It really would not be that hard to 'expand' the characters on your keyboard to allow more possible options.
You could simply code the url line of your web browser to accept more complex text imputs like and good text program.
Most work editors can accept something of ctrl+354 scheme to enter other non-latin characters. Why can't my browser?..
As to the comment a few people down talking about misspellings of webnames and the like, you're going to have that problem no matter if you use latin or non latin characters. You're going to have stupid people that mispell your name no matter what, so that doesn't really affect the nature of what character set we should use.
So there's something really important that everyone seems to be forgetting here.
Yes, blocking a site is very effective, it's most likely more than two times more effective at preventing a phishing scam for the sites that it blocks.
But at the same time, if you block 50% of the sites and users never see them, never see a message or a warning, they think that they are safe and as a result, they are less likely to look at other sites with any degree of caution.
On the other side, if you as a user are warned at every sight that coud be dangerous, and block from only a few right off the bat, then at least you've got it in the back of your mind that you need to be careful. It might actually instill the idea into people's head that they ought to look at the sites thay are traveling on.
So, what you've really created is a situation where 50% of the time it works all of the time.
Instead of a situation where your program covers your ass 30% of the time (or whatever it is, the number doesn't really matter) and then at least helps you to cover your own the rest of the time.
You take your pick.
Perhaps Apple & Google have been tight for years, so this is not news for MS. However, for Joe Sixpack this **is* news and Apple & Google are now two well known names (which they really weren't a year or so back).
If anyone really thinks that Google and Apple were not well known a few years ago they really need to have thier heads examined. Granted that Google search took a while for it to catch on but at lesat by 2002 it was well known enough. And Apple... don't even get me started.
But on more relavent note, M$ knows what's going on between these two at least as well as the general public, if not better. And I assure you they are not yawning at what's happening, but what precisely do you expect them to do? Go cry to their Mommies and Daddies? Microsoft is doing the only thing that any good company can do when faced with someone better than you catching up with your tails and trying to knock you down. Looking for what to do next. Not trying to hide from what's coming. They are also going one step farther and trying to learn what they can from these two companies. Weather or not they are succesful is something that can be debated amongst your selves.
On a more hopeful note, if Google and Apple ever made any sort of actual loose partnership, it's be the coolest company ever.:)
In about 2-5 years, WoW will start to fizzle out as people grow up and away from the game. As well, improvements in computer hardware, GPUs in particular, will start to make the cheesy character graphics that WoW uses seem old.
Yeah, that's what everyone said about Starcraft and many other games of thier time.
The thing about great games, such as WoW, StarCraft, Baulders Gate (IMHO), Myst and others of thier kind is not in ther revolutionalry graphics, in fact at the time of the release sometime they are a bit behind already, but in their amazing playability and richness.
But a bit more to the point, yes, something will eventually beat WoW but it's much more likely that it will be a different style of game, or at least a very different twist on the traditional MMORPG.
Nothing will ever remain atop the gaming world forever, but that doesn't mean that it will stop being a game that captured many people's hearts.
I'm sure there are people out there that are still thinking that nothing will ever beat The Sims...
I've read almost all of the posts and everyone seems to hve missed a great game that balanced classes and skills as wonderfully as any other game that I can think of.
It was called Dragon Realms.
When you first started you chose a class, anything that you wanted.
I belive there was about 15 or so I think.
You were then allowed to do *anything* that you wanted.
There were a few restrictions of course such as that only healers could heal people, but my mage would train with a battle sword and run around and hack people up for all he cared.
The more that you did something the more that you got skills in it. Of course some classes were faster at learning things than others, but that made sense. You didn't even have to spend points or tokens or anything. If you wanted to do it, do it.
You then leveled up in your class when you had enough of the skills that class needed to become better.
It was a brillian system that encouraged people to try new things since you knew that you could always spend a day or two experimenting with something and then leave it by the wayside and continue persuing whatever else you were playing.
The only real problem with that is that it took more time to implement and of course massive tweaking to ensure the proper balance, but isn't that a small price to pay for a great game?
Not as many as they'd like to I think, but then again, they can also advertise that space as being there as long as no one is using it.
They may or may not do that, but if you've got enough space for 100k people to use 2gb+ and only 5k or them use that, and the rest use 100mb then you know that you can really offer 2gb+ to 20x more people.
It's an airline strategy.
They almost always over bok becuase they know that not everone will show up for thier flight.
Trust me, google knows what percetage of people will actually use all 2gb.
With so many things on the internet now a days thatare come and go, there are a lot of people that are skepticle about switching to a new company that might og under. Not even a new company sometimes, but a new product by the same old company. Much as the way that people have stayed with their PC's running windoze for years and years now, many people have stayed with Yahoo! becuase it's the e-mail that they had when they got thier first computer. Many people stay with AOL becuase it's all over the place.
The new services that Google is offering will never take hold in a day or two, but instead will take time, and because they took the time to get noticed and grow in the public support they will stand the test of time. Not only that, but all of the product that Google offers are at least as good as thier competitors services. So once people get thier first look at the things that Google has to offer (whcih may take time) they will see no need to switch back to their old company.
And one other thing that all of these other services afford to Google that no one really seems to consider is the possible inflow of information. Google knows everyone on the web, or at least could know everything. They can sum up the thoughts of the world (accoring to those that traffic google search at least) they can examine thoughts and questions. Above all this, put analyzing informatuon, they can know what people are looking for on the internet. Every time they add a new product they are generating a new way to take in information about the world. That's more valuable in the long run than money because you can have money, but without knowing how to spend it, you are going to fail.
I have the best security of all (for windoze at least that it) I only have two apps on my computer. Firefox and notepad and the only things I do are read slashdot and post replies.
I didn't used to read/. all that much on a regular basis but now that I've got it on my google home page which comes up every time I loadfirefox I get all the good stories every time that I load up firefox. I spend at least 45 minutes there a day.
Slashdot Mirror
It really would not be that hard to 'expand' the characters on your keyboard to allow more possible options.
You could simply code the url line of your web browser to accept more complex text imputs like and good text program.
Most work editors can accept something of ctrl+354 scheme to enter other non-latin characters. Why can't my browser?..
As to the comment a few people down talking about misspellings of webnames and the like, you're going to have that problem no matter if you use latin or non latin characters. You're going to have stupid people that mispell your name no matter what, so that doesn't really affect the nature of what character set we should use.
So there's something really important that everyone seems to be forgetting here.
Yes, blocking a site is very effective, it's most likely more than two times more effective at preventing a phishing scam for the sites that it blocks.
But at the same time, if you block 50% of the sites and users never see them, never see a message or a warning, they think that they are safe and as a result, they are less likely to look at other sites with any degree of caution.
On the other side, if you as a user are warned at every sight that coud be dangerous, and block from only a few right off the bat, then at least you've got it in the back of your mind that you need to be careful. It might actually instill the idea into people's head that they ought to look at the sites thay are traveling on.
So, what you've really created is a situation where 50% of the time it works all of the time.
Instead of a situation where your program covers your ass 30% of the time (or whatever it is, the number doesn't really matter) and then at least helps you to cover your own the rest of the time.
You take your pick.
If anyone really thinks that Google and Apple were not well known a few years ago they really need to have thier heads examined. Granted that Google search took a while for it to catch on but at lesat by 2002 it was well known enough. And Apple... don't even get me started.
But on more relavent note, M$ knows what's going on between these two at least as well as the general public, if not better. And I assure you they are not yawning at what's happening, but what precisely do you expect them to do? Go cry to their Mommies and Daddies? Microsoft is doing the only thing that any good company can do when faced with someone better than you catching up with your tails and trying to knock you down. Looking for what to do next. Not trying to hide from what's coming. They are also going one step farther and trying to learn what they can from these two companies. Weather or not they are succesful is something that can be debated amongst your selves.
On a more hopeful note, if Google and Apple ever made any sort of actual loose partnership, it's be the coolest company ever.
Yeah, that's what everyone said about Starcraft and many other games of thier time.
The thing about great games, such as WoW, StarCraft, Baulders Gate (IMHO), Myst and others of thier kind is not in ther revolutionalry graphics, in fact at the time of the release sometime they are a bit behind already, but in their amazing playability and richness.
But a bit more to the point, yes, something will eventually beat WoW but it's much more likely that it will be a different style of game, or at least a very different twist on the traditional MMORPG.
Nothing will ever remain atop the gaming world forever, but that doesn't mean that it will stop being a game that captured many people's hearts.
I'm sure there are people out there that are still thinking that nothing will ever beat The Sims...
You could worry about the prices of the PS3 or the X-Box 360 (non-crappy model) or you could just wait for the Wii to come out. :)
I've read almost all of the posts and everyone seems to hve missed a great game that balanced classes and skills as wonderfully as any other game that I can think of. It was called Dragon Realms.
When you first started you chose a class, anything that you wanted.
I belive there was about 15 or so I think.
You were then allowed to do *anything* that you wanted.
There were a few restrictions of course such as that only healers could heal people, but my mage would train with a battle sword and run around and hack people up for all he cared.
The more that you did something the more that you got skills in it. Of course some classes were faster at learning things than others, but that made sense. You didn't even have to spend points or tokens or anything. If you wanted to do it, do it.
You then leveled up in your class when you had enough of the skills that class needed to become better.
It was a brillian system that encouraged people to try new things since you knew that you could always spend a day or two experimenting with something and then leave it by the wayside and continue persuing whatever else you were playing.
The only real problem with that is that it took more time to implement and of course massive tweaking to ensure the proper balance, but isn't that a small price to pay for a great game?
Not as many as they'd like to I think, but then again, they can also advertise that space as being there as long as no one is using it. They may or may not do that, but if you've got enough space for 100k people to use 2gb+ and only 5k or them use that, and the rest use 100mb then you know that you can really offer 2gb+ to 20x more people. It's an airline strategy. They almost always over bok becuase they know that not everone will show up for thier flight. Trust me, google knows what percetage of people will actually use all 2gb.
With so many things on the internet now a days thatare come and go, there are a lot of people that are skepticle about switching to a new company that might og under. Not even a new company sometimes, but a new product by the same old company. Much as the way that people have stayed with their PC's running windoze for years and years now, many people have stayed with Yahoo! becuase it's the e-mail that they had when they got thier first computer. Many people stay with AOL becuase it's all over the place. The new services that Google is offering will never take hold in a day or two, but instead will take time, and because they took the time to get noticed and grow in the public support they will stand the test of time. Not only that, but all of the product that Google offers are at least as good as thier competitors services. So once people get thier first look at the things that Google has to offer (whcih may take time) they will see no need to switch back to their old company. And one other thing that all of these other services afford to Google that no one really seems to consider is the possible inflow of information. Google knows everyone on the web, or at least could know everything. They can sum up the thoughts of the world (accoring to those that traffic google search at least) they can examine thoughts and questions. Above all this, put analyzing informatuon, they can know what people are looking for on the internet. Every time they add a new product they are generating a new way to take in information about the world. That's more valuable in the long run than money because you can have money, but without knowing how to spend it, you are going to fail.
I have the best security of all (for windoze at least that it) I only have two apps on my computer. Firefox and notepad and the only things I do are read slashdot and post replies.
I didn't used to read /. all that much on a regular basis but now that I've got it on my google home page which comes up every time I loadfirefox I get all the good stories every time that I load up firefox. I spend at least 45 minutes there a day.