But then where is the transition? Where is "Web 2.0" where there wasn't one before? The first Wiki was invented in 1994. There were other, similar systems 10 years before that.
Social websites aren't any news, either. It's just that they're suddenly popular and everywhere. Sure MySpace is new, but there were sites much like it 10 years ago. Ok, maybe 8. Actually, thinking about it, I dimly remember a "social website" like thing back from my BBS days.
So what is "Web 2.0" if not Ajax etc.? Is it a phase, a trend? iTunes is something that's at least as new, if not more so, than MySpace, but it's not counted in the "Web 2.0" thing, is it? Why not? What about Amazon? The reader reviews are often very useful. Other community product review sites have been around at least since the CEO of my dot-com company started one about 6 years ago.
So, really, when you look at it, what is "Web 2.0", except hype?
but nothing that could equal the level of fundamental change exhibited by the shif to Web 2.0. Which is? That lots of webpages are way more annoying now and their layout will break completely if you're not using the exact browser they were designed with? Oh wait, we don't have those problems anymore, right? Yeah, right...
Sorry, but Google Maps is one of the very few places where "Web 2.0" actually gives me something that wouldn't have been doable in "Web 1.0". Most places just use it as "look it moves"-type eye-candy.
Wake me when people are using "Web 2.0" to make their sites more useable, instead of just more shiney. Those that do are still a tiny minority. Until then, shut up about higher version numbers. Bugfix the old one first.
True, that. Doesn't mean I have to like it. It's the old sell-razors-cheaply-and-cheat-them-on-the-blades business model.
I don't like it because it collides with other things I consider important. One, it requires lock-in and closed consoles to work. I've got no problem with QA, but I've been playing computer games since most of them were one-man works, and quite a lot of those were great designs. Some of the small-team games of today beat AAA titles for gameplay easily. The indie gaming scene is required, but can't survive on locked-in consoles.
The other reason is that it distorts prices, plain and simple. It is not a free market with fair prices, because of the proprietary and licensing shit.
Will it make the fans happy, and deservedly sell thousands of Xbox 360s? That's the #1 problem I have with it. Somewhere in a marketing department, someone grins at that sentence because he knows what many of us only suspect: That the one and only purpose for Halo 3 is to sell more Xboxes.
And somewhere deep inside of me, there's a part that has an unspeakable problem with a game existing only for the benefit of a game console, because it feels it ought to be the other way around.
The idea that there is a market for operating systems is a complete myth. Question: Do you think there never was a market, or that there simply is no market anymore?
If the later, why?
The thing is, monopolies tend to destroy markets, you know?
Hopefully their government will have balls as well when the IP merchants finally bribe the government to take the kid gloves off... Government officials' first priority is to get re-elected (so they can continue stealing, if you're the cynical kind), and the last attempt to turn the swedish government into a part of the US police force turned very badly against them. I never heard anything about the criminal charges that were brought against the then minister of the interior, but the shit-storm hit fast and hard and very publicly - the #1 thing politicians try to avoid.
So, why are companies even allowed to submit a standard without such a letter? Seems like a recipe for wasting work that you allow a standardization process to even start without assurances from all stakeholders that they'll not interfere with it becoming a standard (i.e. that anyone can implement).
It has been 3 years since WinXP Service Pack 2 was released, even though updating Windows XP from an SP2 CD requires downloading more than 170 Megabytes of files, a difficult problem when there is no internet connection or only a dial-up connection. No, the real difficult problem is that even on DSL you have a considerable chance of being owned while the updates that fix all those remote root exploits are being downloaded.
So what they badly need is more sensible physics, and limits for what the amateurs do. No in the sense of what they do, but say some automatic creation of collision zones, boundary boxes, etc.
Or simply a better system. For example, 90% of the objects everywhere I went in SL don't have any visible physics. They're just walls, for example.
160? On the server where you don't even have to render graphics? Either they're running 160 self-aware AIs on their or the SL server code sucks so badly it could've just as well been written in visual basic.
I would be very hard-pressed to think of any instance where I intentionally gave up significant time with people who I really considered friends for the web. The keyword is "intentionally". I've been watching this with my girl for some time now, and we both agree that we lose time together because either or both of us is spending time online. Never intentionally giving up our time for the web, but more "just checking mail" or "I'll be over in a minute, just found something interesting". And that adds up.
To be fair, though, we also gain a lot of time because of the web, time that would've been spent looking for stuff in the city, or calling up shops, or digging through catalogs, libraries, book shops, etc. where a search or a website gets us the stuff faster.
Unless my memory is blurry, it is never made explicit how the Metaverse works. So in principle, yes, but the devil is in the technology details. And that makes all the difference. Running my own world on a Linden Labs server is nice, but it still limits what I can do to whatever the server software provides. Running my own software, even if the APIs are standardized, gives me much more freedom.
That's been a solved problem for at least a decade. Sure it's more coding, but you can have all Linden dollars minted at Linden Labs, and the math and code to verify them, prevent double-spending and forgeries, etc. have all been around for a very, very long time.
At what point do you say 'this character belongs to this server'? That's a good question. Here are two solutions off the top of my head:
a) Make avatars client-side, so the client supplies them. The servers could act as caches, so other clients don't access the client directly (which would probably slow everything down if he's on a slow uplink).
b) Have the avatars streamed from "avatar servers". That way my server only stores avatar ID, location and URL of avatar server to ask for everything else. Or it could act as cache, as above.
I want to be able to rent property in Second Life (or some other virtual world) and have it "link" to my own server, so that when your avatar enters my house, you (transparently) continue playing on my server, using my bandwidth, CPU and my rules.
That way, the main Second Life grid can handle much more people, while I can decide how much I want to handle. If I'm IBM, I will put up a server farm to handle my advertisement/community events. If I'm a private person, I'll plan for 10 concurrent visitors with enough spare capacity to handle spikes of 20-30.
One way or the other, my virtual home is no longer dependent on Linden Lab's server farm. If Second Life gets overloaded, the visitors in my virtual corner of the virtual world won't suffer. They might even come to me because my place always runs smoothly. Suddenly, there is an interest in upgrading the infrastructure beyond "it must work, mostly".
My place can be small (one house) or large (an entire island). Just like property in SL is already. Sure, the transition will be a bit tricky (at what point exactly are people transfered to a different server, and how do they "see" the content inside/outside?), but that's a technical challenge that is, in principle, not that hard. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to have it work the Oblivion way (e.g. you click on the door, you are teleported inside. Windows both ways are faked with textures if at all.)
What is cool about this is that it removes the scarcity of land. I can rent a small house in SL and have an entire world inside. Hey, why not? It's not as if physical laws matter. Sure, Linden will have to adapt their business model, but since the server load isn't theirs anymore, they should not have to worry too much.
I stand corrected. Film is good. Audience, on the other hand, certainly isn't. The cops goal should've been to remove him from the hall, as quickly and quietly as possible - not create even more chaos.
and you struggle against the police when they try to remove you, the police will use necessary force to remove you. And the point is: This was not necessary force, it was incompetence. Two cops not able to properly restrain a student, obviously untrained in de-escalation. Once they have him on the ground, they are stuck in their training manual which tells them to get the subdued to comply, and when he doesn't their only solution is to use a weapon on him?
These cops belong back in basic training. Competent police would have used necessary force to remove him - not subdue and shock him in front of an audience. Heck, if you insist on being a brute, at least be smart enough to do it outside where people aren't filming you!
If you look at the video they first try to remove him rather peacefully by just grabbing him by the arms and moving him. Grabbing someone's arm is not peaceful and should not be the very first step. The video shows them moving in and almost immediately grabbing him. Send those cops back to training camp. You can grab someone after you've given him at least a full sentence of the "come with us or we'll use force" kind. You do not move in and immediately grab someone who is unarmed and not threatening anyone with physical violence.
I'll even tell you why: Because lots of people have automatic defensive responses to being touched. Many simply don't like being touched by strangers, and will react like he did - arms flailing, yelling, causing a stir. Others will react with violence. You - whether you're a cop or a citizen - don't know how some stranger "ticks". Initiating physical contact without establishing verbal and eye contact first is just plain stupid.
You can call it whatever you want the same way I can call the US president a monkey and the moon a big piece of cheese. But changing the labels on things does not change the things. I'll be the first to say that yes, a death penalty means killing someone. "Murder", however, is a slightly different term with a slightly different meaning. And yes, those slight differences are as important as the off-by-one errors that break your software if you shrug them off.
Seems we move to what we finally arrive at once I got the head of IT to listen - that we can have whatever we know is needed for the job, as long as we don't expect IT to support it. If you want support, you have to go through the usual channels and get your tool approved, and IT gets an order to support it.
Slashdot Mirror
It should default to off. There are some times were default off is not useful.
If windos auto-update would conform to those standards, we'd have a billion spam bots out there.
Instead of the half-a-billion we have now.
But then where is the transition? Where is "Web 2.0" where there wasn't one before? The first Wiki was invented in 1994. There were other, similar systems 10 years before that.
Social websites aren't any news, either. It's just that they're suddenly popular and everywhere. Sure MySpace is new, but there were sites much like it 10 years ago. Ok, maybe 8. Actually, thinking about it, I dimly remember a "social website" like thing back from my BBS days.
So what is "Web 2.0" if not Ajax etc.? Is it a phase, a trend? iTunes is something that's at least as new, if not more so, than MySpace, but it's not counted in the "Web 2.0" thing, is it? Why not? What about Amazon? The reader reviews are often very useful. Other community product review sites have been around at least since the CEO of my dot-com company started one about 6 years ago.
So, really, when you look at it, what is "Web 2.0", except hype?
Sorry, but Google Maps is one of the very few places where "Web 2.0" actually gives me something that wouldn't have been doable in "Web 1.0". Most places just use it as "look it moves"-type eye-candy.
Wake me when people are using "Web 2.0" to make their sites more useable, instead of just more shiney. Those that do are still a tiny minority. Until then, shut up about higher version numbers. Bugfix the old one first.
True, that. Doesn't mean I have to like it. It's the old sell-razors-cheaply-and-cheat-them-on-the-blades business model.
I don't like it because it collides with other things I consider important. One, it requires lock-in and closed consoles to work. I've got no problem with QA, but I've been playing computer games since most of them were one-man works, and quite a lot of those were great designs. Some of the small-team games of today beat AAA titles for gameplay easily. The indie gaming scene is required, but can't survive on locked-in consoles.
The other reason is that it distorts prices, plain and simple. It is not a free market with fair prices, because of the proprietary and licensing shit.
And somewhere deep inside of me, there's a part that has an unspeakable problem with a game existing only for the benefit of a game console, because it feels it ought to be the other way around.
If the later, why?
The thing is, monopolies tend to destroy markets, you know?
Unless you're tier 1, there is always one or more upstream providers to bully.
I doubt they'll be making that mistake again.
They'll probably bully the ISP next time.
So, why are companies even allowed to submit a standard without such a letter? Seems like a recipe for wasting work that you allow a standardization process to even start without assurances from all stakeholders that they'll not interfere with it becoming a standard (i.e. that anyone can implement).
Ok, that makes more sense now.
So what they badly need is more sensible physics, and limits for what the amateurs do. No in the sense of what they do, but say some automatic creation of collision zones, boundary boxes, etc.
Or simply a better system. For example, 90% of the objects everywhere I went in SL don't have any visible physics. They're just walls, for example.
160? On the server where you don't even have to render graphics? Either they're running 160 self-aware AIs on their or the SL server code sucks so badly it could've just as well been written in visual basic.
You've found a sex shop where people actually have sex? I always thought people go to the sex shop because they don't have sex otherwise. :-)
To be fair, though, we also gain a lot of time because of the web, time that would've been spent looking for stuff in the city, or calling up shops, or digging through catalogs, libraries, book shops, etc. where a search or a website gets us the stuff faster.
Unless my memory is blurry, it is never made explicit how the Metaverse works. So in principle, yes, but the devil is in the technology details. And that makes all the difference. Running my own world on a Linden Labs server is nice, but it still limits what I can do to whatever the server software provides. Running my own software, even if the APIs are standardized, gives me much more freedom.
That's been a solved problem for at least a decade. Sure it's more coding, but you can have all Linden dollars minted at Linden Labs, and the math and code to verify them, prevent double-spending and forgeries, etc. have all been around for a very, very long time.
a) Make avatars client-side, so the client supplies them. The servers could act as caches, so other clients don't access the client directly (which would probably slow everything down if he's on a slow uplink).
b) Have the avatars streamed from "avatar servers". That way my server only stores avatar ID, location and URL of avatar server to ask for everything else. Or it could act as cache, as above.
Here's what I want to see:
I want to be able to rent property in Second Life (or some other virtual world) and have it "link" to my own server, so that when your avatar enters my house, you (transparently) continue playing on my server, using my bandwidth, CPU and my rules.
That way, the main Second Life grid can handle much more people, while I can decide how much I want to handle. If I'm IBM, I will put up a server farm to handle my advertisement/community events. If I'm a private person, I'll plan for 10 concurrent visitors with enough spare capacity to handle spikes of 20-30.
One way or the other, my virtual home is no longer dependent on Linden Lab's server farm. If Second Life gets overloaded, the visitors in my virtual corner of the virtual world won't suffer. They might even come to me because my place always runs smoothly. Suddenly, there is an interest in upgrading the infrastructure beyond "it must work, mostly".
My place can be small (one house) or large (an entire island). Just like property in SL is already. Sure, the transition will be a bit tricky (at what point exactly are people transfered to a different server, and how do they "see" the content inside/outside?), but that's a technical challenge that is, in principle, not that hard.
In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to have it work the Oblivion way (e.g. you click on the door, you are teleported inside. Windows both ways are faked with textures if at all.)
What is cool about this is that it removes the scarcity of land. I can rent a small house in SL and have an entire world inside. Hey, why not? It's not as if physical laws matter. Sure, Linden will have to adapt their business model, but since the server load isn't theirs anymore, they should not have to worry too much.
I stand corrected. Film is good. Audience, on the other hand, certainly isn't. The cops goal should've been to remove him from the hall, as quickly and quietly as possible - not create even more chaos.
These cops belong back in basic training. Competent police would have used necessary force to remove him - not subdue and shock him in front of an audience. Heck, if you insist on being a brute, at least be smart enough to do it outside where people aren't filming you!
I'll even tell you why: Because lots of people have automatic defensive responses to being touched. Many simply don't like being touched by strangers, and will react like he did - arms flailing, yelling, causing a stir. Others will react with violence. You - whether you're a cop or a citizen - don't know how some stranger "ticks". Initiating physical contact without establishing verbal and eye contact first is just plain stupid.
You can shut them down - at least the part that is in the EU - which is quite considerable. Last I checked, 13.000 jobs. That's not a small part.
You can call it whatever you want the same way I can call the US president a monkey and the moon a big piece of cheese. But changing the labels on things does not change the things. I'll be the first to say that yes, a death penalty means killing someone. "Murder", however, is a slightly different term with a slightly different meaning. And yes, those slight differences are as important as the off-by-one errors that break your software if you shrug them off.
You should wipe the smug look off your face and check the laws. Quite a bit of what MS did (and does) is criminal in the meaning of the law.
Seems we move to what we finally arrive at once I got the head of IT to listen - that we can have whatever we know is needed for the job, as long as we don't expect IT to support it. If you want support, you have to go through the usual channels and get your tool approved, and IT gets an order to support it.