It's really sad. I'm here in Japan and there was not a single Playstaion 2 game in the top ten last week. The #1 game is Powersmash for Dreamcast and even though it was #1 it only sold like 22K units. Compare that to last year when the top game of the week for whatever platform was selling 200K+ units a week.
I makes me wonder if games are dead. The cost of making a PS2 game is generally more than double to cost of a PS1 game and yet nothing is selling. Nothing has made it's money back yet. Bouncer comes out tomorrow here in Japan. I don't know yet if that's an "A" title or not but it will be interesting to see if it sells.
The sad thing is even with PS2 out the only games I actually want to play are on N64 (Zelda 2, Mario Tennis, Mario Story, Banjo Tooie). And there's more titles I'm wait for on Gamecube than PS2. In Gamecube there will be new Mario, new Zelda, new Waverace, new Metroid (yes, this is being made, I have friends on the team)
On PS2 the only announced games anybody is looking forward to are GT3 and MGS2
I sent this info to Slashdot on November 19th!!! The day it came out in Japan. Of course like every other story I submit to them it was rejected. I think it's one of those anti-asian baises or is it just that Slashdot doesn't want to post new news, just news from other websites?
Otherwise, reading some of the comments. It is NOT, $4000, at least not in Japan. It's selling for 278000 yen or less than $2600 US.
Also, it is NOT wireless. Wireless is an option. You can buy one of the about 20 different wireless internet cards available here in Japan. There are cards that are 64K bits and there are cards that are basically 2 cards so you get 2 64k connections at twice the price (for the service not the card)
The cards are available from all 6 different cell phone companies over here. NTT DoCoMo even has a CompactFlash wireless card.
These are wireless USE ANYWHERE cards. They are NOT the 11mhz ethernet cards.
The thing that sticks out about the PGC-GT1 is that it comes with internet broadcasting software so connected to some service so if you want to broadcast video it's all setup to do it.
This stuff has been out in Japan for over a year. Is this an anti-asian bias? If it's not from Europe it must not exist?
Here's the current big push in Japan. This one has been out since last year 12/1999. And for those that don't want to buy a new phone they have things like this.
Once X becomes a commonly installed piece of software on the Mac (say like Winzip on the PC), Microsoft will win even bigger. Why? Because the Mac users will be subjected to some of the worst interface designs ever. Every program having it's own quirks and not being consistant at all. Something the Mac is supposed to have over all other platforms is suddenly gone.
There is no point to this article except possibly to warn consumers not to enter into a deal they don't want which is true of anything.
1) Please post real examples. I haven't ever heard of a 5 or 6 year contract. The longest I've seen is 3 years. Three years for a free computer is not that bad. This would truely be perfect for my grandmother. I've tried to get her to go DSL but her use is only e-mail and she sees no point. She'll be fine. If she had gone for the deal when she bought her computer she'd only have less than a year to go and at no time did she want to upgrade or switch ISPs
2) This is nothing new. Almost every cel phone service operates this way. Sign up for 1 or 2 years a get a discount on a phone. Here in LA on Verizon I can get a $220 Kyocera phone for $19 if I sign up for service for a year. Of course I'm free to just pay the $220 and sign up but it's almost always cheaper to go for the discount.
3) He claims there is no incentive to give good service because you're locked into the deal. This is of course wrong because if people get bad service they tell others and so nobody else will sign up.
I don't really get the point of this article. Is he complaining that he's got choices? Is he just complaining to complain? With no real world examples it truly makes no sense. Sure, a 6 year commitment in the computer industry would be bad but a 3yr is much more reasonable. For example my 3yr warrenty on my toshiba laptop. Maybe I should have saved the $350 but even though my laptop at 3yrs old was about 1/5 the current top speed notebook, as I couldn't afford to by a new one at any time and so the insurance was worth it for me.
Almost any of these deals would be worth it for 1 year. Probably also good for 2yrs. 3yrs it probably depends on the offer. More than 3yrs I can see some problems but as said I know of no deals that are more than 3yrs.
(by the way the $400 MSN offer at BestBuy and other stores is for 3yrs of service BUT you can sign up for only 1yr and still get a discount)
There are not enough programmers at all. Oh, there are enough people who call themselves programmers. Then you ask them to take a simple test like "write a subroutine that can count the number of bits in an 8 bit value" and 6 out of 7 of the applicants can't do it. Of the 1/7th left, most of them don't qualify for other reasons. After going through nearly 100 applicants we maybe found 4 people that were qualified for the job and of those 4 only 1 actually wanted the job. That left us to go out of the country to find qualified people. We found them though it was nearly as hard, the boss came by and asked us all (as he is required by law) to bring up any objections, show us their salary, and allow us to suggest a qualified native instead. Nobody had any objections and the salary listed was the same as everybody else's which was by the way + 6 figures.
It took us over a year and a half to find the 4 programmers we needed for our project.
Don't delude yourself. There are not enough programmers.
On top of that I'm shocked that the majority of comments here are anti immigrants. This is a country of immigrants. The image I've always had of anti-immigrant people are racists, nazi, kkk, skinhead types. I guess I was wrong, it's slashdot types. I'm ashamed to be a part of this community if that's the attitude of the majority here.
Okay, so who do I pay to make this not happen? Where do I go? What group to I join? Will the EFF fight this? I'll donate more money right now. Who do I right?
A large part of the audience started walking out when they introduced the author of Napster as an award presenter. They quickly got him off the stage but that part of the show is still viewable in the daily re-broadcastings of the show.
Capcom did get sued by DataEast, makers of, I think it was called, "Kung Fu". DataEast won. I don't know the specifics of the case. I think it was more specific. Something like Kung Fu had two buttons, punch and kick, and SF1 copied but as I said I don't know.
I do think it's clear there are some direct ripoffs. Just changing the graphics or number of asteroids should be sueable IMO.
My understanding of business names is that you are not allowed to have the same name as another business in the same US county period. And, you are not allow to have the same name in the entire US if you are an interstate company.
So for example if you start a company called Razorback (that sells ribs) in California and somebody else starts a company in Washington called Razorback that sells razors, once both companies go interstate, ie start selling across state lines, the first company to register the name wins and the other company has to change their name. Note: this is only IF the first company actually cares and they don't usually care until people start getting the two confused. ie. people trying to reach one company find the other
At least that's my understanding. If fact the names to not have do be the same, just confusing to the consumer. If Razorback the ribs company was first and starts getting lots of phone calls for people trying reach a company called Razorbuck that sells dear hunting equipment Razorback and get a court order to have Razorbuck change their name. I remember this because when I worked at Microprose they were sued by MicroPro, makers of Wordstar (if anybody remembers that) I believe it was settled out of court
Of course the new problem is the web makes every name a global name instantly and so lots of small companies that were not interstate or intercountry now have to deal with all these name clashes.
It seems like if you applied the same rule to domains then lots of people are going to be losing their domains if (a) they were second or (b) the other guy has more money. Microsoft.com,.org,.net,.anything is going to belong (registered too, licensed too) Microsoft because following the rule above, people will be confused if they type Microsoft.org and get something other than the Microsoft we all know and ____. It may or may not be wrong but it's nothing new really.
I was very interested in this a few years ago and read quite a few books on it. The book that most influenced me was Peopleware which talks about the best environment has the most amount of un-interrupted time. For example un-interrruped by phone calls, by noise from other people, by PA system paging etc. It also said offices are best and at most 2 or 3 people per office. Best was 1 office per person.
Well when I started my own company I gave that a try. We got a space with 21 offices and gave each of are 16 employee's their own.
It was an utter failure. Some employees would download porn all day, others would be on the phone all day but the biggest problem was communication. We were in the video game business where the product is something that has to be fun and visually pleasing as opposed to a perl script or a command line utility or even many apps which only have to be functional. I've come to believe that this "fun and visual pleasing" requires lots of interaction and feedback from the various team members and that separating the team into offices prevents this. Well prevents is a strong word but I now believe that it would be best to have almost the entire team in one room. This way artists and programmers can give and get instant feedback and collaboration.
I believe the reason the Peopleware model did not fit was that the Peopleware model was for "average" programming tasks. By average I mean that the majority of programmers have a technical spec. They don't really need to interact much with others to implement that technical spec. Making the spec might have required meetings etc but once the spec is finished they programming job is fairly solitary. Things like writing drivers, database apps, network stuff, custom corporate apps, etc.
Games on the otherhand have to be fun and pretty. Two things that can't be specified. Sure you can write down alot of stuff and there is tons of stuff to implement in making a game "engine" that may not require interacting with other people on the team but when in comes to making the actual game, making an enemy or weapon or even setup screen, many people need to give their input. "Make it a little faster... Can you adjust the height he jump a little?...When he goes past that make it a little louder...Can that fade out a little slower?..." etc.
Basically that means that what is good for some programmers "private offices" is not good for all programmers.
I'm guessing that for most companies the simple solution would be to REMOVE THE SOUND CARD. No Sound Card = no MP3 playback.
Of course I would never work for such a company but then I see it as their right to lose their employees to other companies that are more sensitive to people needs.
-gregg
BTW: I quit my job last month for similar reasons. Not because of MP3s but because the company wanted slaves not people.
Both programs are very visual. Both are able to program simple to relatively complex games and other web apps. The biggest problem is they are expensive.
The plus is instant results and there are several books on how to use them. A friend of mine has been using Director to make various solitare games. It takes him about 4 hours per game to get it playable and then another few days to fix a bugs and adjust stuff. Of course he's a pro but it does show how quickly things can be done and there are lots of websites with examples to learn from.
Although I think it's a great idea if the owners of old out of print games would "donate" them to the populous at large I don't agree that it "should" be done or that there is no value in old games.
Activision, Namco, Konami, Williams, and Atari/Hasbro have all gotten value from their old titles. Activision released a 2600 emulator. Namco and Konami have released "classic" collections of old games on Playstation. Williams also released a classics collection and Atari/Hasbro has release new versions of old games (Frogger, Centipede, Missile Command, Pong) as well as included an emulation of the old game with the new one..And..they have also used them as advertising (ie. Frogger, Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust and Robotron are all available to play on www.shockwave.com
The point being that the arguement that these old titles have no value for the owners and should therefore be legal to copy and distrubute is bogus.
The best you can possibly do is something like HTML where there are tags you can ignore if you don't understand them but eventually these tags will become require reading.
There is no standard which can cover every new idea even XML.
If I start with some format that can store ASCII text and then later somebody comes up with an idea for BOLD, ITALICS and UNDERLINE and I didn't already think of that in that original spec the best I can do is add it in as a proprietary tag.
Now of course I suspect that BOLD, ITALIC and UNDERLINE are covered by some part of the XML spec but what part covers inserting Flash Animations or 3D data based on Nurbs or 3D data based on Metaballs or 4 dimensional tables.
The answer, it does NOT cover it, it expects you to use proprietary tags that others will then ignore. Unfortunately as some point those tags will become required in order to get the information out.
You can't win. It's an unsolvable problem. The best you can do is pick a simpler format to "export" to that doesn't save all the nifty data that the original application needed to make life easier but that most software can read. A perfect example of this is Photoshop. The original spec of any graphics format just specified a rectangle of pixels. Now a photoshop file consists of multiple layers, some of them not made of pixels with various effects applied. Tomorrow there will be more types of layers with more data no other application will understand. The best you can do is export to some other format like Targa or Tiff or JPeg but of course you loose all your flexibility.
The same will be true for text. Some of the text in that file may be generated on the fly, Like date of modification or a link from some other page or an extract of data from a database into a chart. You can't put the "links" to that data in XML in a non-proprietary way. The best you can do is store some non-proprietary version of the result of those links in the file and then other software can display the information at the time of saving the file. Of course if this is not what the author wanted you to see (ie, he wanted you to see a flash animation, not a still image of the first frame) then your are out of luck.
Given that this has a USB connector, If I got a Pocket PC with USB and CompactFlash I could use the two to empty my digital camera's CompactFlash into this thing. This would be perfect. I could then walk around with just a PocketPC and this thing and have 4.6gig of storage for my digital camera. That's much more handy than lugging around a 3 to 10lbs notebook.
I may have to do this if somebody doesn't beat me to it.
I've wanted a PDA for a while but I have special needs and one of them is that I need to be able to enter Kanji for Japanees study.
The palm platform, even the Japanese version of the palm, does not do this. Because it uses graffiti one must enter the "sound" of the kanji and then pick from a list.
WinCE on the otherhand has kanji recognition built in.
Also, I want to have a descent JapaneseEnglish dictionary. The Japanese CE machine all have them built in. The Japanese palms do not. That might be okay if I could install some good software but unfortunately the smallest Japanese dictionary requires 9meg and palms only have 8.
Note: I haven't bought a CE machine yet but I'm iching to buy something and I wish palm would step up and release something I could actually use.
-gregg
It's not what you think
on
Date Pagers
·
· Score: 1
The idea may be cool or not but the Lovegety has exactly 2.5 bits of info
bit 0: 0 = girl, 1 = boy bits 1-2: 0 = looking for friend 1 = looking for relationship 2 = looking for sex 3 = unused
That's it. If bit 0 doesn't match and bits 1-2 do match and you are within like 15 feet of each other the two lovegetys beep. At that point you shriek at how un-interested you are in that other person.
And even though they claim 1.5 million units sold in Japan the odds of it actually going off are surprisingly small at least going by the people interviewed that have them.
A better idea would be to have them basically have a text profile and if you walk near somebody that has one your profiles are swapped. Then you'd (a) know they are "in the market" and know a little bit about them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really sad. I'm here in Japan and there was not a single Playstaion 2 game in the top ten last week. The #1 game is Powersmash for Dreamcast and even though it was #1 it only sold like 22K units. Compare that to last year when the top game of the week for whatever platform was selling 200K+ units a week.
I makes me wonder if games are dead. The cost of making a PS2 game is generally more than double to cost of a PS1 game and yet nothing is selling. Nothing has made it's money back yet. Bouncer comes out tomorrow here in Japan. I don't know yet if that's an "A" title or not but it will be interesting to see if it sells.
The sad thing is even with PS2 out the only games I actually want to play are on N64 (Zelda 2, Mario Tennis, Mario Story, Banjo Tooie). And there's more titles I'm wait for on Gamecube than PS2. In Gamecube there will be new Mario, new Zelda, new Waverace, new Metroid (yes, this is being made, I have friends on the team)
On PS2 the only announced games anybody is looking forward to are GT3 and MGS2
-g
I sent this info to Slashdot on November 19th!!! The day it came out in Japan. Of course like every other story I submit to them it was rejected. I think it's one of those anti-asian baises or is it just that Slashdot doesn't want to post new news, just news from other websites? Otherwise, reading some of the comments. It is NOT, $4000, at least not in Japan. It's selling for 278000 yen or less than $2600 US. Also, it is NOT wireless. Wireless is an option. You can buy one of the about 20 different wireless internet cards available here in Japan. There are cards that are 64K bits and there are cards that are basically 2 cards so you get 2 64k connections at twice the price (for the service not the card) The cards are available from all 6 different cell phone companies over here. NTT DoCoMo even has a CompactFlash wireless card. These are wireless USE ANYWHERE cards. They are NOT the 11mhz ethernet cards. The thing that sticks out about the PGC-GT1 is that it comes with internet broadcasting software so connected to some service so if you want to broadcast video it's all setup to do it.
This stuff has been out in Japan for over a year. Is this an anti-asian bias? If it's not from Europe it must not exist? Here's the current big push in Japan. This one has been out since last year 12/1999. And for those that don't want to buy a new phone they have things like this.
Hurry!
Somebody please write some javascript that hacks. Then all browsers will be banned.
Some CGI that hacks. Cool, ban all web server sofware.
A Word Macro that hacks. I know some people that would like to see Word banned.
Come Flash that hacks. Flash will then be banned.
Lingo? That too's got to go.
Write another in C, C++, Java, Perl, and Assembly and maybe you can get all programming languages banned too.
Yippy!!!
Once X becomes a commonly installed piece of software on the Mac (say like Winzip on the PC), Microsoft will win even bigger. Why? Because the Mac users will be subjected to some of the worst interface designs ever. Every program having it's own quirks and not being consistant at all. Something the Mac is supposed to have over all other platforms is suddenly gone.
I'm sure Bill Gates is laughing his ass off.
There is no point to this article except possibly to warn consumers not to enter into a deal they don't want which is true of anything.
1) Please post real examples. I haven't ever heard of a 5 or 6 year contract. The longest I've seen is 3 years. Three years for a free computer is not that bad. This would truely be perfect for my grandmother. I've tried to get her to go DSL but her use is only e-mail and she sees no point. She'll be fine. If she had gone for the deal when she bought her computer she'd only have less than a year to go and at no time did she want to upgrade or switch ISPs
2) This is nothing new. Almost every cel phone service operates this way. Sign up for 1 or 2 years a get a discount on a phone. Here in LA on Verizon I can get a $220 Kyocera phone for $19 if I sign up for service for a year. Of course I'm free to just pay the $220 and sign up but it's almost always cheaper to go for the discount.
3) He claims there is no incentive to give good service because you're locked into the deal. This is of course wrong because if people get bad service they tell others and so nobody else will sign up.
I don't really get the point of this article. Is he complaining that he's got choices? Is he just complaining to complain? With no real world examples it truly makes no sense. Sure, a 6 year commitment in the computer industry would be bad but a 3yr is much more reasonable. For example my 3yr warrenty on my toshiba laptop. Maybe I should have saved the $350 but even though my laptop at 3yrs old was about 1/5 the current top speed notebook, as I couldn't afford to by a new one at any time and so the insurance was worth it for me.
Almost any of these deals would be worth it for 1 year. Probably also good for 2yrs. 3yrs it probably depends on the offer. More than 3yrs I can see some problems but as said I know of no deals that are more than 3yrs.
(by the way the $400 MSN offer at BestBuy and other stores is for 3yrs of service BUT you can sign up for only 1yr and still get a discount)
Bullshit!
There are not enough programmers at all. Oh, there are enough people who call themselves programmers. Then you ask them to take a simple test like "write a subroutine that can count the number of bits in an 8 bit value" and 6 out of 7 of the applicants can't do it. Of the 1/7th left, most of them don't qualify for other reasons. After going through nearly 100 applicants we maybe found 4 people that were qualified for the job and of those 4 only 1 actually wanted the job. That left us to go out of the country to find qualified people. We found them though it was nearly as hard, the boss came by and asked us all (as he is required by law) to bring up any objections, show us their salary, and allow us to suggest a qualified native instead. Nobody had any objections and the salary listed was the same as everybody else's which was by the way + 6 figures.
It took us over a year and a half to find the 4 programmers we needed for our project.
Don't delude yourself. There are not enough programmers.
On top of that I'm shocked that the majority of comments here are anti immigrants. This is a country of immigrants. The image I've always had of anti-immigrant people are racists, nazi, kkk, skinhead types. I guess I was wrong, it's slashdot types. I'm ashamed to be a part of this community if that's the attitude of the majority here.
-gregg
Then by continuing to work at those companies YOU are endorsing those companies behavior of mis-treating people.
Okay, so who do I pay to make this not happen? Where do I go? What group to I join? Will the EFF fight this? I'll donate more money right now. Who do I right?
-gregg
Did anybody watch the MTV music awards Thrusday?
A large part of the audience started walking out when they introduced the author of Napster as an award presenter. They quickly got him off the stage but that part of the show is still viewable in the daily re-broadcastings of the show.
Capcom did get sued by DataEast, makers of, I think it was called, "Kung Fu". DataEast won. I don't know the specifics of the case. I think it was more specific. Something like Kung Fu had two buttons, punch and kick, and SF1 copied but as I said I don't know.
I do think it's clear there are some direct ripoffs. Just changing the graphics or number of asteroids should be sueable IMO.
-g
My understanding of business names is that you are not allowed to have the same name as another business in the same US county period. And, you are not allow to have the same name in the entire US if you are an interstate company.
So for example if you start a company called Razorback (that sells ribs) in California and somebody else starts a company in Washington called Razorback that sells razors, once both companies go interstate, ie start selling across state lines, the first company to register the name wins and the other company has to change their name. Note: this is only IF the first company actually cares and they don't usually care until people start getting the two confused. ie. people trying to reach one company find the other
At least that's my understanding. If fact the names to not have do be the same, just confusing to the consumer. If Razorback the ribs company was first and starts getting lots of phone calls for people trying reach a company called Razorbuck that sells dear hunting equipment Razorback and get a court order to have Razorbuck change their name. I remember this because when I worked at Microprose they were sued by MicroPro, makers of Wordstar (if anybody remembers that) I believe it was settled out of court
Of course the new problem is the web makes every name a global name instantly and so lots of small companies that were not interstate or intercountry now have to deal with all these name clashes.
It seems like if you applied the same rule to domains then lots of people are going to be losing their domains if (a) they were second or (b) the other guy has more money. Microsoft.com,.org,.net,.anything is going to belong (registered too, licensed too) Microsoft because following the rule above, people will be confused if they type Microsoft.org and get something other than the Microsoft we all know and ____. It may or may not be wrong but it's nothing new really.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.
If you really believe in what most of you are saying here then cancel you pre-ordered PS2 or if you haven't already then don't get one in the future.
Bet most of you PS2 hopeful won't be able to resist.
-g
After reading that article I immediately joined the EFF. I hope you'll all do the same. Click Here to Join!
-gregg
Maybe not quite as cool but there is a CE version here for all you pocket PC guys
I was very interested in this a few years ago and read quite a few books on it. The book that most influenced me was Peopleware which talks about the best environment has the most amount of un-interrupted time. For example un-interrruped by phone calls, by noise from other people, by PA system paging etc. It also said offices are best and at most 2 or 3 people per office. Best was 1 office per person.
Well when I started my own company I gave that a try. We got a space with 21 offices and gave each of are 16 employee's their own.
It was an utter failure. Some employees would download porn all day, others would be on the phone all day but the biggest problem was communication. We were in the video game business where the product is something that has to be fun and visually pleasing as opposed to a perl script or a command line utility or even many apps which only have to be functional. I've come to believe that this "fun and visual pleasing" requires lots of interaction and feedback from the various team members and that separating the team into offices prevents this. Well prevents is a strong word but I now believe that it would be best to have almost the entire team in one room. This way artists and programmers can give and get instant feedback and collaboration.
I believe the reason the Peopleware model did not fit was that the Peopleware model was for "average" programming tasks. By average I mean that the majority of programmers have a technical spec. They don't really need to interact much with others to implement that technical spec. Making the spec might have required meetings etc but once the spec is finished they programming job is fairly solitary. Things like writing drivers, database apps, network stuff, custom corporate apps, etc.
Games on the otherhand have to be fun and pretty. Two things that can't be specified. Sure you can write down alot of stuff and there is tons of stuff to implement in making a game "engine" that may not require interacting with other people on the team but when in comes to making the actual game, making an enemy or weapon or even setup screen, many people need to give their input. "Make it a little faster... Can you adjust the height he jump a little?...When he goes past that make it a little louder...Can that fade out a little slower?..." etc.
Basically that means that what is good for some programmers "private offices" is not good for all programmers.
-gregg
Q: What do you call somebody that makes false jokes about Americans.
A: Insecure
Hmmm,
Good developer makes great game and goes out of business because bad developer with big ego gets all publishers money and makes crap.
Yea, I can see why this should happen more often....NOT!
-g
I'm guessing that for most companies the simple solution would be to REMOVE THE SOUND CARD. No Sound Card = no MP3 playback.
Of course I would never work for such a company but then I see it as their right to lose their employees to other companies that are more sensitive to people needs.
-gregg
BTW: I quit my job last month for similar reasons. Not because of MP3s but because the company wanted slaves not people.
Both programs are very visual. Both are able to program simple to relatively complex games and other web apps. The biggest problem is they are expensive.
The plus is instant results and there are several books on how to use them. A friend of mine has been using Director to make various solitare games. It takes him about 4 hours per game to get it playable and then another few days to fix a bugs and adjust stuff. Of course he's a pro but it does show how quickly things can be done and there are lots of websites with examples to learn from.
http://www.flashkit.com
http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/
-gregg
Although I think it's a great idea if the owners of old out of print games would "donate" them to the populous at large I don't agree that it "should" be done or that there is no value in old games.
Activision, Namco, Konami, Williams, and Atari/Hasbro have all gotten value from their old titles. Activision released a 2600 emulator. Namco and Konami have released "classic" collections of old games on Playstation. Williams also released a classics collection and Atari/Hasbro has release new versions of old games (Frogger, Centipede, Missile Command, Pong) as well as included an emulation of the old game with the new one..And..they have also used them as advertising (ie. Frogger, Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust and Robotron are all available to play on www.shockwave.com
The point being that the arguement that these old titles have no value for the owners and should therefore be legal to copy and distrubute is bogus.
-gregg
The best you can possibly do is something like HTML where there are tags you can ignore if you don't understand them but eventually these tags will become require reading.
There is no standard which can cover every new idea even XML.
If I start with some format that can store ASCII text and then later somebody comes up with an idea for BOLD, ITALICS and UNDERLINE and I didn't already think of that in that original spec the best I can do is add it in as a proprietary tag.
Now of course I suspect that BOLD, ITALIC and UNDERLINE are covered by some part of the XML spec but what part covers inserting Flash Animations or 3D data based on Nurbs or 3D data based on Metaballs or 4 dimensional tables.
The answer, it does NOT cover it, it expects you to use proprietary tags that others will then ignore. Unfortunately as some point those tags will become required in order to get the information out.
You can't win. It's an unsolvable problem. The best you can do is pick a simpler format to "export" to that doesn't save all the nifty data that the original application needed to make life easier but that most software can read. A perfect example of this is Photoshop. The original spec of any graphics format just specified a rectangle of pixels. Now a photoshop file consists of multiple layers, some of them not made of pixels with various effects applied. Tomorrow there will be more types of layers with more data no other application will understand. The best you can do is export to some other format like Targa or Tiff or JPeg but of course you loose all your flexibility.
The same will be true for text. Some of the text in that file may be generated on the fly, Like date of modification or a link from some other page or an extract of data from a database into a chart. You can't put the "links" to that data in XML in a non-proprietary way. The best you can do is store some non-proprietary version of the result of those links in the file and then other software can display the information at the time of saving the file. Of course if this is not what the author wanted you to see (ie, he wanted you to see a flash animation, not a still image of the first frame) then your are out of luck.
-gregg
Given that this has a USB connector, If I got a Pocket PC with USB and CompactFlash I could use the two to empty my digital camera's CompactFlash into this thing. This would be perfect. I could then walk around with just a PocketPC and this thing and have 4.6gig of storage for my digital camera. That's much more handy than lugging around a 3 to 10lbs notebook.
I may have to do this if somebody doesn't beat me to it.
Cool!!!!!!!!!!
-g
I've wanted a PDA for a while but I have special needs and one of them is that I need to be able to enter Kanji for Japanees study.
The palm platform, even the Japanese version of the palm, does not do this. Because it uses graffiti one must enter the "sound" of the kanji and then pick from a list.
WinCE on the otherhand has kanji recognition built in.
Also, I want to have a descent JapaneseEnglish dictionary. The Japanese CE machine all have them built in. The Japanese palms do not. That might be okay if I could install some good software but unfortunately the smallest Japanese dictionary requires 9meg and palms only have 8.
Note: I haven't bought a CE machine yet but I'm iching to buy something and I wish palm would step up and release something I could actually use.
-gregg
The idea may be cool or not but the Lovegety has exactly 2.5 bits of info
bit 0: 0 = girl, 1 = boy
bits 1-2: 0 = looking for friend
1 = looking for relationship
2 = looking for sex
3 = unused
That's it. If bit 0 doesn't match and bits 1-2 do match and you are within like 15 feet of each other the two lovegetys beep. At that point you shriek at how un-interested you are in that other person.
And even though they claim 1.5 million units sold in Japan the odds of it actually going off are surprisingly small at least going by the people interviewed that have them.
A better idea would be to have them basically have a text profile and if you walk near somebody that has one your profiles are swapped. Then you'd (a) know they are "in the market" and know a little bit about them.
-gregg