Category: Debated

Arguments, appeals, or otherwise analytical.

Categories
Debated Disliked

Tear It Up

Back in April of 2003, I wrote a post [discussing my disdain](https://vjarmy.com/archives/2003/04/if_i_read_any_more_fanfiction_i_will_be_driven_to_murder.php) for fanfiction – particularly that of the DDR variety. I think most of the links in the post are dead, but the point remains the same: fanfiction for video games, particular video games without a plot, is a crime against humanity.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m passionate about games. Twenty years of gaming gets you a lot of addictions and obsessions. I’ve played some games long enough to temporarily ruin my vision, taken mutli-hour car trips with people I barely know to play games in arcades, and written way more PHP to handle game accounting than anyone should have to in the course of their life.

But there’s a line for me. Somewhere past cosplaying at conventions is a breed of gamer who takes things way, way, way too far.

Today, Aaron Ramsey discovered – quite accidently – the [Beatmania IIDX Platinum Livejournal community](http://www.livejournal.com/community/iidx_platinum/). I should, in all fairness, know by now not to click links titled “SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME WHAT THE HELL THIS IS ABOUT”.

If there’s any game I’m obsessed with, it’s certainly Beatmania IIDX; anyone who’s been reading here for longer than a month has been subjected to the regular tangent about it. I am not going to go into details to describe the percentage of my gaming attention this game occupies. That said, this community scares the living shit out of me.

IIDX_Platinum is a role-playing group. This means each and every person in the community plays the role of one of the IIDX “characters”. Let’s stop right here, for the benefit of those people that don’t play: The characters in IIDX are largely relegated to screens that show your scores. They only occasionally appear in videos. They have very minor back-story associated with them, which is then obsessively filled in by people who think it’s worth filling in.

To base an entire perpetual role playing game off of characters that don’t have any characterization is…to make the obvious joke, *just disturbed, guys*. This is even acknowledged in the [group rules](http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=iidx_platinum):

> I’ve done all the research I could do and there isn’t a website that describes all the character’s personality.

There are other sections in the rules that are equally troubling, like the full acknowledgement that there may be [yaoi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi) and [yuri](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri):

> Keep an open mind. *This community/rp group is run by yaoi fans… and we do allow yaoi, yuri, and het in this RP. Anything lemony, please warn us in advance.*

Some people may find this hard to believe, but Beatmania IIDX is a fun game even if you *don’t* pretend the characters on the results screens are having homosexual relations with each other. I personally don’t think it adds anything to the gaming experience – but maybe that’s just me.

I don’t mean to go on a complete snark binge here, so let me get to the heart of the matter, which is based largely in this line in the group description:

> Forgive us for being uncreative (or maybe being lazy) at the time, but this role-play has no set definite plot or anything like that. I mean, our boys and girls are DJ’s. Still, that’s not to say that it’s all they ever do. They are human after all, and go through the same things that we all do. Happy times, fun times, depression, frustration, anger, emo, angst, etc.

If these characters truly “go through the same things that we all do”, what’s the motivation here to write about someone else’s (fictional) life ? Why would you want to *pretend* to have issues, especially those that aren’t your own? Is there really an emotional rush for *pretending* to be in love with someone else who doesn’t exist? Since all of these love stories seem to end in heartbreak, why would anyone want to pretend to go through that?

Don’t misread that as saying there isn’t something to be said for going through all of these things yourself; there’s a lot to be learned from falling into and out of love, from releasing your frustrations and having your friends be there for you in your darkest days. But you need to go through these life experiences as yourself, not as a fictional DJ (or any other character from one of the thousands of roleplaying groups online).

In total, it strikes me as rather tragic that there are so many people out there who are content to churn out pages upon pages of fictional [phone conversations](http://www.livejournal.com/community/iidx_platinum/57710.html#cutid1), [AIM chats](http://www.livejournal.com/community/iidx_platinum/63104.html#cutid1), and [trips with fictional friends](http://www.livejournal.com/community/iidx_platinum/64835.html#cutid2) rather than try doing any of these things as themselves.

Life is too short to spend it writing a story for someone else’s life.

Categories
Debated

Business Week Butchers The Microsoft Syndication News

It’s always sad when a large magazine like Business Week so badly butchers the news. Today’s offender is Jay Greene, who takes the news of Microsoft extending RSS and including functionality in Longhorn, and completely misses the mark in his coverage and analysis.

Allow me to pick it apart:

The software giant has decided to put its considerable weight behind Really Simple Syndication, known to the digerati simply as RSS.

Consider what this sentence is claiming: it’s called Really Simple Syndication, but the geeks call it RSS. And while I don’t disagree that geeks call it RSS (although a number of us prefer the format-neutral term “feeds”), I don’t know of any non-geeks who refer to it as anything other than RSS.

It should also be noted that Microsoft isn’t merely extended RSS 2.0, which is how most everyone has been treating it. At the bottom of their developer information page linked above, there are links to the specs for Atom and RSS 1.0, in addition to RSS 2.0. There’s no reference in the specs for the extension that it’s linked to merely one of these formats. This extension is not limited to a particular format.

The technology makes it convenient for Web users to keep tabs on their favorite blogs, news feeds, columnists, and video by signing up to have updates automatically zapped to their PCs or mobile devices.

Automatically zapped? Oh, please. I know there’s a need to occasionally dumb things down, but this is just ludicrous.

“Automatically zapped” indicates that any time a site changes, your machine instantly receives the change. This is not how syndication works, and is in fact incorrect on both parts of the phrase. Feeds are not sent to a computer, nor are they instantaneous. A computer has to go out and ask for the feed file, and then compares it to whatever entries it had previously seen. This happens on a regular schedule, or on demand.

Microsoft, which has largely been on the sidelines as RSS gained in popularity, announced plans on June 24 to bake RSS technology into the next version of its Windows operating system, dubbed Longhorn, due at the end of 2006.

They also announced extensions to syndication formats, which is the more shocking part of the news. Obviously this is worth glossing over, as it’s apparently too technical for the reader base. I mean, only the digerati would care about something like that.

What’s more, Microsoft is going after the RSS market in a very un-Microsoft-like way -– it’s making its RSS technology available for free using the so-called Creative Commons license.

If you’re looking for the single most misleading sentence in the whole article, this is it.

Microsoft’s “RSS technology” is not being made available for free; It’s the format extensions that are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. This isn’t to say Microsoft can’t release source code later for their technology, but it’s not at all what was announced.

Furthermore, there is nothing “so-called” about the Creative Commons; it is a total non-sequitur and completely out of place. It’d be akin to me referring to the publication this article was published in as “the so-called Business Week”.

But Microsoft plans to dive much deeper when Longhorn ships. Including the RSS technology in the new operating system will allow thousands of software developers to create programs that take advantage of RSS feeds.

Thousands of software developers can already create programs that take advantage of RSS feeds. Thousands of software developers already have.

What Microsoft is doing to “dive much deeper” is using a system-level subscription list, fetching scheduler, and parser. While I can understand the nicety of the fetching scheduler and maybe the parser, I’m personally ambivalent about the system-wide subscription list. Still, there’s nothing preventing a developer from implementing RSS functionality now.

The giant’s foray into the RSS world is clearly a threat to upstart RSS reader companies.

Which is it – are they allowing thousands of software developers to create programs that take advantage of feeds, or are they the two thousand pound gorilla that is clearly a threat to upstart companies?

Look, it’s great if Microsoft is including a feed reader in IE – every browser should have one, simply because if people use it, they will see the benefits of syndication. Don’t think, however, that a product bound into the operating system is going to quench everyone’s thirst for tools. People still choose Firefox over IE and Safari, Eudora over Outlook, Adium over iChat. Third parties can survive, even with core OS support for technologies and protocols.

But Microsoft’s mere presence in the market will do one thing that all the other companies combined haven’t been able to achieve yet: It will make RSS mainstream technology.

How this reads to you depends on if you’re an optimist or a pessimist. As a realist, I will go down both paths.

Optimists will tell you syndication has been mainstream for years – look at the level of syndication provided by major companies like BBC, New York Times, Google, Reuters, et cetera. Look at the number of feed readers available like My Yahoo, My MSN, Bloglines, NetNewsWire, Gmail clips, and the like. People use RSS without knowing it: Apple’s whizzy new screensaver in Tiger, syndicated accounts on LiveJournal (if you’re reading this on LJ, you’re using syndication), live bookmarks in Firefox, and more.

Syndication has been mainstream for years, if you look at it that way.

Pessimists will tell you that even with all these great tools out there, there still aren’t enough people actually using it. Syndication scares people. Feeds are too hard to find, too hard to subscribe to via a standard method, and lead to quirks when you deal with things like character encoding and updated posts. None of the things Microsoft are doing – the features in Longhorn and IE, as well as the extensions to the formats – change any of this.

From this standpoint, syndication will never be mainstream.

Point being made: Either you can believe syndication is already mainstream and Microsoft’s work isn’t going to change anything, or you can believe that syndication isn’t mainstreams for reasons such that Microsoft’s work isn’t going to change anything. Net result: Microsoft’s work is not going to change anything.

Categories
Debated

Awww, Freak Out

Have you heard about the new dance craze
Listen to us, I’m sure you’ll be amazed
Big fun to be had by everyone
It’s up to you, it surely can be done

It was, by far, the strangest keynote I have ever been to in the five years I’ve been in the Apple “industry”. It clocked in at barely over an hour. There were no actual product announcements – just a codename for 10.5, more details on iTunes 4.9, and the release of QT7 Preview for Windows. There was no traditional Phil demo. And strangest of all, Steve wasn’t wearing his trademark turtleneck/jeans combo outfit; the jeans had been replaced with black slacks.

And so, in one quick and non-specific swoop, Apple sent the majority of the conference – over 3,500 people who had mostly paid around $1,500 to be there – into cardiac arrest as they realized that all their apps would have to be reworked, reoptimized, and reconsidered.
Now, I am not a developer. I am one of the alleged 40% of attendees who are strictly on the IT track, meaning this doesn’t strike me in quite the same way as the half of the industry I used to associate with. However, in terms of things such as purchasing further hardware, or looking toward vendors for future support, it does affect us, and it affects us a lot.

I’m not going to freak out about it, though, and neither should you.

All that pressure got you down
Has your head spinning all around
Feel the rhythm, check the ride
Come on along and have a real good time

The part that made me actually accept this all – curing the slight hyperventilation, dizzyness, and other maladies – is not that there are 100 of the developer boxes around the conference for monkeying with, not that there’s a new version of Xcode, and not that Steve says it’s all going to be okay. The warm blanket here is the confirmation that Apple’s had OS X86 – and for those wondering, the dev boxes are P4s, so enough with the “Intel might build PPC chips” crap – for every iteration of OS X.

Most people, upon hearing the rumors, assumed that it would take a lot of time to tune OS X to get it running at acceptible levels; that most of the two year transition to get OS X86 running to even a somewhat acceptible level of performance. It’s already there, though – and this is first hand experience from me.

For those of us already deeply invested in the platform, there’s also fear that PPC-native apps will be quickly thrown to the side in favor of Intel. Ignoring that Apple is strongly pushing Universal Bundles, I don’t see this happening. Why? Because developers are taking this change more personally than you are. Way more personally. They’re the ones who have to do all the work, and until they replace all their PPC machines with Intel machines – given the lifespan of most Macs, that’s not going to be for a while – they will have no vested interest in dumping the PowerPC line.

So my suggestion to everyone is stop shouting DOOM DOOM DOOM, stop wondering if/when Apple’s stock is going to go into freefall, and stop freaking out. It’s all not as bad as you think.