Metaplace, if it ever gets halfway successful, might be a bit like that (without the "dying" part;)
Well you know, the "fi" in sci-fi stands for fiction. And MetaPlace is definitely not becoming like this. Right now it's just a toy isometric sample and a bunch of RSS API-s.
In fact, I went to join the alpha, and it's ridiculous what they ask of you (while reminding you, oh, it's completely optional, but we just want to know, right!):
- do you have experience with C++, Java, Perl? - interpreted languages? - compiled languages? - have you created games, or game artwork? - for which gaming companies have you worked?
and so on and so on...
I felt as if I'm being hired to work as a developer, and not as an end-user.
Apparently they're looking for someone to do the work for them, for free. Not gonna happen, not especially since they keep everything locked to their own servers, they aren't fooling anyone with their "open standards" crap.
A set of API-s that connect various games into a single community. They host it, and if you don't waste many resources it's free. If you do (i.e. become popular), it's no longer free, you pay hosting fee.
They have an example client, most likely Flash-based, 2D isometric game that renders their "world" definition.
Koster, in his own words, can't program a damn thing, and in my opinion, the way he imagines this working is waaaaay out there.
Quote from him:
"You have to admit it; the whole concept of 'play anywhere' is pretty neat. How often have you wanted to play a game with your friends, only to find out that their video card can't support the game? Have you ever been trapped in an airport for longer than expected with just your cell phone or an ancient laptop? We plan to show you just how good a game can look in a browser, and just how much fun it can be to play. Imagine people playing YOUR RPG on their cell phone, or in their Facebook, or in the sidebar of a gaming blog. That is accessibility, and we're out to show you just how awesome it can be."
Oh right, accessible gaming! The same RPG in 2D Flash, 3D, and Java! This will work amazing right? No, it won't. It'll be a disaster.
Let me foresee how this will go:
1. We'll see few games attempting to work on multiple platforms, and thus they will remain ridiculously simple so they can be played at all on anything from a cellphone to freak gamer personal computer desktop.
2. We'll see some more fun games, which you can only play on one platform, either 3D only or 2D only.
Either way, he expects to deliver the API-s, the sample isometric world viewer... and then expects their "users" to code everything, from the hot 3D versions, to the cellphone clients.
I only can sigh, and forget I wasted my time on trying to comprehend what the hell was he doing, since he's apparently trying to market it as something big, and it's not.
Anyway, the fact he produced a popular MMO with a huge company and team behind his back doesn't mean that if he quit and made his own company, he'll produce something worth a damn.
In fact, this is the norm, not the exception. Maybe he should've stayed at Sony.
"Destroying the traditional walled garden: An MMO accessible through Flash apps, 3D clients, cellphones, etc. Up to now, most MMOs have been "walled gardens", requiring an extensive client install. Metaplace, by contrast, is "A Web browser with virtual world capability.""
So, it won't be a separate client, it'll be a browser plugin and there will be API-s that provide RSS/data you can put in your MySpace/Flash/3D client/cellphone.
This is either huge (unlikely) or nothing at all.
It looks like it's just trying to be the MySpace of games. They claim they're build on open standards, but it's still THEIR servers that host the entire thing.
This is like saying "hey, MySpace is built on open standards - JS, HTML and CSS". What good is it if you host it on a central server anyway?
For this to work, they'll need some sort of definitive client, to, you know, deliver the damn world presentation.
They say:
"And it's a browser that comes with its own tool kit, for people who want to build worlds, and a community/marketplace where developers can give away or sell their templates, scripts, and so on, hosted on the Areae network."
So this goes right against what they said earlier, and it requires a special client after all (browsers are, as we know... clients).
"Thanks to the underlying HTML-style code by which Metaplace defines each individual world served by its network, you can literally copy and paste attributes like graphic appearance and user interface from one Metaplace world to another."
This sounds bad and reminds me of VRML and Second Life rolled up into one. Now we can define flying penises and virtual brothels in HTML markup. Phew.
And here's the most revealing part:
"(Metaplace will launch with this 2D isometric graphics view as standard)"
It's not even an immersive 3D world.
His business model? Ads:
"Areae only starts charging users for hosting their Metaplace world when they begin generating heavy traffic [..] There'll be sponsored worlds from advertisers and/or Areae partners [..] Adsense-style ad network will track user behavior based on what Metaplace games and worlds they play, and feed them appropriately targeted ads [..] A mini-Metaplace world can be embedded within a web ad, creating instant brand engagement to promote a sponsor's products."
Uhmm, right, the best part of open standards is that we're force-fed ads, while using 'em! Uhmm, wait, there's something wrong here.
"The whole thing is built on open standards, and attempt to 'bring virtual worlds to the web', instead of keeping them boxed away in a separate little garden."
I don't have a problem with whitelists as such. The wonderful addon to Firefox called NoScript is whitelist based and seems to work fine. Everything is blocked until you choose to unblock it.
The subtle difference is, the suite vendors get to make the list, not you. Imagine NoScript, but with a whitelist of sites you're allowed to *view*.
We alreayd have a taste of the Allow/Deny whitelisting in Vista, I don't think it solved anything either. I believe revokeable company certificates is the way.
This way you give the company a certificate and it should follow the rules (not publish signed malicious executables). If the alliance of security vendors spots an executable in the wild signed with said certificate and is malicious, the certificate is revoked.
This is the most efficient way to do it, while protecting users from executables they can't always know in advance are safe or not.
But it means again you PAY someone to run your executables. If the certificate costs less than $500 per company (or project group, for OSS software), then that's ok. But I and you know, if you allow them to charge $500, they'll try to charge more next year.
While being so excited that it's a million times more powerful, we forgot to say it'll be a million times more expensive. You don't find antimatter laying on the ground you know!
Once we whitelist all legit programs, we only have to blacklist the legit programs with injected code (via open source or assembler hacks) and we're done!
Amazing!
Or will security suites actually have to whitelist every single modification of the program? Will I be locked out of my HelloWorld.cpp program as soon as I compile it?
Certificates were intended as a white list: you protect the submitted data and have certificate from a central authority that this is indeed the company the certificate says it is.
We know how this ended (certificates given left and right without proper verification).
Now they try again with new certificates, which are more expensive.
So that's about that part.
What about site filters. Whitelisting sites in security suites has got to be the dumbest idea I've heard in a long time. Last I checked there's like billions of pages out there, some of which safe and some not.
So now that we find it impossible to cover the entire subset of malicious pages, what do we do? Yes, we try to cover the even great subset of legal pages.
This will either end with many small harmless sites filtered out, or sites having to pay ransom to all security suite vendors out there to get whitelisted or something of a similar nature.
It's faster than their download servers right now, maybe because the story just broke...
As for this release, I'm still a rabid fan of MS Office but when I dual-boot into Linux this is my Office suite (got it under Windows as well). It's nice that MS has some promising competition, even if it's not ready to quite replace MS Office (especially with the advancements made in 2007)
Just go back two articles and we see that the industry lied blatantly about the $40 billion losses of piracy in Canada, and that such numbers are hard or impossible to obtain. And in other news "cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business"...
It's just too plain complicated process to come up with a simple number and claim "that's it", even for a team of neutral experts. And that's the ideal case (people are never neutral, especially on a topic such as this).
The reason they need this number most is they want the government to put a law that artificially "restores the balance" by splitting the loss on blank media and players, taxing those.
The flaws of this approach are visible from a mile away, even if you had the perfect data in your hands.
So bottom line: we can't obtain proper data, but we shouldn't need it in the first place.
It is pointless articles like this that give that ridiculous man publicity (which he seems to thrive on).
Oh come on, now! What would publicity give him, nothing. In fact I'm thoroughly convinced he's paid by the game industry to advertise games such as GTA.
Who woulda noticed GTA IV is coming out? But now we pretty sure have. And it has a version of him inside! Sweet!
In my book, Thompson is the canonical example of how to make great viral advertising.
Nothing more annoying than a bunch of clueless journalists trying to drum up an anecdotal case as the beginning of a new grandiose trend that will possibly change our lives.
Unfortunately their innovative Times Reader appears to be pay-only as of yet.
One would think that there are two sure-proof things NY Times could do to secure large audience for their advertisers.
1. Their image as a respect newspaper, not just NY, not just US, but world-wide. Their journalists are respected, and their content verified, their analysis intelligent.
2. Better presentation than the average site.
Well, Times Reader is that point 2. If they gave me the reader for free, I'll most likely to there for my shot of news and editorials, since it's simply better than browsing a web site.
And hence, the NY Times won't have to compete with the other blogs and sites as much as if they remained free only in-browser.
The picture clearly has a quad-core processor in it. Is this just a binned quad-core processor where one of the cores has a defect (like what Sony did with their Cell chip?)
This is what the article authors suggest, but no, it's a separate architecture. While I suspect it's possible a subset of the 4-core Phenoms to be relabelled as 3-core Phenoms, the bulk of 3-core Phenoms will be built as 3-core parts from the very start.
And, to add insult to injury, this is a quad-core Phenom on the picture, since it's all the authors of the fine article could find. In other words, they are idiots.
However, AMD is definitely moving to make use of these quad-cores that don't quite make the cut, by testing them fully as triple-cores and realizing some revenue, rather than throwing them away.
The triple-core Phenom is an actual Phenom architecture, it's not 4-core rejects. Jesus Christ, NEVER accept submissions from hothardware.com anymore!
You have that now. You can order XP based machines from every major vendor.
Show me the link where I can order XP based machine from DELL as end user (not business). It shows only Vista variations (four of 'em). The situation is the same with other vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
Metaplace, if it ever gets halfway successful, might be a bit like that (without the "dying" part;)
Well you know, the "fi" in sci-fi stands for fiction. And MetaPlace is definitely not becoming like this. Right now it's just a toy isometric sample and a bunch of RSS API-s.
In fact, I went to join the alpha, and it's ridiculous what they ask of you (while reminding you, oh, it's completely optional, but we just want to know, right!):
- do you have experience with C++, Java, Perl?
- interpreted languages?
- compiled languages?
- have you created games, or game artwork?
- for which gaming companies have you worked?
and so on and so on...
I felt as if I'm being hired to work as a developer, and not as an end-user.
Apparently they're looking for someone to do the work for them, for free. Not gonna happen, not especially since they keep everything locked to their own servers, they aren't fooling anyone with their "open standards" crap.
So in essence what this is:
A set of API-s that connect various games into a single community. They host it, and if you don't waste many resources it's free. If you do (i.e. become popular), it's no longer free, you pay hosting fee.
They have an example client, most likely Flash-based, 2D isometric game that renders their "world" definition.
Koster, in his own words, can't program a damn thing, and in my opinion, the way he imagines this working is waaaaay out there.
Quote from him:
"You have to admit it; the whole concept of 'play anywhere' is pretty neat. How often have you wanted to play a game with your friends, only to find out that their video card can't support the game? Have you ever been trapped in an airport for longer than expected with just your cell phone or an ancient laptop? We plan to show you just how good a game can look in a browser, and just how much fun it can be to play. Imagine people playing YOUR RPG on their cell phone, or in their Facebook, or in the sidebar of a gaming blog. That is accessibility, and we're out to show you just how awesome it can be."
Oh right, accessible gaming! The same RPG in 2D Flash, 3D, and Java! This will work amazing right? No, it won't. It'll be a disaster.
Let me foresee how this will go:
1. We'll see few games attempting to work on multiple platforms, and thus they will remain ridiculously simple so they can be played at all on anything from a cellphone to freak gamer personal computer desktop.
2. We'll see some more fun games, which you can only play on one platform, either 3D only or 2D only.
Either way, he expects to deliver the API-s, the sample isometric world viewer... and then expects their "users" to code everything, from the hot 3D versions, to the cellphone clients.
I only can sigh, and forget I wasted my time on trying to comprehend what the hell was he doing, since he's apparently trying to market it as something big, and it's not.
Two words: Star Wars Galaxies.
:P ?
Can't count to three
Anyway, the fact he produced a popular MMO with a huge company and team behind his back doesn't mean that if he quit and made his own company, he'll produce something worth a damn.
In fact, this is the norm, not the exception. Maybe he should've stayed at Sony.
Don't worry Metaplace is 2D too.
What this guy is saying bothers me:
"Destroying the traditional walled garden: An MMO accessible through Flash apps, 3D clients, cellphones, etc. Up to now, most MMOs have been "walled gardens", requiring an extensive client install. Metaplace, by contrast, is "A Web browser with virtual world capability.""
So, it won't be a separate client, it'll be a browser plugin and there will be API-s that provide RSS/data you can put in your MySpace/Flash/3D client/cellphone.
This is either huge (unlikely) or nothing at all.
It looks like it's just trying to be the MySpace of games. They claim they're build on open standards, but it's still THEIR servers that host the entire thing.
This is like saying "hey, MySpace is built on open standards - JS, HTML and CSS". What good is it if you host it on a central server anyway?
For this to work, they'll need some sort of definitive client, to, you know, deliver the damn world presentation.
They say:
"And it's a browser that comes with its own tool kit, for people who want to build worlds, and a community/marketplace where developers can give away or sell their templates, scripts, and so on, hosted on the Areae network."
So this goes right against what they said earlier, and it requires a special client after all (browsers are, as we know... clients).
"Thanks to the underlying HTML-style code by which Metaplace defines each individual world served by its network, you can literally copy and paste attributes like graphic appearance and user interface from one Metaplace world to another."
This sounds bad and reminds me of VRML and Second Life rolled up into one. Now we can define flying penises and virtual brothels in HTML markup. Phew.
And here's the most revealing part:
"(Metaplace will launch with this 2D isometric graphics view as standard)"
It's not even an immersive 3D world.
His business model? Ads:
"Areae only starts charging users for hosting their Metaplace world when they begin generating heavy traffic [..] There'll be sponsored worlds from advertisers and/or Areae partners [..] Adsense-style ad network will track user behavior based on what Metaplace games and worlds they play, and feed them appropriately targeted ads [..] A mini-Metaplace world can be embedded within a web ad, creating instant brand engagement to promote a sponsor's products."
Uhmm, right, the best part of open standards is that we're force-fed ads, while using 'em! Uhmm, wait, there's something wrong here.
"The whole thing is built on open standards, and attempt to 'bring virtual worlds to the web', instead of keeping them boxed away in a separate little garden."
:`(
That sounds like VRML
Would it? I think you will find that there is a finite (and probably quite small) number of programs out there.
:P
You making funny, me laughing silly
I don't have a problem with whitelists as such. The wonderful addon to Firefox called NoScript is whitelist based and seems to work fine. Everything is blocked until you choose to unblock it.
The subtle difference is, the suite vendors get to make the list, not you. Imagine NoScript, but with a whitelist of sites you're allowed to *view*.
We alreayd have a taste of the Allow/Deny whitelisting in Vista, I don't think it solved anything either. I believe revokeable company certificates is the way.
This way you give the company a certificate and it should follow the rules (not publish signed malicious executables). If the alliance of security vendors spots an executable in the wild signed with said certificate and is malicious, the certificate is revoked.
This is the most efficient way to do it, while protecting users from executables they can't always know in advance are safe or not.
But it means again you PAY someone to run your executables. If the certificate costs less than $500 per company (or project group, for OSS software), then that's ok. But I and you know, if you allow them to charge $500, they'll try to charge more next year.
Greed knows no borders.
While being so excited that it's a million times more powerful, we forgot to say it'll be a million times more expensive. You don't find antimatter laying on the ground you know!
Would this work? The effort to maintain black lists is becoming so daunting that white lists may be an effective solution.
You see, a white list would be bigger than the black list. But how come then a black list is daunting to create, and a white isn't?
Simple, they'll charge the legal software vendors to be white listed.
It's funny, laugh.. Hmm, no one is laughing.
Once we whitelist all legit programs, we only have to blacklist the legit programs with injected code (via open source or assembler hacks) and we're done!
Amazing!
Or will security suites actually have to whitelist every single modification of the program? Will I be locked out of my HelloWorld.cpp program as soon as I compile it?
Certificates were intended as a white list: you protect the submitted data and have certificate from a central authority that this is indeed the company the certificate says it is.
We know how this ended (certificates given left and right without proper verification).
Now they try again with new certificates, which are more expensive.
So that's about that part.
What about site filters. Whitelisting sites in security suites has got to be the dumbest idea I've heard in a long time. Last I checked there's like billions of pages out there, some of which safe and some not.
So now that we find it impossible to cover the entire subset of malicious pages, what do we do? Yes, we try to cover the even great subset of legal pages.
This will either end with many small harmless sites filtered out, or sites having to pay ransom to all security suite vendors out there to get whitelisted or something of a similar nature.
Not happening.
It's faster than their download servers right now, maybe because the story just broke...
As for this release, I'm still a rabid fan of MS Office but when I dual-boot into Linux this is my Office suite (got it under Windows as well). It's nice that MS has some promising competition, even if it's not ready to quite replace MS Office (especially with the advancements made in 2007)
Just go back two articles and we see that the industry lied blatantly about the $40 billion losses of piracy in Canada, and that such numbers are hard or impossible to obtain. And in other news "cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business"...
Do we ever learn?
It's just too plain complicated process to come up with a simple number and claim "that's it", even for a team of neutral experts.
And that's the ideal case (people are never neutral, especially on a topic such as this).
The reason they need this number most is they want the government to put a law that artificially "restores the balance" by splitting the loss on blank media and players, taxing those.
The flaws of this approach are visible from a mile away, even if you had the perfect data in your hands.
So bottom line: we can't obtain proper data, but we shouldn't need it in the first place.
Unfortunately, it's XP/Vista only. It doesn't seem to work under Wine either.
.NET3 (which can be installed on XP and comes with Vista).
Yes, it is.
It's based upon
Maybe it can be ported to Silverlight, then it'll run on Linux and Mac as well.
It is pointless articles like this that give that ridiculous man publicity (which he seems to thrive on).
Oh come on, now! What would publicity give him, nothing. In fact I'm thoroughly convinced he's paid by the game industry to advertise games such as GTA.
Who woulda noticed GTA IV is coming out? But now we pretty sure have. And it has a version of him inside! Sweet!
In my book, Thompson is the canonical example of how to make great viral advertising.
"opening up a new era of 'galaxy hunting'"
Yawn.
Nothing more annoying than a bunch of clueless journalists trying to drum up an anecdotal case as the beginning of a new grandiose trend that will possibly change our lives.
Unfortunately their innovative Times Reader appears to be pay-only as of yet.
One would think that there are two sure-proof things NY Times could do to secure large audience for their advertisers.
1. Their image as a respect newspaper, not just NY, not just US, but world-wide. Their journalists are respected, and their content verified, their analysis intelligent.
2. Better presentation than the average site.
Well, Times Reader is that point 2. If they gave me the reader for free, I'll most likely to there for my shot of news and editorials, since it's simply better than browsing a web site.
And hence, the NY Times won't have to compete with the other blogs and sites as much as if they remained free only in-browser.
The picture clearly has a quad-core processor in it. Is this just a binned quad-core processor where one of the cores has a defect (like what Sony did with their Cell chip?)
This is what the article authors suggest, but no, it's a separate architecture. While I suspect it's possible a subset of the 4-core Phenoms to be relabelled as 3-core Phenoms, the bulk of 3-core Phenoms will be built as 3-core parts from the very start.
And, to add insult to injury, this is a quad-core Phenom on the picture, since it's all the authors of the fine article could find. In other words, they are idiots.
Wait, I missed that, another lie:
However, AMD is definitely moving to make use of these quad-cores that don't quite make the cut, by testing them fully as triple-cores and realizing some revenue, rather than throwing them away.
The triple-core Phenom is an actual Phenom architecture, it's not 4-core rejects. Jesus Christ, NEVER accept submissions from hothardware.com anymore!
That's the worst one in months.
SMP doesn't suggest the number of cores should be a power of two, it doesn't even suggest "even number of cores".
It's about multiple cores processing simultaneously. Check the article I link to, even the damn example diagram has 3 cpu-s.
I'll stick to my usual of buying CDs and ripping them to AAC, even if it means less music overall.
And that's exactly how Universal like it.
Now if you'd say:
I'll stick to my usual of buying DRM music off iTunes
And that's exactly how Universal won't like it, but it's exactly how Apple like it.
And if you'd say:
I'll stick to my usual of buying DRM-free music off iTunes (or DRM-ed and remove the DRM)
Now that's exactly how both Universal and Apple won't like it (don't you be fooled by Job crying for less DRM).
By saying that vista is slow as a turtle on vicodin and that it won't run some important software, you are spreading FUD.
Thing is, I didn't say it myself, I quoted it. I don't have quite the talent to come up with amusing comparisons like that.
Also, thanks for a good laugh, you gotta realize your posts are amusing, and the "I'm something of a computer expert" just topped it all.
You have that now. You can order XP based machines from every major vendor.
Show me the link where I can order XP based machine from DELL as end user (not business). It shows only Vista variations (four of 'em). The situation is the same with other vendors.