spammers. I've been contacted by a spamming service before (they spammed me offering their services), and it just blew my mind.
At this point, I think there is a mass-marketing laziness about the entire thing. In order to get the spam email through all the filters, you have to have a fake email address. You also have to keep changing email addresses, as the filters will pick up on your email address and you'll only get to use it once or twice at best.
And yet, with all this in mind, I still have received more than one spam talking about how wonderful spamming is as a marketing tool. Reach hundreds of millions, they advertise!
And in reality, get ignored by them.
This certainly demonstrates one of the paradoxes of the MMORPG. On one hand, it has to be fun, and everybody has to be able to do everything in it. On the other hand, you somehow have to create the illusion of a living, working world.
And it is an illusion. To satisfy the first condition, the moment you have a built-in quest, the players are rendered powerless to change the world around that quest - a town in danger from a Dragon is always in danger from a Dragon, no matter how many times the Dragon is slain.
But, there are certain concerns that make running an MMORPG a very tricky balancing act:
1. The company must retain control over the game. This essentially renders democracy in an MMORPG impossible. The moment the players actually have a controlling interest in the game itself, the creator of the game is placed in the impossible situation of being responsible for what happens inside the game, but being to control it.
(This is the reason, for example, that when you create a character in any MMORPG, the company running the MMORPG owns the character. If you own the character, you can make demands on the company that are unreasonable in the greater scheme of things, the company HAS to give in [as the character is your property], and since the company owns the game, they are liable for anything you do.)
2. For the game to survive, the players must form a viable community. This means that the game must be fun, but also encourage people to contribute to the world in ways other than slaughtering monsters (such as creating items in UO and EverQuest). In the end, it is the people that the regular players come back for, not the game itself.
3. The game must be balanced, both in design and community. And that is the hardest of the lot, considering the first two factors. Too much inflation and the majority of the players are driven away. Have a closed system, such as the real world, and all of the resources get eaten up by the first players in the game, leaving everybody else in a state of poverty (which happened in the early days of UO). The tax system in Second Life is an interesting solution, and possibly the best I've heard so far (as just pushing new and better stuff into the economy creates inflation).
The big issue is whether democracy can end up existing in an MMORPG. Quite frankly, I don't think it can. It is one thing to petition a developer for a change, which is what the protest basically amounts to, but quite another for the players to dictate to the developers what can and can't be done in the game. The moment you have the gamers in full control of the game, the game will start to die - there will just be too many voices fighting for control at once.
Unfortunately, I've become convinced that we live in a society that is petrified of personal responsibility. Suing a computer game company is an easy answer - it means that the families of the victims and the culprits don't have to actually ask the deeper, harder questions, and that we as a society can assuage ourselves that it isn't really their fault, their environment made them do it.
It is, in a word, horsesh*t. And I'm sick to death of it.
However, regarding Elizabeth Wooley and her son Shawn, there is a much different story. I know this because I just had a book released about EverQuest by McGraw-Hill (it's titled "The EverQuest Companion"), and I covered the issue of EverQuest addiction. To do this, I talked at length with Mrs. Wooley, and got a complete timeline of what happened.
First of all, Shawn Wooley was an adult. While he was living at home, once EQ became a problem, his family TRIED to keep him away from it, but to no avail. When he was living on his own, the family could do virtually nothing about it. After all, what he did in his own home was his own business.
What was not covered in any of the news reports, however, was the fact that the Wooley family spent the better part of two years trying to get Shawn psychological help. They were turned away almost everywhere, by psychologists who would not acknowledge that a psychological addiction could exist, much less one to a computer game. In the rare instances where they were able to find some help, the symptoms were treated, but never the addiction itself. The lawsuit she pressed was to get Sony Online Entertainment to release their logs of what happened in the last hours of Shawn's life, as I recall.
So please don't paint Liz Wooley with the same brush as this nitwit lawyer who is suing Take 2 and Sony. Particularly when the details of the Wooley case only just got properly published two weeks ago.
Best to all,
Robert B. Marks, author of the EverQuest Companion