May Contain Nuts

So, this was a shocker… I went to GameTap’s website today looking for a screenshot of their client for a little sidebar piece in The Archiver, and found this as their homepage: GameTap - URU Live - Expand Your Playground.

Dude.

(For those who may come after this link changes, since it is only for a limited time, GameTap has the Uru Live promo page [1 month free, plus lots of Uru screenies and such] as the service’s front page right now. There’s a show of support if ever I’ve seen one…)

CNN profiles complaints from safety experts who claim that the recently-installed security measures on the site aren’t enough to keep kids from being preyed upon by sexual predators.

Honestly, since when was it ever really possible to truly identify users with 100% accuracy and confidence? People are going to lie about their age, gender, name, weight, interests, etc… perhaps even more so than usual because of the extremely socially-oriented nature of the website. Hell, people don’t even give you their name or age with 100% honesty in reality… just go to any bar or club and pick five people at random. I’ve got $20 saying one of them fibs, for whatever reason. It’s just a LOT easier to do so online. Unless MySpace wants to restrict itself to US users and require something inane like your social security number to confirm your identity, there’s no realistic way MySpace is going to prevent people from lying about who they are.

Furthermore, since when was it MySpace’s responsibility to keep an eye on kids who may or may not have signed up with an assumed name, gender, or age? Sure, you can have all of the child safeguards and parental control mechanisms for underage users you want, but they all rely on kids a) having their parents’ permission and b) being honest about themselves when signing up for an account. Someone in Texas is suing the company for $30 million in damages because her daughter was sexually assaulted after meeting up with someone she found on MySpace. As horrible as that is, and as heartless as this next question may be, I have to ask, where was the mom and what was she doing to keep an eye on her daughter’s activities? Did she approve this meet-up, or did her daughter just go without telling anyone?

And the 16-year-old who flew to Jordan? Seriously, does it make any sense for some kid’s friend’s mom to organize a trip to Canada (which doesn’t require a passport, I might note, assuming you’re driving anyway) without calling the other parents to discuss it? And wouldn’t it also make just as much sense to want to discuss the trip with that kid’s friend’s parent before going to get your 16-year-old child a passport? (I’ll leave out the question of where the hell this girl got the money to buy a ticket to Jordan on the grounds that maybe the Jordanian guy bought it for her).

I really can’t help but think that, with as much as MySpace has been in the news lately - good and bad alike (though mostly bad) - parents would start taking a bit more of an interest in their children’s online activities and have a nice conversation on the general stupidity of blindly trusting folks you meet on the internet. In that respect, I have to say that it’s nice that I sort of “grew up” in a community online that seems to be pretty much devoid of deviant behavior like the aforementioned cases. It’s good to know that, should someone ever actually go missing for real at a meet-up like Mysterium, folks are willing to get the National Park Service rangers to go looking for you.

Anyway, ultimately, there’s a certain degree of responsibility on parents to make sure they know what’s going on, and as I will admit from first-hand experience that it’s easy enough to hide what you’re doing if you have your own computer, there’s something to be said for not letting underaged kids have unmonitored access to the internet, especially without a nice long chat about how dangerous places like MySpace could be. I think it’ll be interesting as our generation takes the parental reigns, because we pretty much know all of the tricks to pull to hide stuff, and hopefully we’re good at spotting those tricks too and can figure out ways of keeping our kids from getting around us.

I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t want to do any work to find out something about a product. Just as an example, Uru Live’s home page has the GameTap press release on it, stating the game’s return through the service. Now, GameTap is only available in the US, while Uru is and has been for some time a very international thing. This has led a distressingly large number of international site-goers to assume that the game will not be available outside the US, and they come to the forum to verify this assumption.

Of course, they do fail, in the process, to completely skip the entire “Game Info” section of the site, which has a wonderfully-crafted FAQ which quite clearly states that the game will, in fact, be available internationally. Having seen this question posted no fewer than five times in the past week (and not just on the Live forums), I have to wonder if people even bother reading FAQs, and if not, why do companies and individuals continue to bother writing them? I mean, granted, it’s easier to ask someone else to do the reading for you, but if you want to know the answer to a question *now*, asking a forum is probably not the speediest way of going about it… and it’s actually more work for the person in the long run, between registering, posting, and waiting for a response.

Of course, at the same time, I’m also baffled as to why nobody ever seems to use the handy-dandy “Search” tool to find the numerous threads undoubtedly already given over to their query, but again, I imagine this is assumed to be less productive and more labor-intensive than is appropriate for the effort this person wishes to shell out.

I would like to note that this doesn’t in any way limit itself to the Live announcement, before someone else thinks I’m just being snarky about it (which I am, to a degree, because I would have hoped that after the twentieth time I’ve seen the question asked, someone would have figured out that the issue had already been raised). I’ve seen just as many occurrences of this in places like the Microsoft User Groups, where the behavior is even more pronounced, though at the same time perhaps slightly more understandable (at least, as far as MS goes), because the MS knowledge base is a joke. But still… Search, folks. It’s there for your benefit! FAQs are there for a reason! Read! Odds are, given the sheer volume of people on the internet, that your question has already been answered. Odds are also that people are getting tired of answering it.

One of the webcomics I read (which hasn’t updated in a long time, incidentally) uses a “free” domain through an exploitative service that puts large ads on the screen, then re-directs you to the actual website, which isn’t hosted on the domain it’s registered for, but rather the owner’s own web space (which is also often free). Anyway, shady internet domain name practices aside, I found a couple of rather amusing ads for Napster over the past couple of days while waiting for the comic’s page to load. My personal favorite is probably this one:

It’s like stealing. Only not. Talk about a crappy attempt at bringing back the application’s original user base…

This one’s rather amusing too…

Because renting music is the coolest idea since the idea that opening a computer game makes it un-returnable.

So I just noticed about a week ago that Ubi re-skinned their community forums to match their website (to which I say “good job, guys, you’re only about 6 months late”) and its new light brown/tan color scheme. They also changed the default forum banner in the process. Now, normally, this is not something I would find remarkable. However, the fact that their old “play it at ubi.com” banner had an Uru Live screenshot on it for over a year after they shut the game down was a bit more than annoying to me, for a reason I really can’t quite put my finger on (I believe, though, that the term “bitchslap” may be involved). While I could probably spend the next hour conversing with myself about Ubi’s decisions regarding Uru’s funding (and I could… just ask me, I did it last night at work), I’ll refrain from that and say that at least they finally took the screenshot out of their banner.

So I think I’ll check in and say a couple somethings about IE7, since there’s now something that can actually be said about it.

First off, it’s about freaking time that MS got their head in the game and actually made their browser work. Not releasing a new browser (save for incessant security upgrades) for several years is simply unacceptable in the web climate we have today. At some point, presumably, the internet’s development will slow to the point where the W3C won’t have eighty new things on the table every year for developers to have to be aware of, but this is not that point, nor has it been since the mid-90’s.

So, I’m very pleased that Microsoft is finally deeming CSS 1 worthy of being properly supported, along with most (but apparently not all) of CSS 2. This more than anything else makes me happy. Security fixes are, of course, inevitable because it’s IE and it has far too much internal power in the OS. There are just some things you shouldn’t do, and opening up your OS to the internet by tying the browser directly into the base level of the system (especially in such an unchecked fashion) is one of them. But I’m digressing.

Tabbed browsing is also nice, though I take issue with the concept of putting the tabs *above* the menu bar… perhaps this is simply the default setup and through the wonders of toolbar customization, tabs can be dropped below the rest of the toolbars, where they exist in every other browser in existence. It just seems to me like the IE team said “okay, we have to make this tabs thing look different or we’ll be accused of copying features… so let’s put it somewhere else!” It’s just poor design… the menu bar belongs at the very top of an app’s window, nowhere else. Nothing should be allowed to get between the menu bar and the title bar. Period. End of discussion.

Now, on to the real point of contention: the OS support. Yes, it’s fantastic that IE is finally getting things correct (though it may be just a little too little and a little too late), and that Microsoft has finally deemed international standard better than their typical “everyone else will just have to deal with our own damned standards” standards. However, I think the decision to exclude all Windows operating systems besides XP/SP2 and the ever-delayed Vista (more on that name in a little bit) is, while probably a necessary one, a rather unwise one, largely because of its impact on the web.

Let me clarify: IE6 is currently used by about a jillion people, many of whom are still running Win2K, WinME (*jibblies*), or even Win98 (*shudder*). Many of these people will see no reason to upgrade to Windows Vista, largely for the same reasons they haven’t yet upgraded to XP: they’re doing fine just the way they are now. Vista being a DVD-only launch will probably only serve to compound this issue (and frankly, whoever decided that CDs and DVDs should be exactly the same in appearance needs to be smacked, simply because the number of people who try to run DVDs in a CD drive is nightmarish), because it’s likely that if you’re still running Win98, you probably aren’t going to be one of the early-adopters of technology, and so you probaly still don’t have a DVD-ROM drive (for the same reason you haven’t upgraded to XP… you’re doing just fine with what you’ve got). So my concern is that, for as much as IE7 is being hailed by the web development community as a shining beacon of intelligence on behalf of Microsoft’s web department, it is ultimately going to do very little to actually help web developers design sites with fewer headaches for a number of years to come. In fact, all it’s really going to do is create more headaches for developers as they try to develop sites that work in IE pre-7, IE7, Mozilla/Firefox/Camino/WTF-ever, and (only if you’re really lucky) Safari. Heck, you’re actually lucky if you run across an advanced website that is developed for more than just IE, but that’s just another personal pet peeve of mine.

Upgraded to OS X 10.4.2 tonight after seeing Chucker’s blog entry about the patch’s availability. No issues yet that I’ve encountered. The good: there’s a widget controller built into the dashboard now… there’s been a third-party one out there for a while but now it’s internal, which is always nice. Safari also checks to make sure you actually do want to install the widget you just downloaded, so that should eliminate the problem everyone on Slashdot was bitching about a while ago where widgets could be installed without the user knowing it.

The bad: they changed scrolling behaviro for mouse wheels in Safari. It’s a lot faster now, and even though the support doc says it’s supposed to make scrolling more consistent and even, I think the opposite is true. It’s kind of all over the map now. Ugh.

The pointless: I’m writing this in a Dashboard widget. w00t.

T minus 12:27:10 as of this sentence on Discovery’s return to flight. Fingers crossed, folks, though after 2 years, I think things have been scrutinized and secured about as much as is humanly possible for these babies. The only thing we can do to improve the situation further is phase them out. It’s a sad thing to say, because the shuttle has been the icon of space flight in this country since I was born in 1984, but I think it’s time. New technologies and safety measures can be implemented in a new bird for much cheaper, overall, than would be required to refit the Shuttles… especially the heat tiles (a wholly inefficient, albeit ingenious, way of approaching the problem of re-entry). I love the shuttles… every last one of them, and it really does pain me to see them being retired by 2010, but they’ve far and away out-performed their original expectations, and they have an overall safety record that’s nigh-on unbeatable in US manned space flight history (I specify this country because I’m not up on Russia’s current flight record). Mercury and Gemini were the only two groups of spacecraft to perform without fatalities; Apollo 1 burned on the pad, and we’ve lost two space shuttles since they went into operation. However, the safety record of each shuttle is quite impeccable, given he number of hours each ship has logged in space. This is just inherently a dangerous occupation, and while we can do everything in our power to minimize risks, we can’t eliminate them. I salute and applaud the people who go on these missions… and I only hope one day in my lifetime I can visit that most forbidding of places. I’ve been fascinated by it since I was a little kid… I remember setting my alarm one night and sneaking downstairs at 4 in the morning to watch a shuttle launch (I think it was Discovery, too), then being disappointed when the launch was delayed for some reason. Don’t even ask me how I knew it would be on TV, or what channel it was… I don’t remember. I just distinctly remember sitting on the sofa in front of out ancient color projection TV watching the ganry arm extend and retract several times while they decided whether to scrub the launch. I got in SO MUCH trouble the next day…

Seriously, though, the ONLY way to experience a shuttle launch is live, in-person, at the Cape. It’s no 363-foot-tall Saturn V booster rocket, but it’s damned impressive. Anyone who has doubts about what good the space program is doing should be made to watch a launch (and be shown the vast assortment of gadgetry we take for granted that came from NASA).

T minus 12 hours, 13 minutes. They’d damn well better cover this launch on CNN.

So I just spent about 45 minutes of otherwise productive time going through my fonts in OSX’s Font Book app (it needed to be done, though, so I consider it a necessary and useful waste of time ;)). It was fun trying to weed out the duplicate files I accidentally brought over when I moved my stuff off of the PC, and it was even *more* fun trying to track down a copy of the D’ni font that didn’t have a malformed character name table, as most of the ones I have seem to. Cyan’s (surprise) works, but tracking theirs down was a bit difficult, since it’s not on their website anymore and I wasn’t sure if I’d downloaded it. To be honest, even though there’s really no material difference between Cyan’s and Jehon’s, I prefer Cyan’s because it doesn’t have an apostrophe in it, which gets in the way of using it on websites with CSS. That Font Book likes it is really just another plus ;).

On the subject, font handling is something Apple really seems to have down to an art form. I can install a new font, and it immediately appears in the font list in Pages. That’s really handy, and something I really wish Adobe would be able to wrap their brains around (getting rid of their applications’ splash screens is another, but one step at a time :P). I also really like the font collection concept, so you can get quick access to a small group of fonts you use regularly (or even not so regularly) without having to scroll through your entire (potentially enormous) font list to find them. The Spotlight-powered search in Font Book is also really handy too.

On a slightly different note, my uncle wants to learn HTML and make some money on the side doing web design (he teaches middle school as a day job). This amuses me, mostly because my uncle is largely techno-illiterate (I dunno… Apples seem to do that to people… they don’t break often enough to require vast amounts of knowledge to keep them running), and I’ve had difficulty impressing upon him the limitations of a website versus an interactive game. So now he’s trying to get Flash (and I’m not arguing because he’s going to let me use it as well), and wants to get an educational lisence of Maya. Honestly I’m tempted to toss my PC in the truck and drive out to his house to show him just what he’s getting into (his worldview that “if it’s on a Mac, it should be easy” only extends so far into the real world of application development, especially for the web and games). It’s also been quite fun trying to impress upon him that things like background music and <font> tags are things he absolutely should not be using on his website. I’ve loaned him my book on HTML (I kept my stylesheet reference book because that’s got a lot more stuff in it that I keep forgetting), so we’ll see how well *that* pans out, at least… but somehow I doubt he’s going to be landing much work at his current design mindset (which is, to be honest, virtually nonexistant…).

There are times that I wish web development were harder to get into for n00bs, simply because I’m tired of seeing red pages with green text (or worse, blue pages with red text [or worse, pages with a denim fabric background image and tiny-sized white fonts...]) and background MIDIs of “Pinky and the Brain”. I mean, it’s great that anyone with 15 minutes, a text editor, and an internet connection can shout their opinion from the rooftops, but the signal to noise ratio, IMHO, is really nasty. Now, I will also readily admit that if HTML were much harder than it is, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into the field either, which would mean no fancy-pants blog, no DPWR, and no quality professional website touting my wares. I will say, though, that even when I was still a n00b, my general sense of design and readability was vastly superior to the stuff being churned out on Angelfire and Geocities by 13-year-old script kiddies who think their tiled bubblegum wad background is teh shiznit :P. Even if the original D’niPedia wasn’t nearly as glamorous as is it now, it was at least readable and accessible… I dunno. It just kind of worries me that I’ve unleashed yet another crappy web designer into the wild.