May Contain Nuts

Sometimes I want to smack myself senseless.  Obviously, this requires a little bit of setup to adequately explain where I’m coming from, so I’ll try to start far enough back that it’s enlightening without being boring or otherwise unnecessarily detailed…

Oscy and I have, for some time now, been involved with a neighbor in our apartment complex who has, to put it lightly, been going through some really serious relationship-related issues.  On the side, she’s a complete technophobe who also happens to have a bizzare tendency to want to have all manner of technology in her apartment, then freaks out about it a few days later because she’s either unknowingly broken it, forgotten what it was there for, doesn’t actually know how to use it, or thinks that someone might be hacking into it (this includes being suspicious of the little circuit boards in her smoke detector, fearing that her apartment may be bugged).  Stay with me here, because I’m slowly getting to the point…

One of the less intelligent things I did for this woman was give her my extremely outdated Dell laptop in an attempt to assuage her fears about her computer being hijacked and get her to a functional state of computing again, both tech-wise and peace-of-mind-wise.  In the course of the month and a half or so that she had the laptop, I ended up re-installing XP three different times (once for the initial wipe before I gave her the system, and twice more after that because either she or someone in her family who promised to “fix” this perfectly operational system for her completely trashed it instead).  Finally, she ended up just giving the laptop back to me a couple of weeks ago (a blessing in more than one way, as I’d been missing the nicety of having a lappy around, and it meant I would no longer be dragged over to her apartment at 11 PM to “fix” something that wasn’t broken and listen to another hour or two of sob stories).  She then tried to get it back a couple of days later, only to then change her mind once more a few days after that, but that’s neither here nor there (just annoying).

Anyway, throughout this whole mess, she’s ended up becoming friends of sorts with the complex’s maintenance guy, whom she also had try to “fix” the not-broken laptop (which resulted in me having to re-align the pins for the power plug after both of them failed to realize they were forcing the jack in the wrong way… bloddy idiots).  At some point she mentioned me and my incalculable technological prowess to him, and about a week ago, he came by asking if I could take a look at his computer, because he was having problems with pop-ups and couldn’t get some of his games to run.  The end goal of this post is now in sight… stay on target!
I agreed to look at his computer after he promised to pay me for my time (something my neighbor has never done), and spent last Saturday evening merrily removing over 200 virus- or malware-infected files from his computer, deleting all of the crapware that came with it, and setting up a functional AV/Anti-spamware suite (in other words, Not Norton)… which was actually pre-installed, never activated, and probably damaged by a bit of malware because it wouldn’t run properly despite launching at boot-up).  All told, I ended up charging him $70 for the time spent, which is still easily half of what he would have been gouged for at Geek Squad.

It then occurred to me that I lived in an apartment complex that was probably full of lamers as hopelessly lost as these two people, and that there was probably a fair amount of money to be had fixing their problems for them at half the price of what Geek Squad would charge (still a fair amount of money by any estimation) without the hassle of lugging their computer off to a retail store and dealing with Best Buy’s interminably long wait times and generally clueless staff.  This led to the ad-hoc creation of the Computer Defense Force, an “on-site” computer service & repair operation for apartment tennants.  Now, I’ve prided myself on not having to deal with endless system maintenance since I bought my G5 three years ago (doesn’t seem that long, but maybe thats a good thing, hehe), so Oscy was understandably baffled by this decision to start servicing computers in my “copious” spare time outside of work.  There’s actually two reasons why I decided to get into this again after 3 years of just dealing with Oscy’s computer and the occasional service call from my clueless family members: 1) more money is always a good thing, and 2) it actually makes me kind of happy doing this to computers that aren’t mine.  I have to be a bit more careful with other people’s systems, obviously, but I’m helping people get their computers working again, and oddly enough, it’s good stress relief watching a virus scan or disk defrag run.  And did I mention I’d get paid for this?

Now we’re on the home stretch… I realized last night that my quaint little Pages document of a sales invoice was pretty cool and all, but that I’d need a real way to track expenses and payments, as well as services offered, services rendered, the costs for those services, and to whom I provided them (as well as who still owed me cash moneys).  The problem is that most of the apps that handle invoicing and billing on the Mac are built for web designers and other freelance-type people who have big projects for small number of specific clients.  Now, if there’s one down-side to what the Mac has done for me, it’s made me less inclined to try and shoehorn the way I want to do things into the way an application wants me to do things.  My growing tendencies toward programming my way out of a hole I’ve found myself in have done absolutely nothing to help this situation.  So, at a loss for an app that does exactly what I want (a surprising rarity on a platform that supposedly has far less software than Windows does), I decided on a whim to start up XCode and start dinking around in the hopes that I might be able to figure out how to build my own program.  For those of you who have been waiting for this moment, this is the part where I commence smacking myself senseless.

OS X apps are written in Objective-C, which is a related language in some ways (but obviously not others) to C, C++, and any of the other not-C# variants of C floating around these days.  I have nothing but bad experiences from my C++ computer programming classes, learning how to create MPG calculators that ran in the Command Prompt, which has made me extremely hesitant to try learning a C-variant language that has absolutely no practical use where I work.  My forray into XCode last night wasn’t exactly nightmarish, but I was just blindly following the instructions given to me by the Hello World tutorial, so I didn’t get much of anything out of it beyond learning that XCode/Interface Builder’s way of building apps and linking them to UIs is very different from Visual Studio’s (in some ways better, in other ways a lot more tedious).  I still know next to nothing about Objective-C, and I’m betting that by the time I’ve learned enough about the language to build my shiny little application with CoreData usage and iCal &Address Book integration, I could probably just make money by selling that instead of the services I’d be managing with it.

Plus I still want to make video games…

And I need to actually get Issue 12 of the Archiver done for TCT, which I was asked to help with 5 days ago…

And I’m still interested in trying my hand at C# desktop programming, just so I can have a potentially useful new skill at work if the need arises…

And I’m helping to plan Mysterium…

Which, speaking of, means I need to get the Room Share system finalized tonight and handed off to TW and Odo for assistance in developing…

See why I want to smack myself?  I mean, Learning New Skills for Fun and Profit is cool and all, but I’m still working on that “and Profit” part… I have a ton of ideas for things to do, and no time to finish any of them as a result.  And all the while I keep coming up with more new things to try and do.  It’s somewhat maddening…

I can’t say I’m an avid (or even staunch) supporter of the “Get Things Done” mantra that’s sweeping the corporate world and to some degree personal life across the country.  However, I do recognize the value in making lists of things to do that are small enough to keep you motivated but detailed enough to keep you organized.  Given that my entire job consists of a never-ending stream of projects with deadlines and due-dates, having a way to quickly and easily create and maintain lists of tasks for those projects is fairly important, and to that end, I’ve routinely tried to get a system together that works for me in that regard, with varying degrees of success.

I would like to take this moment to decry the state of Windows development when it comes to GTD software.  It’s just downright pathetic next to the myriad of options available for the Mac.  There are about half a billion (I may be exaggerating) different GTD-oriented apps on the Mac, ranging from free to about $80.  The stand-out winner for me thus far has been iGTD, due in large part to its flexible attitude towards “contexts” (which I rarely if ever use) and the degree to which it integrates with pretty much every other Mac application on the planet.  Need to keep a reference to an email handy for this task?  No problem, just drag it into iGTD when you’re viewing the task.  Want to have references to all the files changed by a specific feature addition?  No problem, just drop the files into the task from the Finder.  Have a website with the instructions for completing a certain tricky JS action?  Again, no problem, just drop the URL into iGTD from Safari!

Why is there not a single application on the Windows side of the fence that supports this kind of deep file-system and application-level integration?  Is it because the Windows shell isn’t flexible enough to support these kinds of drag/drop actions from Explorer?  Because Outlook is the single largest walled-garden application next to Windows itself?  Because IE is a pile of poop?  Because Windows’ drag/drop just isn’t robust enough to support cross-application tie-ins like that?  Seriously, why can’t Windows do all of these things?

Hell, I’d be happy to settle for a to-do list app that doesn’t make me want to vomit, let alone handle all the rest of these integration points.  Just give me something small, simple, and most importantly, free that I can use to create projects, put tasks in them, assign due dates to those tasks, and see an overview, by project, of the stuff I have to do today.  Why is this so god-damned hard?  Half of the GTD-oriented apps out there for Windows are Outlook plugins, and I don’t want to potentially break my copy of Outlook, lest the security nazi descend upon me like a ton of bricks.  The other half are either pay-only, or have such a crippled free version as to be totally worthless, or are the sort of open-source programmer-developed apps that have absolutely zero usability, or are apparently targeted at kindergarteners, judging from the insultingly overblown look of the UI.

Outlook 2007 has this thing called the Business Contact Manager that I’ve tried using on a couple of occasions, since it supports projects and tasks, and you can even link emails to specific tasks, but it’s tedious, bulky, slow, and just a general pain in the ass to use regularly.  I’d be totally gung-ho for this solution if they just made it easier to deal with by speeding it up, simplifying linking emails to tasks (or even creating tasks from emails), and took out some of the complicated cruft that I didn’t need (it’s oriented towards sales as far as I can tell [surprise...], which is decidedly not what I’m involved with).

I’m tempted to roll my own solution and run it off of my website at this rate.  It’ll have to be an off-the-job project, though, because I have enough else that I’m getting paid to do.  Though maybe I can pitch it to Brock as another service we can provide and/or sell outside of our core credit union demographic, and get paid to put this thing together for myself.  Yes, I’m devious.

All this infighting and he-said-she-said and bitterness and anger and talking about other people behind their backs and grudges and intentional “innocent” rule-bending etc etc etc etc is really starting to piss me off. It may not be tearing the community apart, but it sure as fuck is starting to fray it around the edges. This shit has got to stop. Why do people think that this is an appropriate way to behave? Why do we let them get away with it?

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been around for so god-damned long that I just don’t care if I’m ostracized or made fun of or put on any particular group’s blacklist, but I am sick and fucking tired of dancing around issues and grudges and problems and arguments just so that nobody gets upset and leaves. It’s stupid. We keep talking about how Uru (and Myst) is something that can be this huge commercial success that appeals to a zillion different people, but at the same time, we get so paranoid over making someone mad and having them leave because it’s one more person gone from this tiny little community we have here. We can’t have it both ways. Personally, I think that while this community may not be huge enough not to miss the contributions of any one individual, it’s big enough to get over it, and small enough that keeping problem-causing people around is eventually going to make it fall apart. It’s not worth it.

I like the Myst games, and I like this community… but sometimes the people in it make me wonder if I’ll even make it to my 10-year anniversary. But if I give in and leave, who else would be willing to put up with it? How many good people are these two-faced back-stabbers going to drive out before there’s nobody left but them and the people who don’t know any better?

And just to be perfectly crystal-clear on this, I’m talking primarily about the Slackers and their self-righteous ivory tower we-know-best attitude. They show up in droves when the situation suits their purposes, and they utterly destroy those who stand against them, argue with them, moderate them, or even just cough while they’re talking. Of course, they don’t do it in public, they do it privately, plotting in their little forum about who’s going to take the brunt of their next round of ass-hattery, and playing all innocent whenever someone calls them on their bullshit. I’m sick of playing in the undercurrent of implication and vague suggestion. Flame on. But know that I’m not leaving, no matter what gets said about or against me. I spoke earlier about all of the ills that came out of UU, well, this is the worst of it. And it needs to stop.

Belford has written a long but very-much-worth-reading essay on the future of Uru.  I have very, very mixed feelings on this whole thing, so I feel I need to speak my peace and lay everything out in the open.  A lot of this is going to re-tread history that has already been covered and re-tread in many places, and I’m almost certainly going to say things that offend some people, but I need to say this, and I’m tired of holding it in.  At this point, I really don’t care if I end up pissing off some of the people in this community, or becoming unpopular because of something I’ve said.  And really, some people deserve to be offended :P.
Back when Uru was MUDPIE, and we got our first tiny glimpses of it through Spyder, Cyan’s open house at Mysterium 2000, and realMYST’s easter eggs, it was the culmination of a dream for me and, I imagine, many other people who had not only spent time in this universe, but grown up in it.  If you think I’m joking about this at all, you are sorely mistaken.  I first played Myst at the age of 11, and I’ve been a member of the Myst community since September of 1998.  I may not have literally grown up in D’ni (wishing to avoid improper use of that word), but I did effectively or perhaps figuratively grow up there, spending copious amounts of time better applied in school learning about the D’ni and linking theory, endlessly debating Rivenese water, reading and re-reading the Myst novels, cementing images of these magnificent places in my mind’s eye.  To me, at least, MUDPIE was a way to finally be able to see those places “for real” and share them with others.  Story, at that time, was unknown and unimportant.  My desire for what would eventually become Uru Live was driven by 10-year-old fantasies of seeing the place where it all began.  And throughout my time in the private beta for Uru that was run by UbiSoft, I saw things, went places, and performed feats I never thought I would be able to do.

To be certain, there were issues with the game itself on a technical level, and I reported those issues as I was expected to, but the game’s world is something that has and will always be a special place to me, because all the while, I was living a dream.  I was exploring D’ni.  And despite the hobbling of the online release by UbiSoft at the final hour, Cyan’s plan seemed to be working… the Cavern evolved on an almost daily basis, and real characters with real depth set the stage for an adventure that would sadly never come.

Until Uru was released shortly after the final expansion of Uru’s offline content, and was hailed by the community as a glorious resource and a way to keep the dream of Uru alive, and continue to share the Cavern with our friends.  At the time, I was overjoyed to be able to keep exploring with others; I had actually been surprisingly overwhelmed by the emptiness of the Cavern in To D’ni, and to this day have very rarely had occasion to venture into Ae’Gura via Complete Chronicles, because it’s simply depressing knowing that I will never see another person there.

For a while, Until Uru provided the respite and safe harbor that I had been wanting since Live’s closure; a place to explore and laugh and be with friends, even if that was all there would ever be to the journey.  But over time, something changed.  UU became something other than what it was supposed to be: a way to keep the idea of Uru alive.  It evolved, and not, I think, in a way that has been entirely healthy for either the community or the game itself.  To this day, certain people still will not speak with each other, and whole groups hold absurd grudges against other individuals, groups, or the community as a whole for things that happened in UU.  I can’t even begin to summarize what went on, because by that time, I had lost interest in going there due to the bickering, the in-fighting, and the general nastiness that existed on most of the shards.  There were plenty of good people in UU, and many valuable projects were started there that have lived on to this day, but unfortunately (and I’m not sure for whom), I let those motivated by anger, frustration, and bitterness drive me away from my second home in the Cavern.

Beyond the ugliness that grew out of UU, there also came a certain sense of ownership and entitlement, which I think more than anything else has seriously altered the way that some segments of the community see Uru.  The shards were ours, after all, and there was no authority standing between us and the game’s content.  And so, UU once again changed, and certainly not for the better, in my opinion.  The UserKI and AdminKI, as well as the myriad other ways in which the game was modified, are some of the worst things to have happened to D’ni that I can possibly fathom.  In 2003, there was a realism to the world of Uru, a sense that this was a real place, with rules, structure, and a certain adherence to the laws of nature.  What it became was Myst: Second Life, with people leaping hundreds of feet in the air and walking around with neon blue skin, the lake tinted to whatever color struck the fancy of the shard administrator(s), etc.  Whatever realism was in Uru was destroyed for me by what was done to it in UU.  I know a lot of people in the community adored the UserKI, the skydiving “feature”, the ability to literally be a little green man, the fact that the shard admins could upturn Kerath’s Arch and turn the sky in the Cavern pink, and spawn a massive copy of the DRC’s laptop in Tokotah Courtyard for everyone to play on, and so I’m sure, moreso than I was when I suspected (incorrectly) the last time I said it, that I will be lynched for uttering these words, but I hate what UU did to Uru (or, to be even more direct, I hate what this community did to Uru in the name of making their own fun).  More than that, though, I hate that UU’s atmosphere of happy-go-lucky do-as-you-please-ness has become so accepted and ingrained in the minds of some people that they outright protested Cyan’s efforts to do the very thing that UU was intended to facilitate: re-launch Uru Live, citing that over-developed sense of entitlement as the sole reason why UU should be left running (oddly, pretty much everyone I saw protesting UU’s closure on the grounds of MOUL’s limited international availability were people who lived in supported countries).
I could go on at length about the ways in which either Cyan or GameTap screwed the pooch this time around, but I’m not going to.  I’m pretty sure that Cyan knows what went wrong, I’m pretty sure that GameTap doesn’t read my blog, and I know for a fact that the community has been all over this facet of Live’s second closure, and so I see little point in continuing the exercise.  Suffice it to say that mistakes were made which probably contributed far more to Uru’s second death than any failure of imagination or effort on the part of the community.  And now that Uru is gone again, everyone wants desperately to have something else to hold on to, and the only thing that comes to anyone’s mind is another UU.

While I can’t blame people for wanting to return to the only known way of keeping this game alive on an unofficial basis, to put it bluntly, this notion scares the living shit out of me.  I’ve seen this community turn D’ni into an amusement part for its own entertainment, when years ago, the very notion of such a thing would have turned the stomachs of everyone I knew.  I don’t want to take over D’ni, and turn it into the community’s plaything.  I don’t want to usurp Cyan as the arbiter of D’ni canon.  I don’t even want to usurp the notion of there being an arbiter of D’ni canon.  At the same time, I have no qualms with people who build Ages, or tell stories, or create artwork that increases the depth and breadth of the D’ni universe; people who - like those of us who signed on to this game eight years ago - see D’ni as a real place and want to share their interest and enthusiasm for it; people who genuinely want to give something back to the community.  If left in the hands of people like that, I wouldn’t be concerned at all, because I would know that D’ni was in good hands, and I would work with them as long as I could to make sure that the Cavern was never silent again.  Even before Uru, there were attempts at something similar through the Writers of D’ni MOO, and though I sadly have never participated in it, I know some of the most creative members of the community in ages past did so, and created a place second only to Uru in its representation of D’ni.  More than anything, though, I fear turning D’ni over to people who would once again turn it into an amusement park to make it more “interesting” or “fun”, not seeing or even understanding that D’ni is interesting and fun enough for a great many people on its own merits.  Based on the dedication I have seen from the Guilds in their present form, I don’t think Guild-managed new content with ultimate approval from Cyan would be a bad idea.  But anything that removes Cyan from the equation entirely for a second time is begging for a repeat of the bickering, anarchy, and entitlement that ultimately stemmed from Until Uru, and I don’t think I can stand to see my childhood desecrated like that again (yeah, I’m one of those people; the kind who finds stuff like Pyst to be beyond simple poor taste).  Sadly, I don’t think there are many people left in this community who share my experiences of D’ni, and I weep for what may be done to it again in the name of “entertainment”.  Perhaps it would have been better never to have dreamed at all…

To further elaborate on exactly why I think Microsoft’s new default rendering method is a Bad Idea (since GermanShepherd has taken me to task for being anti-Microsoft at the expense of the good of the Web), I think it’s important to first explain why I don’t think its a bad idea. I am not opposing this plan because I automatically think that anything coming out of Redmond is evil by default (in fact I applauded the IE team’s efforts on version 7, despite feeling that they didn’t go far enough in implementing long-standing standards at that time; something that appears to be biting them in the ass now). I’m opposed to the idea of version targeting because it is antithetical to the very concept of the standards that Microsoft is claiming they support, and as a developer who is increasingly working to fully support existing open standards (HTML 4 Strict, XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1, CSS1, CSS2, CSS2.1, Javascript), this concept will make things harder for me, not easier.

I will readily acknowledge that MS is in something of a pickle of their own making here, because for over 5 years, IE6 was pretty much the only browser on the market, and as far as rendering pages built to standards goes, well, saying it sucked is putting it pretty mildly. Now they’re in a situation where their past shoddy support for standards in IE’s standards-compliant mode is making it hard to obey those standards and the commonly-accepted method for opting into them (namely, the doctype switch) without causing large portions of the corporate intranet to come crashing down because their standards-compliance is only as good as what IE6 and now IE7 require. (I think that the effect of IE7 was much greater on internal sites than it was on the Internet as a whole, but I’m just working from personal experience here. I have no way to verify or dispute Chris Wilson’s claim that IE7 broke half of the top 200 websites, so I’m just going to have to take his word for that.) So, rather than do the difficult thing and make it obvious to these people that their sites were built using antiquated, buggy, and often broken code for a product (IE6) which is nearing (if not already at) the end of its support cycle (something they seem to have no problem doing for Windows), they’re taking an easy way out and dumping the responsibility for keeping IE up to snuff with the other modern web browsers onto the developers who have so tirelessly demanded Microsoft’s compliance.

And really, that is the biggest problem I have with this meta tag business: it punishes developers who have already done the most work to build sites that are well-rendered by every major browser and which support the forward compatibility that these standards are supposed to ensure. Developers who are either too lazy, inexperienced, or entrenched in Microsoft’s broken method of rendering the web get a free pass for remaining 7 years behind the times. This is quite possibly one of the only computer-related fields where this would even begin to be an acceptable situation, and that simply boggles my mind. We cannot continue to support sites designed and built during the Dark Ages of the Web; it hinders progress and innovation, and puts us into situations like the one we have now. Websites are just like other pieces of software: they become antiquated, broken, and need to be replaced. Unfortunately, the “operating system” for these pieces of software is a browser so deeply tied into the desktop OS that it cannot support anything but the latest and greatest version of itself.

This brings me to my second point: I seriously question the sustainability of this meta tag version-targeting system. The way that this has been proposed, it isn’t a temporary solution to the problem of maintaining backwards compatibility in IE; it’s a new “standard” way for developers to target their pages for specific browsers and versions (in fact, it’s the exact opposite of a temporary fix; you don’t temporarily opt into the future, you temporarily opt out of it, and Microsoft is hoping that other browser vendors will implement this meta tag as well [interestingly, for some reason, devs from WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera have all rejected and disowned this proposal... I wonder why?]). Again, this sounds like an absolutely fantastic idea in theory, but in practice, it will turn any browser that supports it into bloatware, because antiquated, buggy rendering methods can now no longer be dropped from a browser after being fixed, they need to be retained for the sake of remaining compatible with all those pages out there that bought into the broken way of doing things (and I might note that despite Firefox, Safari, and even Opera going through numerous revisions in far less time than it took IE to go from 6 to 7, there has never been an outcry from developers for these browsers to support backwards compatibility with earlier versions of their rendering engine). What happens two or three versions of IE down the road? If developers build in a meta tag explicitly indicating that IE use the IE8 rendering engine, what does IE9 or IE10 do about that? What about IE11? IE12? How many versions of the Trident engine can Microsoft conceivably cram into this product before it simply collapses under its own weight? How much more difficult does this make fixing bugs in the program? How does this increase the number of potential vulnerabilities in the browser? What happens if IE9 introduces more than just bug fixes, but performance increases in areas like Javascript handling and page rendering? Will sites locked into IE7’s or IE8’s engines benefit from these improvements? If not, why even bother making these improvements in the first place? When everything still renders “just fine” in the default IE7-compliant mode, and standards are optional, what motivation does Microsoft have to continue to innovate and improve its browser?

Segue now to point #3: This idea will stifle innovation in the IE Team and on the Web in general. Certainly, the standards-compliant developers are welcome to “force” IE8 (and presumably IE9 and up) to behave like a modern browser, but if this defaulting to IE7 is being done to help unprepared developers, lazy developers, and corporations without the time, resources, or perhaps most commonly, the desire to update their sites stave off an impending armageddon, what motivation do they now have to do anything at all? If IE8, IE9, IE10, etc. all default to rendering content just like IE7 would have (and again, I question the sustainability of this approach), what motivation do these people now have to do anything at all? What motivation do novice developers have to learn about standards and advanced content creation methods when IE7 works just fine? Sure, the standardistas and the less fanatical but still standards-friendly developers are welcome to use this meta tag to target more advanced versions of the IE engine, but this practice of making standards opt-in rather than opt-out forces people to have to expend more time and effort to learn standards-based practices than they would need to spend just making it look right in IE7. It marginalizes the importance and impact of standards on the most commonly-used browser on the planet. This is bad for standards, not good for them, and standards are good for the Web, even at the expense of older sites ceasing to function. Some may find (and have found) it odd to advocate Microsoft enforcing something like this, since usually Microsoft forcing people to do something is anti-competitive and harmful to the computer industry, but this is not an advocation of more proprietary lock-in garbage from Redmond. This is advocating that Microsoft conform to open standards in the interest of fair competition. If they lose market and mind share because of past attempts to unfairly dominate the Web through proprietary technologies and poor support for even the most basic of standards from HTML to CSS, then they have nobody to blame but themselves for this calamity that they now face, and the longer they put it off, the worse it’s going to be for them when they finally do decide to make modern standards the default. Microsoft is not a charity, and we as an industry should not be expected to coddle them for having screwed up in the past. Nor should we allow Microsoft to continue to hold open standards hostage because it would temporarily damage some portions of the web and the corporate intranet (and I do wish to stress temporarily… sites can be updated, and will only be updated if there is a motivation to do so). If Microsoft would get off its ass and just freaking announce and end-of-life date for IE6 and that incompatible sites would no longer render or possibly even function correctly in newer versions of IE, that alone would be enough incentive to get corporations off of their own duffs and invest in modernizing their internal infrastructure and external Web presence.

To take a brief tangent into the hazy realm of economics, imagine if you would the number of jobs and the amount of economically stimulating cash would be generated by at least encouraging, if not outright forcing major companies to upgrade their websites and corporate intranets. It could – admittedly without the benefit of insightful education into the workings of economic factors – be argued that Microsoft making IE8 act like IE8 by default would be a good thing for the economy in this down-turning market, as it would drive the creation of tech industry jobs in the form of new contracts to freelance web developers and development firms. These are quite typically rather lucrative contracts which would drive considerable money into the hands of a segment of the market most likely to further re-invest it into the economy (in the form of purchases, likely from the very companies shelling out cash to upgrade their web-based infrastructure), doing far more benefit than free hand-outs from an already cash-strapped federal government.

But back to the real world, there are other ways that this sort of preservation of the ancient corporate American intranet could have been handled without a) blaming developers for making badly-designed sites so that they’d work in IE6/7 and b) further placing an additional onus of responsibility on standards-compliant developers to make their standards-compliant sites render correctly in IE8’s non-default super-duper standards-compliant mode. Unfortunately, all of these alternative methods would rely on some combination of user education, developer training, and the “breaking” of the Web which Microsoft is so terrified of doing (despite the fact that the vast majority of the web is either built to standards, or to such ancient implementations of HTML that it immediately falls under the purview of Quirks Mode). The sites most likely to “break” (by which I believe the IE Team means “render incorrectly” more than “ceases to function entirely”) are those written by tech-savvy developers trying to cleverly circumvent the bugs and limitations of IE’s Trident engine.

Making IE7-compliant mode opt-in, through either the inclusion of the meta tag or the use of the also-proposed X-UA-Compatible HTTP header, would allow these tech-savvy developers to “fix” their sites temporarily while still placing an onus upon them – and not the standards-based development community which has been doing the legwork to get Microsoft to pay attention to this issue in the first place – to update their sites before this temporary stop-gap measure ceases to be supported in the future. For those sites that don’t have active support teams or who for whatever reason were tech-savvy enough to know how to work around IE’s shortcomings but not up-to-date enough to know about this temporary solution, a button and/or contextual menu item (I’m thinking both) can be added to the browser that would toggle IE7-compliant rendering for a given domain. Make it look like a band-aid, and trumpet the feature as the best of both worlds: forward-looking standards compliance and the ability to continue to view “legacy” sites in a non-destructive manner. You’re already giving the browser the ability to switch renderers, just put that ability into the hands of the users. With proper education of users on the use of this feature, and proper education of developers through notifications from Microsoft on any and all tech-related blogs and news sites to ensure that this “band-aid” feature would be required only in the most dire of circumstances, Microsoft could continue their pledge to not “break the Web” while still properly implementing modern Web standards. And if you don’t like the band-aid button, here’s another one for you: make IE8 a stand-alone product, separate from the built-in, deeply-Windows-integrated IE5/5.5/6/7 releases. Since I’m pretty sure that by this point, most of the “Web breakage” has already happened in the nearly-mandatory move to IE7 (which inexplicably hasn’t impacted IE6’s browser share all that much), most of what’s left is corporate intranets still stuck in the mid-to-late 90’s. Let people run the antiquated IE5/5.5/6/7 engine for those sites that need it, run IE8 for the actual Intarwebz, and make the new IE8 release available for all versions of Windows from Win98 through Vista (seriously, it can’t be any more work than making sure IE10 still has IE7, 8, and 9’s rendering engines in it…) to ensure maximum adoption so that devs can more quickly move to end-of-line the old versions of the browser.

As a final salient point, making yet another opt-in to replace the opt-in of the doctype switch because so many people (and WYSIWYG editors) completely loused that idea up simply begs for this opt-in to be similarly abused in the future. There’s even a setting in the meta tag for “edge”, which will force the page to target the latest version of a browser’s rendering engine regardless of how far in the future the page is being accessed. Knowing that most devs aren’t going to want to be locked into a specific release of a browser (as they’ll want a well-formed site to be able to take advantage of improvements to performance and capabilities over time), and knowing that WYSIWYG editors are going to make “edge” the default for inexperienced devs simply because it looks bad to target an older browser release as a default, the proliferation of “edge”-defined sites – despite strong advisement from Microsoft not to do this – is going to ruin this as a way to guard against future incompatibilities in rendering the same way the doctype switch has failed to do so for the exact same reasons. Opt-ins don’t work, because everybody wants to opt-in to the future, even if they don’t understand what that means. The only way to preserve standards and their forward-compatibility is by opting out of them as needed until the people responsible for maintaining and creating content on the Web get their heads in the game. If they choose not to, there are plenty of forward-looking developers out there who will gladly take their business once they explain to their clients why their sites don’t have as much portability, functionality, speed, or simplicity. Standards as defaults drive innovation; standards as options do not.

Now for my paragraph of anti-Microsoft paranoia, which will likely serve to undermine all of the hopefully well-reasoned arguments I’ve just made (oh well). I can easily see this move by Microsoft as a way to ensure that IE7 becomes the “gold standard” for the internet yet again. It may not be the intent if the IE Team right now, but faced with sharply declining browser share and a potential way to make up for it through this new non-standards-compliant IE7 default rendering method, I have no doubt that someone at Microsoft will turn this into another crusade against open innovation. By effectively paying lip service to standards by including them as a non-standard feature, Microsoft is once again already marginalizing the open standards community in favor of maintaining its own proprietary, or at the very least, “broken” standards, which serve to keep people locked into their products, lest those customers find that they are no longer able to use their corporate intranet site after moving to another browser vendor. It’s a small – and predictable, based on past performances – step from this marginalization to another take-over effort built on the back of IE7 and 8, rather than IE4, 5, and 6. It’s easy to understand why this would work, too… even after the rise of Firefox as a viable alternative and the steady increase in Safari market share, IE still commands anywhere from 60% to 95% of the traffic going to most popular websites. This is arguably the most commonly-used (if not popular, since that sort of implies that it’s something people want to use, rather than people simply not knowing they can use anything else) browser on the market, and leveraging the power of stupid people in large numbers is something that Microsoft is very, very good at. But that’s just my bit of anti-Microsoft paranoia to cancel out the well-reasoned arguments. Feel free to just pay attention to this paragraph and ignore the other 9 when making your counter-arguments.

… again.

(My apologies for the language.)

I wonder: what sort of technological, marketplace, or other financial innovations would make it possible for “cult” franchises like Firefly and Uru to be more financially viable in the future? Both have large fan bases, and both have seen, as far as I can tell, remarkably marginal returns in the market despite the rabidness with which their constituents adhere to them. These products contain content that is by no means inexpensive to produce. In the case of Firefly/Serenity, there’s actors (not quite big-time ones like Harrison Ford, but certainly able to command sizable salaries), writers, camera crews, set builders, support staff, marketing, effects shops full of their own staffs… that’s a metric ton of money to be throwing at something like this. In Uru’s case, you’ve got artists, animators, programmers, designers, concept artists, story writers, marketing, customer service staff… again, loads and loads of money that needs to be spent for this sort of content. The sort of money that, when not made back quickly, makes investors or other financial buoys (like publishers) nervous.

Niche markets are getting harder and harder to tap, it seems, despite the increasing interconnectedness of experiences that one would think would make it easier to reach those niches, and the amount of money required to create high-quality entertainment capable of not only attracting but retaining the people who make up that target market is ever-increasing. You can’t make a Firefly or Uru with $50,000 in the bank (which by itself is a rather substantial chunk of change), and you certainly can’t sustain it that way. These are multi-million-dollar products, and you need to find a market for them quickly, and be able to hold onto that market, or you’re screwed, no matter how many loyal fans you have who will follow you to Hell and back if you promise them a fruit cup.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see quality franchises suffer at the hands of the Almighty Dollar just because not enough people are interested in it to make it financially viable. Not only is it frustrating, it’s also rather scary, speaking as someone who wants to do this sort of thing for a living before I die. Especially in the case of video games that don’t find their market fast enough, it’s ridiculously frustrating, because video games are themselves still a niche market (I think the biggest reason games cost $40-$60 a pop is because of their limited market… though as it expands and the prices fail to drop, the industry has managed to overtake motion pictures in revenue… go figure). A product like Myst or Uru that has the ability to break out of the traditionally-held limitations of the gaming industry’s demographics should be able to (and did, once) make substantially more in sales than products like Call of Duty, or even Halo, which has of course proven to be more popular than God. And yet, such products languish in obscurity, attracting only a niche group of an already niche market dominated by a demographic more inclined towards faster-paced, more aggressive gameplay, and failing to reach those who decry video games as nothing but murder and “virtual orgasmic rape” simulators (not so much NSFW as just incredibly, horribly frustrating).

There’s something about this whole situation that makes me wish that there were some way of more cheaply developing quality entertainment products that only manage to appeal to a narrow cross-section of the market (or that only manage to reach a narrow cross-section of the market that you know would find it appealing). Whether it’s through something ridiculously socialist like subsidies from whatever governmental organization could be seen as supporting this sort of thing (or, ideally, just making Blizzard share some of the billions of dollars in revenue that WoW generates… no, I’m not bitter, shut up), or through some other innovation in the market itself that makes these sorts of products available to anyone at reasonable prices with the majority of the revenue going to the developers and not the distributors, I feel that something needs to happen, especially in the video game industry, whose generally-accepted concept of innovation seems to be “Mario64, but in space”, “Like Halo 3, but with chainsaws”, “WoW 2″, and “System Shock 2: Underwater” (shocking). I may be watching a bit too much Zero Punctuation…

It could be (and certainly has been) said that as far as something like Uru goes, there was more in play than just lack of audience, and I think I’ve got a whole post full of things to say about what I’ve learned from Uru as a developer, but despite its numerous setbacks, cancellations, and stutters, it’s still a unique approach to interactive entertainment, and I wish there were more people willing to throw copious amounts of cash at it to make it what it really could be. And maybe that’s the solution to this whole thing in the end: finding people with plenty of money to spend funding crazy-awesome ideas that may not be the most wildly successful product in history, and hooking them up with people who have crazy-awesome ideas for niche products in need of said cash.

Now how the hell do we do that?

Re-write because Wordpress ate my first draft…

I emailed Fanista yesterday informing them that no, my package was not “at [my] house still” and asked them to provide me with any tracking numbers and additional information they had so that I could file a lost package claim with the post office. Today I got a response from Steven, to whom my claim had evidently been elevated after the CSR drones realized I must not actually have the package I said I didn’t have (smart, them…). He informed me that the box had been shipped by FedEx rather than the USPS to try and make up for the delay between the time my order was placed (11/30) and the time that it shipped (12/8). He also provided me with the box’s tracking information, which indicated that the box was indeed “left at the door” with no signature on file. However, much to his credit and my considerable appreciation, he didn’t just send me to fend for myself with FedEx. Instead, he graciously offered to ship us a new copy at no charge: an offer I took him up on with extreme gratitude.

I really do have to give Fanista credit on this one. They absolutely didn’t have to do this; the package was shipped and its loss (or faulty delivery) is the fault of FedEx, not Fanista or myself, and they could have just told me to stuff off and buy a new copy (which I would have done, albeit grudgingly, because I wants me some Osmo and I’m willing to pay to get it), but they took responsibility for it and made an extremely generous offer, so that makes me quite happy :).

Despite really wanting to get the game as quickly as possible, I didn’t want to put them out any more money than they were already eating at my expense, so I didn’t ask for overnight shipping or anything outrageous like that, which means it’ll probably be the end of next week before we get our copy of the game, but we will be getting it, and that makes me quite happy indeed.

So I ordered a copy of Cyan’s new game, Cosmic Osmo’s Hex Isle on November 30th. The order shipped on December 8th, and as of December 22nd, there was no sign of the package. Our mail box had no parcel key when we returned from our trip to Cincinnati, the office had no box for us, and there was no notice from the post office saying they couldn’t deliver it. This necessitated an email to Fanista’s customer support department, inquiring as to the status of my $23 package.

Today I get an email back saying that the package was “left at the door” on December 10th, and asking if it’s perhaps “at [my] house still”. There are two three problems with this:

1. We were out of town on the 10th of December, and as such, would have been unable to retrieve any package “left at the door”.
2. We live in an apartment complex! Why the FUCK is the post office leaving packages at our god-damned door?! Even if we hadn’t been out of town at the time the box arrived, it’s likely that it would have sat outside unattended for at least 4 hours before I got home from work and saw it (Ash doesn’t usually venture outside to get the mail since it’s on my way back from the office, so I’d be the only one to see it).
3. If our box were “at [my] house still” as the support representative suggests, I think I might have noticed the box. Further, having researched my order, you’d think they would have noticed the “Apartment #42″ part of the shipping address, and not suggested such a ludicrously stupid possibility.

So it’s nearly a month after I ordered the game, I still don’t have it, and now I’m facing the very real possibility that it was stolen from our doorstep because the god-damned post office didn’t put the box in a fucking parcel bin in the mail depot like they’re supposed to! Suffice it to say, I’m not pleased at the moment. I’m going to try hitting up the post office where our packages are usually held when they can’t be delivered and see if it’s just stuck in some sort of ugly loop there, and if it’s not there, I’m going to drive a war-path to the office tomorrow at lunch (I’d drive one now, but the office closes at noon on Wednesdays for no apparent reason).

Anyone have advice for how to handle “the post office left my box in a location where it not only could have been, but very likely was stolen by some crack-headed wigger instead of following proper parcel delivery procedure” with the company providing said now-stolen goods?

So apparently Sony’s launching a new 40GB PS3 model in Europe next week, for the low-low price of €399.

Unfortunately, if you swing for this model, you apparently lose all backwards compatibility with PS2 games. This, my friends, is patently retarded. Allow me to explain.

I have all of two games for the PS2: Okami and Shadows of the Colossus. I do not, however, currently own a PS2; Ash and I bummed off of my brother’s while we were living in Kentucky, since he was basically on gaming probation for most of the school year. Ash is also regularly eying FFXII (or, perhaps more accurately, the picture of Balthier on the cover of FFXII) increasingly forlornly, since she never managed to finish the game before we moved. That makes 3 PS2 games which are guaranteed to be played with considerable regularity in our house provided we ever get the scratch together to bother with getting a PS3.

Now, on the subject of getting a PS3 in the first place, I’ve been looking at games like Ratchet and Clank Future and Little Big Planet rather forlornly myself, and I know that in its current state, the PS3’s game selection really has very few places to go but up (I hope). It seemed pointless to try jumping onto the PS2 bandwagon this late in the game when holding out for a little longer was likely to ensure I’d also be able to play new games (though for some reason, the PS2 continues to have more launch titles per week than the PS3 on average…), for a slightly larger investment. However, the understanding was that the PS3 was an up-sell from the PS2 (akin to getting a large-sized combo at some obscenely over-priced drive-thru window), not a completely separate product requiring an additional purchase for existing library titles.

Needless to say, I’m considerably annoyed at this decision, and I don’t even have definite plans for buying the damn thing (suffice it to say, these vague plans are now far less definite than they were before today). I knew there was no way in hell I was going to be dropping $600 on one, and while $500 is slightly more palatable, I could find several other more useful things to spend that much money on. $400 was a point at which I was going to start seriously considering it (interesting, that I had the same reaction to the iPhone…), but if I have to then go spend another $100 on a PS2 which will simply take up even more space in our incredibly tiny apartment, that makes it a zero-value product for me, and I might as well swing for the $500 version, which as I already mentioned, is very expensive (but not “expensive as f***”, as the $600 model is).

I’m wondering if there’s any aspect of the PS3’s launch that Sony hasn’t managed to fumble horribly. It’s like they put the Cincinnati Bengals in charge of their marketing strategy (ouch… and also perhaps the only sports reference you’ll see on this blog all decade, so double the shock value).