So how are you planning to do event concurrency?  I just had each event run on a separate thread, but I discovered that that can become a big mess once Common Events get added into the picture, so I'm going to rewrite the Event system in TURBU to drastically cut back on the need for Common Events by putting in other options instead.  But I'm not sure if you guys have that option, since your goal seems to be a cloned system and not a completely different one capable of importing RPG Maker projects.

Che, Sr. de la Pipol, ¿cómo te va?  Me parece que el proyecto anda bien.

Looks like I've got some competition!  Oh well.  I'll just have to work harder on TURBU. :P

Seriously, though, it's good to see your engine up and running.  I wish you the best of luck with the events; they can be a real pain.  The battle engine's not that hard, really, once you've got the formulas figured out.

Mason

Actually, if this flops and Yahoo brings Microsoft down . . well, that's sort of bad for the US economy.

In the short term, yeah.  In the long run, however, removing a monopolist from the picture, especially in such a high-demand area, would create a lot of new competition as other companies attempt to fill the void, and strong competition produces a stronger economy than lack of competition.  (Just look at how the computer industry took off after IBM lost its monopoly on the production of PCs!)

I know this might sound like a joke or trolling.... but I thought the "classical capitalist notion" was to drive everyone out of business and to strong arm their way into having the public depend on them? You know.... the days of the Robber Barons?

Meh.  That's mostly a socialist strawman, although it really doesn't help that a lot of highly visible corporations do in fact behave that way.  But that's not what all businesses are like, and it's not how any of them are supposed to be.

If anyone doesn't think Microsoft acquiring that sort of power in the Web marketplace is a big deal, I'd advise them to read the Halloween Documents, especially the first two.  They're internal Microsoft memos that were leaked by some programmer with a conscience, and they describe Microsoft's worldview:

• They view anything that has the ability to compete with them successfully as a threat to their way of business.  (In other words, they know they're a monopoly and wouldn't have it any other way.)
• They believe that the best way to "compete" in business is not through the classical capitalist notion of competition, (producing either a better or a more affordable product, which promotes innovation and benefits everyone) but by driving everyone else out of business.
• They view the open, published standards of the Internet, which make possible everything you see here, as a threat to their way of doing business.  They believe it would be in their interest to "de-commoditize" the Internet protocols, or in other words, to replace the open standards with closed, proprietary Microsoft ones so that you need Microsoft programs to use the Internet.

This isn't me ranting and making stuff up off the top of my head.  This is from real Microsoft internal documents.  This is their plan for the future of the Internet, and now they're after the #1 biggest site on the Web.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever - and remember that it is forever."
 - George Orwell, 1984

I've got a gmail account.  I got my invite from a friend who works at Google, way back when it was first launched.  I hardly ever use it, though, because I've got too much of my life invested in my @yahoo.com identity. :P

Rockman:
Depends on how you define "successful business".  If someone achieves dominance through competition and having a better product, that's true success in my book.  (Google's a prime example.)  But making your way to the top through a long string of broken laws and anticompetitive business practices, which has been Microsoft's way since they entered the operating system market if not longer (read up on the DOS licensing terms if you don't believe me) isn't successful business, it's successful thuggery.

Tina:
That may be so, but have you ever tried to switch from one email address to another?  Remember how much of a hassle it is to update it everywhere?  Look at all the websites that use your email address as your login name.  Multiply all that hassle by a few million.  Playing into Google's hands or not, it's a Very Bad Thing.

Nope.  It gathers its information from a toolbar that you consciously choose to install.

I mean, what does even TC have to do with the issue of Microsoft buying Yahoo!

Nothing, really.  That got off-topic.  Someone said Microsoft isn't a threat to anyone but their own business rivals, and I explained why that's not true.  But anyone who thinks that my statement regarding the potential that TC has to endanger us is a "crazy exaggeration" needs to spend a bit of time examining computer security reports.  Look at what people are already starting to accomplish with ordinary, non-trusted viruses and worms that the user is still able to deal with relatively easily.  Then just imagine the computer trusting the virus more than it trusts the user.  That's what "trusted computing" does.  It obeys the program instead of the owner.  Once you let local control out of your hands, it's impossible to know whose hands it will end up in.

Is it unlikely that something that bad will end up happening?  Yeah, probably.  Will it ever happen?  I certainly hope not.  Impossible? Wild? Crazy?  Not in the slightest, unfortunately.

Far-fetched, perhaps, but possible.  Ten years ago, the idea of using a commercial airliner as a flying bomb to blow up a building was the stuff of fiction, straight out of a Tom Clancy novel.  Then someone actually did it.  We live in "far-fetched" times...

Why should I be worried about Microsoft in the first place? Admittedly I really don't know their history or anything but uh, I really don't think they're a threat to anything other than their business rivals.

Hoo boy.  Where to begin?  If you study their history a bit, a different pattern will emerge.  And right now they're at the forefront of the development of one of the most dangerous technological "advances" of our age, called "trusted computing."  It's being advertised as a way to make your computer more secure by using hardware-based strong encryption, but analysts who look at it say its most obvious uses are creating a truly secure DRM system that can't be cracked, promoting vendor lock-in, allowing programmers to remote-control their programs on your computer, and using a "trust certification" system to stifle the growth of open-source software.

The remote-control ability is particularly frightening.  You won't be in charge of your own computer anymore.  If someone writes a Word document containing stuff that Microsoft (or some government or rich individual that Microsoft's friendly with) doesn't like, they'll be able to remotely command Word over the Internet to not open that document anymore, and nobody will ever be able to read it again.  And if a virus ever makes it through the trust certification process somehow, and gains more trusted access to your system than your anti-virus software... use your imagination.  (Which isn't as impossible as it sounds.  All it would take is one person planted in the right job by a business rival or foreign government.  Imagine this: 10 years from now, the President of Iran could well have two metaphorical "big red buttons on his desk."  One of them launches the missiles at the USA, the other activates the command to break all of our "trusted" computers.  Which one would end up doing more damage?  It's a toss-up, when you think about it...)

If by "good business" you mean "good for the business that attains monopoly status," then yes, it is.  It's not good for the consumer, though.  It leads to stagnation through the lack of competition, and to exploitation.  That's why the government made it illegal.  Capitalism is supposed to be about the betterment of both individuals and society as a whole through competition and the consumer's freedom of choice, not about a few powerful individuals forcing their wishes upon the public.  (The United States fought a war to be free of that way of life, and quickly learned that businessmen could be almost as bad as kings, if we weren't careful...)

(alsoyou say "If people can't use what they already have, they won't want to switch." about rpgmaker, as XP has less functions than 2k3 and the latest has even less, but people are switching over regardless. The RPGMaker world should noway be confused with the real world, more like a school playground.)

Same principle, actually.  A lot of people are switching to these newer makers for about the same reason the majority of people switch to Vista: "latest-and-greatest syndrome".  It's newer, it's got a few flashy new features, so it must be better!  And to be fair to Enterbrain, XP could do a ton of stuff that 2000/2003 couldn't.  It was a true upgrade, even without the vehicles and all the other stuff they tossed out.  Too early to tell for VX, seeing as how it's not even released in the US yet, but a lot of the early comments I've seen don't speak too highly of the new system...

But what does Vista have that's truly new and improved?

The Aero interface, (we've been over that).
You mentioned DirectX 10.  One of the greatest game programmers of all time, who knows more about DirectX than anyone on this board ever will, said it has no real, compelling advantages over DirectX 9, and that's good enough for me.
In fact, as hard as I think about it, I can only come up with one real advantage over WinXP that doesn't introduce more problems than it fixes/improves upon, and that's the new <Alt>-<Tab> system.  But that one feature alone just isn't worth the cost of the upgrade...

But code doesn't rust. Adding (radically) new features will hardly, if ever, warrant a complete rewrite. It's a poor business decision, too, since it takes a lot of time and resources for little result.

That's exactly right.

Besides, even when rewriting a program from scratch, you can still implement backwards compatibility. There's no reason not to.

Precisely!  This is a man (I assume) who understands programming.  My TURBU project is basically rewriting RPG Maker 2000/2003 from the ground up, with improvements.  The #1 design goal is: everything that worked in RPG Maker must work in TURBU.  If people can't use what they already have, they won't want to switch.  (Granted, this is less of a consideration when you already have a monopolistic stranglehold on the market...)

Climbtree:  I'm old enough.  I was in high school at the time.  I switched over to Hotmail because I didn't like the way my ISP at that time handled email.  (Just as well, too.  The ISP went out of business within a year.)

There's a thing with progression' date=' where if things get better and improve that requires serious reworking of the inards. This will reach the point where backwards compatability is impossible for some things.[/quote']
Do you actually believe that?  You're not a progammer, are you?

Good API and toolkit designers handle this issue by deprecating things.  That means they leave the old functionality in, working exactly as it worked before, but declare it to be deprecated.  In plain English, that means, "this is left in for backwards compatibility, but you shouldn't use it for new code, because we've got this other feature that does the same thing, but better."  You don't "rework" the innards; you provide an alternative.

And if the backwards-compatibility issues are the only major flaw you're aware of in Vista, you don't know enough about the OS to even be having this discussion.  Just off the top of my head, the UAC is a mess whichever way you slice it, there's DRM that doesn't work built into the core of the OS, slowing everything down, and the Aero Glass interface, while pretty, comes with ridiculous amounts of system overhead and still isn't as user-friendly as the OSX Aqua interface it so transparently copies.  (Which is not to say that Apple or OSX is perfect.  Don't anyone try and pin that strawman on me.  But one thing they've always been able to do better than anyone else is build a user interface.)

Xeno|Soft:
There are two ways to buy a publicly-traded company.  The idea is, whoever owns the largest amount of shares is the de facto owner.  If you want to become the owner, you can make an offer to the current owner to buy enough of their stock to gain a controlling interest and become the new owner.  (This is what Microsoft's trying to do to Yahoo.)

The alternative is to attempt a "hostile takeover" by buying up enough of the shares that other people (not the owner) own.  Let's say that the owner only holds 40% of the stock in his company, and the other 60% are scattered throughout various portfolios and mutual funds.  If one company manages to buy up 41% out of that 60% floating around there, they're the new guys in charge.

that being said are they going to change the mail client? google bought youtube and didn't change it to google vid.

True, but that's because they're Google and that's how they do things.  Has Microsoft ever bought something and not immediately started to tinker with it?

No, this is not "what (most) corporations do", and Microsoft certainly isn't the only company ever to do stuff like this.  The existence of antitrust laws demonstrate that well enough.  But that's the entire point.  When a company starts behaving like this, it's in violation of the law.  When Adam Smith defined modern capitalism, he described a system in which thriving competition works for the good of everyone involved.  Anti-competitive business is an abuse of capitalism, in which only the monopolist benefits, to the detriment of both competitors and consumers.
If there's any doubt as to what Microsoft's stance on competition is, you need look no further than Halloween Document #1, an internal Microsoft memo that was leaked several years go.  One sentence sums up their worldview quite nicely:

Long term credibility exists if there is no way you can be driven out of business in the near term.

This isn't an opinion or a hypothesis.  This is straight from the horse's mouth, an inside view of how they look at the computer industry.  From the publisher's commentary on the document:

Note the terminology used here "driven out of business." MS believes that putting other companies out of business is not merely "collateral damage" -- a byproduct of selling better stuff -- but rather, a direct business goal. To put this in perspective, economic theory and the typical honest, customer-oriented businessperson will think of business as a stock-car race -- the fastest car with the most skillful driver wins. Microsoft views business as a demolition derby -- you knock out as many competitors as possible, and try to maneuver things so that your competitors wipe each other out and thereby eliminate themselves. In a stock car race there are many finishers and thus many drivers get a paycheck. In a demolition derby there is just one survivor. Can you see why "Microsoft" and "freedom of choice" are absolutely in two different universes?

You know, that's one of the absolute best ways to spot an argument with nothing solid to support it: making fun of the other viewpoint in an attempt to distract the audience from an actual rational evaluation of its claims.  "No, that idea's too silly to take seriously, so don't waste your time bothering.  (I sure hope they buy it...)"  It plays on the lower aspects of human nature and, unfortunately, is successful far too often.  Shame on you, Emperor Kaworu.  If you have some real clothes, let's see them.

I could say Vista because of compatability problems with older programs, but then that is also equally to blame with the makers of them programs...

Wait a second.  If someone writes a program that works just fine under the operating system it's written for, but then doesn't work on the updated version of that system, it's his fault?  His fault for what?  Failing to properly anticipate and plan for future changes to the operating system?  I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense.  Assuming something works in the first place, the blame for breaking backwards compatibility lies entirely on the shoulders of the creators of the new system.

Microsoft broke Hotmail when they acquired it.  I left after it started sending 30+ copies of all my mails to people.  Only a few months after that, a friend of mine's Hotmail account got hacked.  (This actually ended up happening to her 3 times, once by some random script kiddie and twice by a jealous ex-boyfriend whose mom worked at Microsoft.)  She tried to reset her password and ended up unable to access her account at all, so she asked me to take a look at it.  You know what I found?  The new password it assigned to her wasn't an a valid password under MSN Hotmail's password policy, so it was being rejected even before it was checked to see if it was actually the password to her account.  This is the sort of left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-hand-is-doing idiocy we can expect from Microsoft.

And Hotmail still has serious problems.  Ever try to use it under OSX?  And its spam filter regularly throws away legitimate mail, especially registration emails from small communities.  It's gotten so bad that some forums won't accept Hotmail addresses anymore.  And it takes forever to load anything when I go in there, even on a broadband connection.  (I still use the Hotmail account for a few minor things.)  Yahoo!Mail, even the feature-rich Yahoo!Mail Beta, pulls things up almost as fast as I can click on them.  I don't want to see that ruined.

People are very retarded over the whole issue. Microsft is the DEMON. Like they do ONE mistake or thier program has ONE fault and people are saying they are satan and they never do anything good.
This is of course based on the fact that they have money. And people are stupid and assume that people having money = people murdering and eating babies.

Puh-leeze.  Spare me the "you're just jealous of their success" Libertarian nonsense.  Can you even name one program of theirs that has only "ONE fault"?  Heck, I'll make it easier on you.  Can you name one program of theirs that has only one MAJOR fault?

I couldn't care less who does and doesn't have money.  What I don't like is them 1) breaking the law, 2) selling buggy crap that doesn't work, and 3) destroying good software by either buying it out and breaking it or driving its developers out of business.  Microsoft has been doing all three of these things for decades, and now they're after my email.  Everyone here understands what a fundamental part of one's online identity an email address is.  I have several years of my life invested in Yahoo!Mail.  To have a company with a long and consistent track record of buying out and breaking good software eyeing my email provider is a nightmare come true!

If Google were to try to buy out Yahoo!, the Feds would be all over it.  It would give them over 85% of the search market, and similar supermajorities in webmail and web advertising.  And yet, I'd prefer that over Microsoft buying Yahoo! for one simple reason:  Google's software works.