Many sectors of the news world are simply conduits for dissiminating propanda. I don't understand why people would want to pay. There are plenty of information sources on the internet that are free. At this point in my life, I have already found sources for the majority of the information that I want to consume. By the time the major news organizations pick up on the story and publish it, they are just rehashing information that I had days ago. The only difference seems to be that they tend to have eyewitness accounts, and it shows that they have interviewed people as opposed to just repeating the facts.
Two examples are Stratfor and The Long War Journal. Between those two sources I am up to date on what is happening in Afghanistan, and what the major (political / economic / military) stories are.
Earlier in the week, there was a bit of griping going on from journalists about the way the Obama administration handled releasing details about the President's Supreme Court nomination. The journalists were upset that the administration officials releasing the information wanted to remain anonymous, and they were only giving the details to a select group of journalists, instead of the entire press pool. The thought that went through my mind was, "What would the White House do if all of the journalists suddenly said, 'We really don't care who you are nominating for the Supreme Court. Find some other way to let the American people know what you're up to.'"
We are really getting to the point where the major news sources are less and less relevent. Who wants to pay to consume propaganda?
There are some quirks in the software in the technical sense. My end users love the program and couldn't live without it. As an IT guy, I'm disappointed by their import functionality. It seems to be very quirky and rigid. It is very hard to import new, "complex" records. For example I'm having a difficulty right now creating a large number of new organizations, creating constituent records associated with those organizations, and also associating specific information with the constituent records (phone numbers, addresses). The Raisers Edge way involves creating all the organizations. Then creating all of the constituents. Then creating all of the associated information. Doing so involves keeping track of numerous importid fields across multiple import files. In theory, according to their technical specs, you "should" be able to do it all with one import file. The reality is that you can't.
My other gripe with the system is that do seem to charge extra for what I think should be standard functionality. If you have a list of constituent names, and you want to pull their associated constituentid fields from the database, you have to pay for a $4500 "plug-in" developed by a third party. I didn't have $4500 laying around, so I had to dump some tables into Access, and run queries between the Excel data with the constituent names and the Access tables with the constituentid information. In my mind, finding constituent IDs should be basic functionality for a CRM system and not a "special feature".
Their reporting functionality is kind of quirky. You can't just point Crystal at the SQL tables. You have to write queries to generate special "Blackbaud Report Writer Databases" (basically Access databases) and report against thsoe.
Like any piece of software, there are some ups and downs. Like I said, the staff loves it. There is a reasonable amount of community support available for the product. The technical quirks aren't insurmountable, but they do lead to some "Who the hell developed THIS piece of code." moments.
The Outlook integration is a "must have" feature among the staff here. They really appreciate being able to have alerts setup within Raiser's Edge, and then have those alerts synced with Outlook (and the Blackberry). It really improves the quality of the development process, especially for the development staff who are handling dozens of prospective donors at any given point in time.
It's pretty much the industry standard. I work for a 501(c)3 non-profit with a $15 million a year budget. It's Windows only, but I'm not aware of any open source solution that includes all of the industry specific knowledge that Raisers Edge does.
Pretty much. I worked for a consulting company, and one of our clients needed a system to manage their manufacturing and distribution processes. Developing a system like that was far beyond the scope of our ability, but we developed the needs analysis (documented all of their internal processes, etc) and helped them shop for vendors. We eventually narrowed it down to Epicor and the Epicor sales staff of course promised everything under the heavens... then signed a contract committing to their promises. A year and a half later, when the product STILL wasn't working, the client sued Epicor for breach of contract. We were in the clear because we just did the needs analysis, and we didn't know that Epicor was full of crap.
It seems like there are two worlds, the ideal world, and the real world. In the ideal world, you can purchase an off the shelf software package that supports all of your business processes. In the real world, you find something that comes as close as possible, and then modify the way you do business... or, you hire programmers/farm out the programming work to customize the hell out of it.
I have an addictive personality and purposefully stayed away from WoW during the beta cycle. Even after it was released, I didn't play it for a long time. I didn't really get into the game until a bunch of my friends were playing it and were already involved in end game raids. I was hesitant to get into the game after hearing tales of multiple hour long raids, but I gave it a shot anyway.
The thing that drew me in was how well the quests were laid out. I went into the game after having read a story here on/. about how Blizzard had a relatively large number of psychologists on staff. I was actively looking for addictive qualities to the game. For me, a person who wanted to play it casually, it was the time involved with the quests. The quests are short, so its easy to get into the mentality "I'll just do ONE more quest 'real quick'". Often times the quests are grouped together in the same area, so while doing 'one quest real quick', you might as well 'do these other quests that are right here'. Before you know it, a couple of hours are gone.
The other thing is that the quests are linked in such a way that they guide you onto the next area in a fairly seemless way. You never linger in any one area for too long, and there is always something on the horizon to tackle. Beyond that, all of the quests are relatively easy so you don't get frustrated. It makes the game feel kind of childish at times, but it also limits the likelyhood that a person is going to leave the game in frustration.
Although the end game raids still take a lot of time, there is content available for the more casual player. I rarely ever raid because I don't want to set aside the time required. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to hop online and within fifteen minutes, find a group and run an instance or two. That method pretty much denies me any sort of high end gear, but that's not why I play the game.
When reading the old Chan scriptures and treasties (as translated by Thomas Cleary), even a thousand plus years ago, there were masters warning about the secularization of Buddhism, and the inclination of certain sorts of followers to focus in on the organized religion-like aspects of the practice. The underlying teachings themselves have a universal appeal, and those roots of the teachings are what have been transfered to the Western world.
I can't even get the guy to talk to me, much less smack me in the head. I think he's put off by all of the conversations going on in my head all the time.;)
Where do you get the idea that Buddhism can only be enjoyed by "those sheltering themselves away from others through their wealth"? That's almost as abhorrent a teaching as the belief that sitting in peaceful meditation is akin to completely extinguishing the mind so that thoughts are completely absent.
My experience with Buddhism (Chan / Zen) has been that the intention behind the practices involves becoming mindful and living in the moment. One of the key aspects of the training involves sitting in meditation and just "being". It isn't that a person lights incense for the sake of lighting incense. They might incense so that they can focus on the incense and meditate on it as it burns.
I personally meditate on the train quite often. My Blackberry doesn't meditate for me. I do the meditating.
Buddhism is like any other religion. There are a lot of people who get so caught up in the rituals of the religion that they don't fully understand the underlying reason for doing the ritual in the first place. It's not like once you've lit your 10,000th stick of incense, some guy named Buddha appears before you, smacks you on the forehead to open up your third eye and then you're suddenly enlightened.
I'm only slight above average in the IQ department. The last time I was tested was in third grade before I went into "gifted" education and my IQ was in the 140s. I realize that reading my original response to your post, I came across as a little hostile. That wasn't my intent. As I read your post it reminded me a lot of myself. I know that your intentions are good and that you want to help your child focus on school work. I think that the way you're doing it is by giving him some high-level meta messages that have the potential for a serious downside.
I am very much in the same boat that you are. Did you try biofeedback at all? There is a great program that has been developed by The Drake Institute for Behavioral Medicine (you can Google them). They use biofeedback programs that are specifically tailored to each individual patient's needs. My sister and I both went through the program and we achieved similar results, but with very different treatment methodologies. The thing that I took away from the treatment is the feeling of being "concentrated". Concentration has a body feeling associated with it. Once you are able to relax, train your breathing and calibrate your mind, you can bring the feeling about at will.
Drugs are the easy way to do it. They just force the brain into a certain state and keep it there until they wear off. My sister ended up getting on drugs (I think she takes Adderol(sp?)). I prefer meditation, tai chi, kung fu and running. Diet helps too, as do some supplements (alpha-gpc, tryptophan, chlorella). However I wouldn't be able to use all of those tools without having gone through the biofeedback program. The biofeedback establishes the baseline. Once the baseline is established, it becomes easier to monitor how different factors in life affect it and adjust accordingly. For example, I've found that when I listen to music with lyrics, the songs get stuck in my head. So these days I listen to classical, jazz and electronica.
I have ADD and having read what you wrote, I'm kind of terrified because I think you're setting your son up for a bruising in about a decade or so. School is "easy" and "smart kids do finish first" when dealing with basic concepts. As soon as he has to deal with complex concepts, higher level math that involves multiple steps, or research that goes deeper than the superficial, he is going to be lagging behind his peers. When he can't "finish first" he will start having all sorts of self esteem problems and think less of himself because he isn't "smart" anymore.
I eventually learned that the smart kids are the ones who use all of their time. When they are finished with the test, they go over it again to make sure that they really did do the math right. They re-read what they wrote to make sure that their points really are clearly communicated. The smart kids enjoy learning and don't see it as something that they need to hurry up and finish.
If your kid is ADD, get him some professional help. Get him a tutor who can help him develop some real learning skills.
Those classes that you "got bored" with were the classes you struggled with. You wrote them off as boring because you couldn't handle the work. It was easier to go do something else instead of focusing on the work and getting it done. Trust me, I made the exact same excuse.
I've been diagnosed with ADD (minus the hyperactivity) and although I was similar in that interesting teachers kept me interested, I can't blame my attention problems on the teacher. People with healty minds can focus them on whatever the subject happens to be. It's a cop out to put the burden of our inability to focus on the rest of the world for "not being entertaining enough". I did a lot of biofeedback training and that, combined with meditation and martial arts has really helped me control and focus my attention.
Staying focused is a skill that takes time to develop. On the other end of the spectrum, being hyper alert and aware is also a skill. I think that staying focused is easier for ADD people to develop. Becoming hyper alert is more of a physiological/genetic trait. It is an innate ability, more so than a learned behavior. It just happens to be frowned upon in an "orderly" society.
I've said this before in other discussions on this topic, but I still think that Shadowrun would make a great MMO for the reasons that you like UO. It had a very flexible character creation system, and the world itself provides a huge variety of content possibilities. It meshes the world of science fiction/cyberpunk and the fantasy world. The only problem I foresee is that in order for it to really work, it has to take place in an urban setting. I'm not sure if there are any game engines out there that can really handle a player doing whatever they want in a vast urban setting, while at the same time still running reactive NPCs, and keeping track of resources and the like. The Grand Theft Auto engine comes close, but I think the limit on their network play is 8 or 16 people. The Unreal developers are threatening to come out with MMOFPS type engine that is supposed to handle large game worlds but its vapor ware as far as I know (a game called APB is supposedly going to utilize it).
Blizzard wasn't exactly a "me-too" company in the same way that the developers of Vanguard and other MMOs are. Blizzard had the benefit of mind share from their RTS Warcraft series. A lot of people who were playing EQ or whatever other MMO had probably also played Warcraft at some point. They were already familiar with the world. I hadn't ever played EQ, but I had played Warcraft. What I expected from WoW and what WoW delivered were entirely different. I expected it would be like the RTS, except you would be in it, controlling a single unit. I expected that I would be fighting the other armies, and killing peons harvesting wood and gold. I still think that they need to come up with World PVP that is just like the RTS, but given what a cluster fuck Wintergrasp is, I'm not holding my breath. Their game engine obviously can't handle that level of game play.
I completely agree with you. The properly written apps will run better because they aren't depending on DLLs that are having to check for code that nobody has been using for ten years, but has been left in there for those random "just in case" scenarios. It probably slims down the core DLLs a lot because they can offload all of that to the shims.
WoW has become ubiquitous. So many people, from so many different walks of life all play WoW. In a way, WoW is to online gaming in the 21st century what AOL was to the internet in the 20th century. It brought online, multiplayer gaming into the lives of people who otherwise probably wouldn't have gone there. My g/f is a good example. Until we started dating, her idea of playing video games was playing Tony Hawk with the guys at parties. Now we play WoW together every once in a while. A lot of her co-workers play WoW. The lady who lives in the apartment beneath us plays WoW. It is very well polished.
Thanks for the information. If you have to write code in the shim, how is that better than just rewriting the application? I guess it's less resource intensive, and helpful in situations where you might not have access to the original code.
What should Microsoft be doing? The community is up in arms over their less than stellar security record. They introduce progressively better security with each iteration of the OS, but often times those security improvements crap all over previously accepted programming practices. What do they do? Pull an Apple and tell everyone to go out and buy the newest version of all of the software that was working just fine on the previous version of the OS? It seems to me like shims are a good solution. Older shops get to continue extracting value from their legacy code without having to invest money in rewriting the apps.
Since at least Windows 2000, Microsoft has provided guidelines about how to write code so the applications do not require administrative privileges. Most developers have either been ignorant of the practices, don't care about the practices, or don't know how to implement the practices. A lot of it has to do with where the DLL files get stored, and where the application writes its files to. In the *nix world, everything is pretty self contained within its own directory. For the most part, all of the files that an application needs are right there with the application. If they aren't in the same directory, symbolic links (something that Windows lacks) provides the application access to the necessary libraries.
I think you're blowing things out of proportion to say that it is unheard of it in the Windows world for users to be able to run as a something less than a super user. At my current job, we only have one app on the network that requires admin privileges. When I was consulting, most of our clients were all running as regular users.
The "problem" with Microsoft is that they have always catered to the lowest common denominator. When it comes to developers, they provide the developers with a powerful IDE and don't encourage them to think about how it works behind the scenes. That ease of use has come at the cost of security. Sure, devs have been able to come up with the applications that they need to meet the business requirements laid out for them. Unfortunately, those applications often times aren't properly hardened and crack when put on hostile networks.
I see the computer world working from two different ends. The Microsoft part of the world has provided the functionality and is backing into security. The *nix world has provided the security and the stable foundation, and now they are building the functionality.
On one hand you didn't get the money to fix your code. On the other hand, Microsoft stepped up to the plate to "protect your investment in your legacy solution". The only cost to your organization was the time spent sorting out the shims. You mentioned you had to shim an app to get it work on XP. How old was it? Did it run on 2000? Was it developed for 2000 or NT? At the risk of comparing apples and oranges here, how many nearly ten year old Linux apps can you run on the current kernel without a recompile or rewrite?
One of my biggest gripes with MS has been needing "administrator" rights to run seemingly standard applications. Nine times out of ten the requirement comes from poor coding practice on the part of the developers. It is good to see Microsoft finally stepping up and providing a work around instead of forcing everyone else to wait for some developers who might not ever get around to fixing their apps.
I'm reading the documentation right now, but I'm curious if it resolves the security problems. I'm guessing that a shimmed app is running in a sandbox? Or is the shimmed app given fully elevated privileges so that if gets compromised, the exploit code can still own the system?
"I got caught breaking the law and now I have to deal with the consequences." There is a reason that I stopped hacking computer systems after I turned 18. In today's legal climate with regards to the internet, downloading torrents is almost as dangerous as using Craigslist to solicit prostitutes or drugs. Whatever your stance on the morality of the laws, the reality of the situation is that for whatever reason (got $$$?), the law enforcement community and the courts are up in arms and on a witch hunt.
I'm not sure what life is like in Australia, but here in Los Angeles, anything that I download from a torrent site, I can purchase on any train or Metro bus at one for $5, three for $10 (including Angels and Demons). The way I look at it, that's the much better deal. I get to contribute to the local economy, and my odds of catching a law suit are next to none. I haven't bought any movies that way because I am content with my NetFlix subscription, but the point I'm making is that if you are going to obtain pirated content, doing so via a college internet connection is probably the absolute highest risk way to do it right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Many sectors of the news world are simply conduits for dissiminating propanda. I don't understand why people would want to pay. There are plenty of information sources on the internet that are free. At this point in my life, I have already found sources for the majority of the information that I want to consume. By the time the major news organizations pick up on the story and publish it, they are just rehashing information that I had days ago. The only difference seems to be that they tend to have eyewitness accounts, and it shows that they have interviewed people as opposed to just repeating the facts. Two examples are Stratfor and The Long War Journal. Between those two sources I am up to date on what is happening in Afghanistan, and what the major (political / economic / military) stories are. Earlier in the week, there was a bit of griping going on from journalists about the way the Obama administration handled releasing details about the President's Supreme Court nomination. The journalists were upset that the administration officials releasing the information wanted to remain anonymous, and they were only giving the details to a select group of journalists, instead of the entire press pool. The thought that went through my mind was, "What would the White House do if all of the journalists suddenly said, 'We really don't care who you are nominating for the Supreme Court. Find some other way to let the American people know what you're up to.'" We are really getting to the point where the major news sources are less and less relevent. Who wants to pay to consume propaganda?
There are some quirks in the software in the technical sense. My end users love the program and couldn't live without it. As an IT guy, I'm disappointed by their import functionality. It seems to be very quirky and rigid. It is very hard to import new, "complex" records. For example I'm having a difficulty right now creating a large number of new organizations, creating constituent records associated with those organizations, and also associating specific information with the constituent records (phone numbers, addresses). The Raisers Edge way involves creating all the organizations. Then creating all of the constituents. Then creating all of the associated information. Doing so involves keeping track of numerous importid fields across multiple import files. In theory, according to their technical specs, you "should" be able to do it all with one import file. The reality is that you can't.
My other gripe with the system is that do seem to charge extra for what I think should be standard functionality. If you have a list of constituent names, and you want to pull their associated constituentid fields from the database, you have to pay for a $4500 "plug-in" developed by a third party. I didn't have $4500 laying around, so I had to dump some tables into Access, and run queries between the Excel data with the constituent names and the Access tables with the constituentid information. In my mind, finding constituent IDs should be basic functionality for a CRM system and not a "special feature".
Their reporting functionality is kind of quirky. You can't just point Crystal at the SQL tables. You have to write queries to generate special "Blackbaud Report Writer Databases" (basically Access databases) and report against thsoe.
Like any piece of software, there are some ups and downs. Like I said, the staff loves it. There is a reasonable amount of community support available for the product. The technical quirks aren't insurmountable, but they do lead to some "Who the hell developed THIS piece of code." moments.
The Outlook integration is a "must have" feature among the staff here. They really appreciate being able to have alerts setup within Raiser's Edge, and then have those alerts synced with Outlook (and the Blackberry). It really improves the quality of the development process, especially for the development staff who are handling dozens of prospective donors at any given point in time.
It's pretty much the industry standard. I work for a 501(c)3 non-profit with a $15 million a year budget. It's Windows only, but I'm not aware of any open source solution that includes all of the industry specific knowledge that Raisers Edge does.
Pretty much. I worked for a consulting company, and one of our clients needed a system to manage their manufacturing and distribution processes. Developing a system like that was far beyond the scope of our ability, but we developed the needs analysis (documented all of their internal processes, etc) and helped them shop for vendors. We eventually narrowed it down to Epicor and the Epicor sales staff of course promised everything under the heavens... then signed a contract committing to their promises. A year and a half later, when the product STILL wasn't working, the client sued Epicor for breach of contract. We were in the clear because we just did the needs analysis, and we didn't know that Epicor was full of crap.
It seems like there are two worlds, the ideal world, and the real world. In the ideal world, you can purchase an off the shelf software package that supports all of your business processes. In the real world, you find something that comes as close as possible, and then modify the way you do business... or, you hire programmers/farm out the programming work to customize the hell out of it.
I have an addictive personality and purposefully stayed away from WoW during the beta cycle. Even after it was released, I didn't play it for a long time. I didn't really get into the game until a bunch of my friends were playing it and were already involved in end game raids. I was hesitant to get into the game after hearing tales of multiple hour long raids, but I gave it a shot anyway.
The thing that drew me in was how well the quests were laid out. I went into the game after having read a story here on /. about how Blizzard had a relatively large number of psychologists on staff. I was actively looking for addictive qualities to the game. For me, a person who wanted to play it casually, it was the time involved with the quests. The quests are short, so its easy to get into the mentality "I'll just do ONE more quest 'real quick'". Often times the quests are grouped together in the same area, so while doing 'one quest real quick', you might as well 'do these other quests that are right here'. Before you know it, a couple of hours are gone.
The other thing is that the quests are linked in such a way that they guide you onto the next area in a fairly seemless way. You never linger in any one area for too long, and there is always something on the horizon to tackle. Beyond that, all of the quests are relatively easy so you don't get frustrated. It makes the game feel kind of childish at times, but it also limits the likelyhood that a person is going to leave the game in frustration.
Although the end game raids still take a lot of time, there is content available for the more casual player. I rarely ever raid because I don't want to set aside the time required. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to hop online and within fifteen minutes, find a group and run an instance or two. That method pretty much denies me any sort of high end gear, but that's not why I play the game.
When reading the old Chan scriptures and treasties (as translated by Thomas Cleary), even a thousand plus years ago, there were masters warning about the secularization of Buddhism, and the inclination of certain sorts of followers to focus in on the organized religion-like aspects of the practice. The underlying teachings themselves have a universal appeal, and those roots of the teachings are what have been transfered to the Western world.
I can't even get the guy to talk to me, much less smack me in the head. I think he's put off by all of the conversations going on in my head all the time. ;)
Where do you get the idea that Buddhism can only be enjoyed by "those sheltering themselves away from others through their wealth"? That's almost as abhorrent a teaching as the belief that sitting in peaceful meditation is akin to completely extinguishing the mind so that thoughts are completely absent.
+1.
My experience with Buddhism (Chan / Zen) has been that the intention behind the practices involves becoming mindful and living in the moment. One of the key aspects of the training involves sitting in meditation and just "being". It isn't that a person lights incense for the sake of lighting incense. They might incense so that they can focus on the incense and meditate on it as it burns.
I personally meditate on the train quite often. My Blackberry doesn't meditate for me. I do the meditating.
Buddhism is like any other religion. There are a lot of people who get so caught up in the rituals of the religion that they don't fully understand the underlying reason for doing the ritual in the first place. It's not like once you've lit your 10,000th stick of incense, some guy named Buddha appears before you, smacks you on the forehead to open up your third eye and then you're suddenly enlightened.
I'm only slight above average in the IQ department. The last time I was tested was in third grade before I went into "gifted" education and my IQ was in the 140s. I realize that reading my original response to your post, I came across as a little hostile. That wasn't my intent. As I read your post it reminded me a lot of myself. I know that your intentions are good and that you want to help your child focus on school work. I think that the way you're doing it is by giving him some high-level meta messages that have the potential for a serious downside.
I am very much in the same boat that you are. Did you try biofeedback at all? There is a great program that has been developed by The Drake Institute for Behavioral Medicine (you can Google them). They use biofeedback programs that are specifically tailored to each individual patient's needs. My sister and I both went through the program and we achieved similar results, but with very different treatment methodologies. The thing that I took away from the treatment is the feeling of being "concentrated". Concentration has a body feeling associated with it. Once you are able to relax, train your breathing and calibrate your mind, you can bring the feeling about at will.
Drugs are the easy way to do it. They just force the brain into a certain state and keep it there until they wear off. My sister ended up getting on drugs (I think she takes Adderol(sp?)). I prefer meditation, tai chi, kung fu and running. Diet helps too, as do some supplements (alpha-gpc, tryptophan, chlorella). However I wouldn't be able to use all of those tools without having gone through the biofeedback program. The biofeedback establishes the baseline. Once the baseline is established, it becomes easier to monitor how different factors in life affect it and adjust accordingly. For example, I've found that when I listen to music with lyrics, the songs get stuck in my head. So these days I listen to classical, jazz and electronica.
I have ADD and having read what you wrote, I'm kind of terrified because I think you're setting your son up for a bruising in about a decade or so. School is "easy" and "smart kids do finish first" when dealing with basic concepts. As soon as he has to deal with complex concepts, higher level math that involves multiple steps, or research that goes deeper than the superficial, he is going to be lagging behind his peers. When he can't "finish first" he will start having all sorts of self esteem problems and think less of himself because he isn't "smart" anymore.
I eventually learned that the smart kids are the ones who use all of their time. When they are finished with the test, they go over it again to make sure that they really did do the math right. They re-read what they wrote to make sure that their points really are clearly communicated. The smart kids enjoy learning and don't see it as something that they need to hurry up and finish.
If your kid is ADD, get him some professional help. Get him a tutor who can help him develop some real learning skills.
Those classes that you "got bored" with were the classes you struggled with. You wrote them off as boring because you couldn't handle the work. It was easier to go do something else instead of focusing on the work and getting it done. Trust me, I made the exact same excuse.
I've been diagnosed with ADD (minus the hyperactivity) and although I was similar in that interesting teachers kept me interested, I can't blame my attention problems on the teacher. People with healty minds can focus them on whatever the subject happens to be. It's a cop out to put the burden of our inability to focus on the rest of the world for "not being entertaining enough". I did a lot of biofeedback training and that, combined with meditation and martial arts has really helped me control and focus my attention.
Staying focused is a skill that takes time to develop. On the other end of the spectrum, being hyper alert and aware is also a skill. I think that staying focused is easier for ADD people to develop. Becoming hyper alert is more of a physiological/genetic trait. It is an innate ability, more so than a learned behavior. It just happens to be frowned upon in an "orderly" society.
There wasn't anything better yet.
I've said this before in other discussions on this topic, but I still think that Shadowrun would make a great MMO for the reasons that you like UO. It had a very flexible character creation system, and the world itself provides a huge variety of content possibilities. It meshes the world of science fiction/cyberpunk and the fantasy world. The only problem I foresee is that in order for it to really work, it has to take place in an urban setting. I'm not sure if there are any game engines out there that can really handle a player doing whatever they want in a vast urban setting, while at the same time still running reactive NPCs, and keeping track of resources and the like. The Grand Theft Auto engine comes close, but I think the limit on their network play is 8 or 16 people. The Unreal developers are threatening to come out with MMOFPS type engine that is supposed to handle large game worlds but its vapor ware as far as I know (a game called APB is supposedly going to utilize it).
Blizzard wasn't exactly a "me-too" company in the same way that the developers of Vanguard and other MMOs are. Blizzard had the benefit of mind share from their RTS Warcraft series. A lot of people who were playing EQ or whatever other MMO had probably also played Warcraft at some point. They were already familiar with the world. I hadn't ever played EQ, but I had played Warcraft. What I expected from WoW and what WoW delivered were entirely different. I expected it would be like the RTS, except you would be in it, controlling a single unit. I expected that I would be fighting the other armies, and killing peons harvesting wood and gold. I still think that they need to come up with World PVP that is just like the RTS, but given what a cluster fuck Wintergrasp is, I'm not holding my breath. Their game engine obviously can't handle that level of game play.
Oh yeah. As you can see by my UID, I'm new here. ;)
I completely agree with you. The properly written apps will run better because they aren't depending on DLLs that are having to check for code that nobody has been using for ten years, but has been left in there for those random "just in case" scenarios. It probably slims down the core DLLs a lot because they can offload all of that to the shims.
WoW has become ubiquitous. So many people, from so many different walks of life all play WoW. In a way, WoW is to online gaming in the 21st century what AOL was to the internet in the 20th century. It brought online, multiplayer gaming into the lives of people who otherwise probably wouldn't have gone there. My g/f is a good example. Until we started dating, her idea of playing video games was playing Tony Hawk with the guys at parties. Now we play WoW together every once in a while. A lot of her co-workers play WoW. The lady who lives in the apartment beneath us plays WoW. It is very well polished.
Thanks for the information. If you have to write code in the shim, how is that better than just rewriting the application? I guess it's less resource intensive, and helpful in situations where you might not have access to the original code.
What should Microsoft be doing? The community is up in arms over their less than stellar security record. They introduce progressively better security with each iteration of the OS, but often times those security improvements crap all over previously accepted programming practices. What do they do? Pull an Apple and tell everyone to go out and buy the newest version of all of the software that was working just fine on the previous version of the OS? It seems to me like shims are a good solution. Older shops get to continue extracting value from their legacy code without having to invest money in rewriting the apps.
Since at least Windows 2000, Microsoft has provided guidelines about how to write code so the applications do not require administrative privileges. Most developers have either been ignorant of the practices, don't care about the practices, or don't know how to implement the practices. A lot of it has to do with where the DLL files get stored, and where the application writes its files to. In the *nix world, everything is pretty self contained within its own directory. For the most part, all of the files that an application needs are right there with the application. If they aren't in the same directory, symbolic links (something that Windows lacks) provides the application access to the necessary libraries.
I think you're blowing things out of proportion to say that it is unheard of it in the Windows world for users to be able to run as a something less than a super user. At my current job, we only have one app on the network that requires admin privileges. When I was consulting, most of our clients were all running as regular users.
The "problem" with Microsoft is that they have always catered to the lowest common denominator. When it comes to developers, they provide the developers with a powerful IDE and don't encourage them to think about how it works behind the scenes. That ease of use has come at the cost of security. Sure, devs have been able to come up with the applications that they need to meet the business requirements laid out for them. Unfortunately, those applications often times aren't properly hardened and crack when put on hostile networks.
I see the computer world working from two different ends. The Microsoft part of the world has provided the functionality and is backing into security. The *nix world has provided the security and the stable foundation, and now they are building the functionality.
On one hand you didn't get the money to fix your code. On the other hand, Microsoft stepped up to the plate to "protect your investment in your legacy solution". The only cost to your organization was the time spent sorting out the shims. You mentioned you had to shim an app to get it work on XP. How old was it? Did it run on 2000? Was it developed for 2000 or NT? At the risk of comparing apples and oranges here, how many nearly ten year old Linux apps can you run on the current kernel without a recompile or rewrite?
One of my biggest gripes with MS has been needing "administrator" rights to run seemingly standard applications. Nine times out of ten the requirement comes from poor coding practice on the part of the developers. It is good to see Microsoft finally stepping up and providing a work around instead of forcing everyone else to wait for some developers who might not ever get around to fixing their apps.
I'm reading the documentation right now, but I'm curious if it resolves the security problems. I'm guessing that a shimmed app is running in a sandbox? Or is the shimmed app given fully elevated privileges so that if gets compromised, the exploit code can still own the system?
"I got caught breaking the law and now I have to deal with the consequences." There is a reason that I stopped hacking computer systems after I turned 18. In today's legal climate with regards to the internet, downloading torrents is almost as dangerous as using Craigslist to solicit prostitutes or drugs. Whatever your stance on the morality of the laws, the reality of the situation is that for whatever reason (got $$$?), the law enforcement community and the courts are up in arms and on a witch hunt.
I'm not sure what life is like in Australia, but here in Los Angeles, anything that I download from a torrent site, I can purchase on any train or Metro bus at one for $5, three for $10 (including Angels and Demons). The way I look at it, that's the much better deal. I get to contribute to the local economy, and my odds of catching a law suit are next to none. I haven't bought any movies that way because I am content with my NetFlix subscription, but the point I'm making is that if you are going to obtain pirated content, doing so via a college internet connection is probably the absolute highest risk way to do it right now.