This article is a joke, but the given the state of things in the U.S., I could see it actually happening in a few years. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened in Canada already.
North Americans may scoff, but in most of Europe you must pay a yearly license fee to own a T.V. The BBC has a cheery little site that explains the process there. The section on detection and penalties is particularly scary.
Ok. How cute is this?
I actually know people who first met in a MMOG. They’re not together anymore, unfortunately. Meatspace didn’t live up to all the hype it would seem.
But this isn’t to say that it can’t or shouldn’t work. Ripping up a dungeon can be every bit as good a date as a trip to a club or restaurant. Hopefully Delora and Rhovan will find harmony together in both worlds.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a lover, not a fighter. My usual solution to fighting is to run away, though on the odd occasion I’ve been known to take a swing. But I’ve always been scared pissless while doing it. Except for once. My John Wayne moment. The only time, when for a short while, people who had no reason to be scared of me, were. I think everyone has such a moment of power at least once in their life. It happened some ten years back around this time of year, I don’t remember the exact date.
. . .
It was getting close to last call at our favourite pub and my two buddies and the bartender had gone out back to smoke a joint, leaving me alone with the beer and natchos. Sweet. We knew the barkeep pretty well and he was in the mood to join us for a couple of after hours pitchers when the doors were locked. Hey, when you’re in your second year of college you don’t say no to after hours partying.
The only other group left in bar were four drunken frat-boy twits accessorised with some bored little hottie, obviously someone’s trophy girlfriend. They’d been riding the bartender hard for as long as we had been there, yelling and throwing corn chips around. Nothing really unusual for this place, so we’d only been giving them the odd glance. Since the bar was no longer serving, it was down to a waiting game. As always with these idiots, they’d run out of drinks, pay their bill, tip poorly and leave.
Only that didn’t happen. Not long after my buddies were out back the four guys came over to my table. The fellow in front with the backwards ballcap opened up the conversation with a classic.
“Hey asshole. I see you looking at my girlfriend.”
“No, I’m not.” I simply replied, though I had the niggling suspicion that talk was probably futile.
“Oh, so are you a faggot?”
Oh great, the F-word was out on the table. I knew exactly where this was going. Anything I said was going to be used as an excuse by this guy and his buddies to pound me. If I dared to say I wasn’t a faggot he’d then accuse me of calling him a liar, or of looking at his girlfriend again. The usual thing I would do in a situation like this is flee, but because of the unfortunate layout of the pub these lads were basically between me and the two exits.
The prospect of getting beat by these guys was starting to frighten me. I’ve prevailed at fights before and individually they weren’t big guys, but there’s no way I would be able to take four of them. At the very least my glasses were going to get broken, and if these guys were determined enough I was probably going to wind up in hospital. I wished my buddies would get back. Then at least the numbers would be even.
“Huh, faggot?” He moved closer. I stepped back. Violence was imminent. But then, for a reason I can’t fully explain, my fear was replaced by calm, then by anger, then by the spirit of The Duke.
That fucker is threatening me in my bar. Nobody threatens me in my bar! My body got tense, bracing for impact, readying me to jump on top of that asshole. I looked right at him. In my clearest, calmest, deepest voice I laid it out plainly, just like The Duke would.
“You’re not going to fight me. In fact, I think you’re going to leave my bar. You know why? Because when this shit goes down I’m going to jump on you and gouge your fucking eyes out with my thumbs. I’m going to do this while your buddies beat the crap out of me. But they won’t stop me in time. I’ll rip those peepers out of your skull before I’m beat down. Oh, they’re going to hurt me, maybe even kill me, but you… you… you are going to be fucking blind. So what’s it going to be?”
Their expressions changed. All of a sudden the pack wasn’t all powerful. The bluff was called and the stakes were being raised. Someone was going to leave this fight with a permanent injury. They gazed at me like I was a minion of the Devil himself, and cursed and muttered as they backed off and left the bar. The girlfriend gave me a worried sidelong glance as she scurried up behind. Fear had become my weapon.
I sat down and drained my pint. Then I poured another.
“Hey hey, Bobster!” My pals had missed the whole affair by less than a minute. They were stoned and would’ve probably been rubbish in a fight, but there’s no doubt they would have at least been in there swinging if they had known.
“Hey, those assholes finally left? Woohoo! I’m done work! Next round’s on me! Bobster’s crazy hair must have scared ‘em off!”
No, it was the spirit of The Duke. I swear.
The chart below represents market share in the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming industry. Guess which slice is World of Warcraft? I found it and many others at a website called mmogchart.org, a serious effort to track MMOG statistics. This is all part of a personal undertaking to understand the appeal of these games more.
One conclusion I get from the data is that most MMOGs today are in decline, perhaps because of the popularity of World of Warcraft. Only Runescape, Eve Online, Second Life, Tibia, and a curiously named game called Dofus have been able to deliver sustained, decent growth for the last 12 months. Dungeons & Dragons Online will probably do the same, it’s growing fast, and has a built-in fan base.
I don’t play any MMOGs, though it’s not for lack of other people trying to get me into it. My friends who play MMOGs tend to be great advocates of their game and are always trying to get me to join. I tell them I already have a time wasting Internet hobby and I don’t need another. It can get annoying at times, all the talk of DoTs, Gnomes, mining and jump gates, but this is mostly because I have no idea what the hell everyone is talking about*. I’m in no position to lecture, but at least my time wasting Internet hobby is slowly making me more literate.
Still, the social pressure is undeniable, which is as good a reason as any for why WoW is as popular as it is. Me, if I did play one, it would probably be Eve Online. I like spaceships and killing monsters gets old real fast.
* a hilarious parody of this is found here. Don’t play it with the kids in the room.
I’ve been mulling over the whole IceWeasel thing for a few weeks now. I’m not going to waste your time by going into detail about why using the word “weasel” to sell a web browser is dumb, or why the whole IceWeasel name is childish. Instead, I’m going tell you why there’s nothing wrong with the Mozilla Foundation’s position on their copyrights.
Despite the salacious title of the article, some good coverage and discussion about the whole affair is offered by the engtech blog. Read the comments for a while and you’ll find comments like the one below from poster GK:
I think people are missing the broader picture in all this talk about open source software. Why is Mozilla trying to protect its image and its trademark? Because merchandising has become a significant way it raises income. So naturally they want users to associate the Firefox brand with their icons. The code itself? Wide open — otherwise Debian couldn’t make changes to it and develop their own branch (and brand) of browser.
Over and over I see people talking about Linux becoming a serious player in the OS market, but I seldom see what I think is a crucial element in the strategy to expand market share: embracing a certain amount of commercialization. The folks at Mozilla are trying to earn money with Firefox in a benign way that leaves the code open while keeping the brand intact. It seems entirely reasonable to me. I applaud your defense of Mozilla; it’s right on target.
I tend to agree with this. But it isn’t just about raising money. Marketing is as essential to the survival of an open source project as it is to a closed source one because it gets the project noticed. The process of selling the project is the same in both worlds because to the end-user software is a product, no matter how it is developed. It might be made by volunteers, it might have a price of zero and it might share its blueprints with its competitors, but it’s still a product.
One of the things that gets a product out there is the marketing of a brand. The Mozilla Foundation understands this. They know that word of mouth can only get you so far in the immense web browser market. They know the only way to keep snatching mindshare away from their incumbent rival is to create an consistent, equally powerful brand. Only then do they have a shot at selling its superior features. As I have noted before, this is no small feat, especially when you consider how regular folks view their computers. It has nothing to do with price. The price of a typical web browser is zero, has been for a while. It has nothing to do with giving away the code. Access and use of the Mozilla code has always been free. It has everything to do with getting noticed.
This may seem like such an obvious thing, but I don’t think a lot of FOSS types understand just how important brand recognition is to an open source product. A consumer needs to know what a product is called if he is going to be convinced to get it. A brand gives customers an easy way to identify a product. It attacts new customers and reminds the existing ones of what they’ve got. Since open source offers so many choices to its users, having a consistent, recognisable brand is even more crucial.
A solid brand also adds, rightly or wrongly, a sense of legitimacy. Like Internet Explorer or Opera, the Firefox name is a kind of certification that says to a customer, “This is an authentic Mozilla product. Mozilla certifies this product meets our quality standards and is worthy enough to bear our name.” If the marketing is doing its job, which I think it is, a regular user can see this and feel confident about the program his computer geek friend just put on his computer for him.
Since anyone can distribute a Firefox-based browser, protecting the brand from misuse becomes extremely important. Since Mozilla has no control over what other people do with the code, their brand is the only thing that sets them apart from just any old fork. What the Mozilla people know, and what the Debian people haven’t figured out, is that if a project is going to be taken seriously by mainstream users, there can’t be half-baked, buggy versions of it out there. Strict control of the name is the only way to ensure the consistency and quality of the product.
So while the code is free, the brand is not. Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation and greed is not what motivates them. Their position on their trademarks is purely practical: control the brand to promote awareness and ensure quality. The essential freedom of open source software is not being taken away. If someone else wants to fork the code and start flogging a Firefox-based browser they are free to do so, just with a different name. This is exactly what the Iceweasel team did, of course. Mind you, in addition to being childish, the some of the reasoning behind the fork strikes me as a bit hypocritical.
The Debian people say the branding restrictions are not free, and it’s something which they cannot abide. Yet the IceWeasel project already has a number of snazzy logos made up. You know, the kind with that really clean, professional looking graded colour fill. I presume they want people to notice their project so in a way, they have already begun the process of creating their own brand.
Every major open source project does this too. Every distro, every app, even obscure little utilities have a logo and an identity. Come to think of it, Debian has a distinctive logo. They even have a slogan: “The Universal Operating System”. No matter what they say about freedom, I’m not really free to start flogging a fork of the Debian distro using their name, their slogan and their logo. They would never stand for it. I would be pressured until I stopped. The only difference between Mozilla and Debian in this regard is the Mozilla people would use the legal system to stop me, rather than flameage and threats from thousands of angry FOSS zealots.
And as for the official code base being autocratically directed by small group of people, well, the Debian folks need to recognise the hypocrisy in that too; the kernel of Linux is ultimately controlled by one guy. He even has a trademark on the word “Linux”.
The free open source software movement is hungry for another victory like Apache, but this time on the desktop of the average joe. The Mozilla Foundation is in a good position to deliver it. They are playing for all the marbles in the browser market and unlike many others in the open source world, they are willing to get down and dirty to take on the beast at its own game. I believe it is this willingness to hold the nose, suck it up and play by the same rules will be what ultimately leads them to market dominance over Internet Explorer. If the Debian folks want to view their work as a mere project, then fine, they can toil away in obscurity all they want. If they actually want regular people to benefit then they had better get down with the idea of selling it like the Mozilla guys do, even if it means playing by a few rules.
An *ahem* anonymous reader sent this image to me of a modified Windows XP installer clearly intended for in shop use only.
Ah, if only Windows normally looked like this. I might look forward to the some dozen installs of it I do in a week.
I think I’m going to send a copy to Steve Ballmer!
As the post says, this is a little distressing.
Read the comments too. Hilarious!
Maybe I should just give in and change the name of this thing to the “Hard Drive Blog”. The little buggers fascinate me so much.
A lot of modern PCBs are screen printed with settings and various diagnostic indicators. Sometimes they even get a bit artistic. What’s with the little picture of a car at the top left of this hard drive PCB?
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