What happened to Final Fantasy? I grew up with it, the original Final Fantasy was my first RPG, and then Final Fantasy 2, and then, what I believe to be the greatest RPG of all time, Final Fantasy 3/6 came out. Final Fantasy VII was great, and breathtaking, but since then, it's been downhill. Nine was a quick breath of fresh air, but VIII is the only Final Fantasy I've never played past the first hour. Ten was super linear (geez, *another* cutscene?), and X-2 was a joke (please stop making intrepid adventurers act like tween girls, it's insulting to everyone except tween girls). XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration.

It seems to me that the problem, more than anything, is the failure to dream up a really compelling setting, characters, and plot, and then let the player loose in it. Earlier games had those, but it seems that lately all that they're interested in is new systems of combat and leveling up. There are no villains like Kefka, no tragedies like Rosa's attempted suicide, no big reveals like Cloud's backstory, no tortured protagonists like Cecil.

In a lot of ways, it's as if they've substituted "cool" for "good". They want a cool story, a cool main character, a cool setting, not good ones, not well developed ones. The potential for storytelling in videogames, from a technological standpoint, it's all there. There's nothing really holding anyone back, but instead, we get flashy graphics and a new battle system, instead of characters we care about. When I was 14 years old, watching Rosa throw herself off a cliff, or Terra almost decide against saving the world, or even the NPC orphan teenage couple obliquely considering an abortion because Kefka had turned the world into a wasteland, that was good storytelling, and I expected it to only get better as technology improved, and it really didn't, at least not for the Final Fantasy series.

It's a shame, and maybe this is harsh, but I consider the Final Fantasy series to be like M. Night Shyamalan movies. Sure, "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" were epic, and "Signs" was pretty decent, but at some point you have to give up on things and count yourself as no longer a fan, but a harsh critic.

I wish they would turn to their attention to the next issue of the open Internet, a free and open social network.

Here you go:

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

Combine this with social networking to allow/deny access to your files and I think you've got a game changer. Files which require no server, and which are unknown/unavailable to anyone who doesn't need to know about them. I could share my mp3 collection or movie collection with only my friends list, which would be much more along the lines of fair use (like tape trading).

I ran a BBS in the Chicago area in the 90's called "Throwing Copper", and Legend Of The Red Dragon was my addiction. Sometimes I think I set up that BBS just so I could play it without dialing in. This brings me back, The Whammy Bar, Disallusioned Society, and a bunch that are on the tip of my tongue.

Someone should make a gritty reboot of LORD. I'd play it.

For every bucket of fried chicken assholes like you DON'T eat, I'll eat three, plus a package of Wal-mart bacon.

I would encourage you to do so, because people with attitudes like that are what I like to call a "self-correcting problem"

I've never had a problem with meat being murder. That's basically by design, and it's something I have no moral issue with. My moral issue is with how the animal lives, and the nature of it's slaughter. If the animal is basically tortured it's whole life, that's immoral. If it lives a relatively serene and uncomplicated life, and is quickly killed, I don't have an issue with that.

Of course, it's all moot, because at some point, we'll have vat grown meat, and we won't have to raise any full animals to begin with anymore.

I can't believe I'm responding to such a poorly constructed troll, but by "high quality", I'm talking about the way it's produced, not the part of the animal. There's plenty of things you can do with the rest of the animal (tripe, soups, stews, etc), and still have the source be high quality instead of factory farmed. I'm not talking about eating fillet mignon every night.

As for your dream cuisine, here you go, buddy:

http://o.onionstatic.com/images/articles/article/8983/Dennys-Bucket_jpg_445x1000_upscale_q85.jpg

I am not a vegetarian, but we need to reduce our meat consumption. I'll never be a vegetarian, I'm too fond of my Sicilian-American culinary traditions, but two things need to happen: First, we need to reduce the amount of meat we consume, and we need to consume better meat when we do. This diet that America has of eating a big bucket of meat and cheese from Denny's is just ridiculous, and it's killing us on multiple fronts.

I try to follow a basic plan: Vegan (or Vegetarian) before 6pm. I try and make sure the meat I do eat for dinner is high quality. I pay a little extra for it, but the savings throughout the day balance out. There are other types of diets that would be great for reducing meat consumption without any of us thinking we're suddenly living off of soy and wheat germ. Eating smaller portions of meat, but still using it for flavoring, for instance. Even just getting the idea in our heads that we shouldn't eat meat for every single meal.

Factory farming has got to go, it's horrible on so many fronts. I'm not a foodie, and I don't have vegan super powers, and I recognize that people are on a budget, and can't shop for organic at whole foods (hell, I can't afford to, and I have a decent job). But we have to figure some kind of practical way forward, because we can't keep packing animals in to dark crates, standing in their own filth and pumping them full of drugs and then call that dinner.

I haven't checked recently, but what's the status of voip over jabber? We've seeing a lot of collusion and conglomeration between monolithic "walled garden" services, and I think we'll see more of it. The open source community has alternatives, but I'm starting to think we're going to have to step up our game to fight the momentum that the closed systems have.

I think it's positive that Diaspora was able to raise $200k through crowd-sourcing, and I don't agree with people who say it was a waste of money, if only because it showed it was possible. But the reality is that $200k is pennies in comparison to the funds that Facebook, Skype, and others have. And I think it's fair to say that for every talented, idealistic open source programmer willing to work on the side to open the up communication channels, whether it's the web or voip or anything else, there's dozens of talented developers willing to take large salaries to work on proprietary, walled software.

We seem to have solved a lot of the questions that open source brought up when it was first popularized by Linux (management, how to make a profit, etc), but we still have some big questions to ask in terms of how to fund these projects while maintaining independence, and how to compete with well-funded corporations that have an invested interest in keeping things proprietary and walled off. Not just on features, but on user interface and experience, stability, scalability, and other software design concerns.

I don't know if I have any answers, but I'd sure love to hear suggestions. Call it the next big challenge for open source, but we increasingly need to be able to make user-facing software that appeals to the least savvy of users, we need to make it open and flexible, and we need to make it compete with the cycle of new features that come out of proprietary software with massive bank accounts.

--
Appleseed - Open Source, Distributed Social Networking
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

There was a TED talk that outlined recently why building from scratch is rarely "green". Especially when you're talking about building a big, opulent "green" mansion out in the middle of a posh suburb with a huge acreage.

People (especially the wealthy) may not want to hear it, but the greenest option is to renovate an existing structure in an urban center. Just like buying a used 1992 Honda is more "green" than buying a brand new Prius.

Building new may make you feel better about yourself, but it's definitely not the best option for the environment, by far.

Their computers are all spam servers because they've been infected with viruses.

Users unintentionally running a spam server because of an infected system doesn't exactly bolster your case. :)

if was well designed it would give completly free (both beer and speech) internet to everybody and wouldn't need administering.

Has there ever been a server system that was so well designed and intuitive that it didn't need administering? Isn't that what Microsoft tried with Zero Administration? I think there's a reason unix, with all it's complexities, won out.

I'm not saying it's impossible. But when even the best server management software out there is too difficult for the majority of users, I think it's simply impractical.

I see where he's going with this, and while I expect that certain aspects of the concepts will eventually be implemented in different ways, we have to be clear that the idea of everyday people administering their own servers is just not practical. I realize everyone here sees it as something we're willing to invest our time in, but most people don't. Servers exist for a reason, there are people (called system administrators) who can specialize in making sure the server software you're accessing, your data, etc. all are secure and have 99% uptime.

I'm not the kind of person who thinks that there is a divide between a sort of tech elite and the unwashed masses who will never understand this stuff. I'm one of those people who thinks that even your grandmother can learn how to recompile Apache given enough time, interest and dedication. The problem is that doctors are busy being doctors, plumbers are busy being plumbers, parents are busy being parents, and so on an so on. Even as a software developer, I prefer to not administer my own servers if I don't have to. I have friends who are very intelligent people who are very accomplished in non-computing fields who use virus and adware-ridden Windows machines. I don't suspect they're interested in taking the time necessary to fully secure a server that holds a digital representation of their life.

So this idea of a total peer-to-peer networking is not an approach I think we should pursue, not because it's not technically achievable (it totally is), but because it's not practical on a social level. This is reflected in the difference between Appleseed's approach to open source social networking and Diaspora's: Appleseed uses a federated node structure, and Diaspora claims to use a P2P, although we haven't seen the code yet, this was the original promise, and since the EFF is backing the project, it fits in with what Moglen is suggesting here.

We'll see where we end up, but I worry that if we push for Moglen's approach, we may see a small ghetto of tech savvy users who adopt it, while everyone else chooses to remain with the proprietary systems, because they're just that much less hassle. It makes much more sense to me to push for federated, hosted solutions, so that an ecosystem of servers (administered by professionals) can exist, and users can move freely between them.

Michael Chisari
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

I was at the Federated Social Web Summit this July, and over drinks, I was discussing this issue with other open source social networking developers. I mentioned that I've had a few friends pass who still have a presence on the social web (livejournal, facebook, myspace), and I really appreciate being able to go back and remember them that way. I also mentioned that their parents have access to their accounts, so people would get especially unnerved when that "online now" icon would show up or when they would pop up in a chat list, because their parents were checking or closing out their account.

I had a little too much to think, so I posited the idea of a system which learns, based on what you've posted, how to post like you after you're gone. Not a full representation, but a way to continue to create an impression of you. Less like Sonny from I, Robot, and more like Mal from Inception. A shadow of a person, based on what people remember. Or, more specifically, what the system remembers. Since conceivably, generations born in 2000 and up will live their whole lives on the social web, systems will have a lot of information with which to recreate a person's personality. When I suggested this, someone asked, "Why would I have to wait until I died to use this?"

I won't be coding this into Appleseed, because for now, it violates the "Don't Be Creepy" rule that sometimes people break when building prediction software. But there's no reason it can't be done, which means at some point, someone will do it.

Michael Chisari
Appleseed - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

To somebody like my mom that doesn't want to be bothered with updates and interruptions out the wazoo and just user her camera/photos/Facebook, Macs are perfect.

I was using Linux back when Slackware was the best distribution around, I know how to manually recompile a kernel, I've been doing software development professionally since 1998, and I know how to code in multiple languages, from bash scripting to C++. I was frankenstein'ing machines back when graphics cards had jumpers.

I'm what you'd call a "power user", and I wouldn't use anything but Mac OS X. It's one of the most functional and unified interfaces to a pretty solid UNIX core that I've ever used. Nothing comes close.

So tell your mom I said "Hi."

Michael, maybe you could try and get in contact with the diaspora guys (since they're just starting to code and all) so that you can make sure this future is possible (making much more likely for this idea of "open social network" to happen)

There's a summit coming up where all the open source projects focusing on distributed social networking will be getting together to discuss that. Appleseed and Diaspora will be there (along with a bunch more). Should be very interesting!

Michael Chisari
The Appleseed Project - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/