I'd suggest having the floor plan printed out on a piece of paper, rolling it up, and taking that with you. You can read it, measure it, draw/write/make notes on it. A tiny screen is not a particularly useful tool for reading architectural drawings.
It looks like Apple's sort of stuck between two sets of laws that don't mesh well, and the only way to avoid running afoul of either set is pack up their stuff and leave.
Is that the "right thing" that Apple should do? While having a fractured and confusing jumble of iTMS's is not the perfect solution, if the alternative is no iTMS, is that really any better for the citizens of the EU? Or are you suggesting that they just sell whatever music wherever, and get sued by all the music copyright holders? What other choices do they have? Send a bunch of lobbyists to try and get legislative changes? Is that a good solution?
The record companies are the ones who really should change their priorities. And the EU should be hassling them. If Apple shuts down iTMS Europe, then the EU is just going to end up stuck with the same problems with whatever store tries to take its place.
Yeah, it's important to have some perspective here. You can argue till your face turns blue that DRM doesn't work/doesn't make sense/is evil/whatever, but the reality of it is that there are people out there with different opinions. And a bunch of those people are old businessmen who run big companies that see, over the horizon, the end of the business model on which they've built their little empires and made their fortunes.
It's easy for you as a consumer or a musician to argue for the new "music economy" because you have little to lose and much to gain. A lot of these big record companies have plenty to lose. You might be able to make an argument that with the right business savvy and some smart decisions that they have a lot to gain as well, but nothing is guaranteed, and big companies tend to be risk adverse.
The point is, if the general/. mentality is correct, and DRM is not a workable solution, then the market will flesh that out and we can all get on with our lives. But to expect and preach anti-DRM like the heavens will open up and everyone will see the light and hold hands and all DRM will disappear tomorrow is not only unrealistic, it makes you look silly.
Baby steps are what we should expect and really hope for. Each sign of progress should be a reason for celebration, not a bitch session about everything you still don't like about the music industry. Yay for steps in the right direction!
There are a number of reasons why I need to use AutoCAD. As far as the world of architecture is concerned, CATIA is really a non-issue, almost everyone we work with uses AutoCAD.
I'm not going to argue that macs can't do CAD. I have done CAD on macs with various pieces of software, I've done 3D architectural modeling, I've done just about everything that I need to do at work on a mac, the only thing missing is 100% compatibility with autoCAD, in regards both to file formats as well as things like specific plug-ins. Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than "oh, there's a piece of software that can do mostly the same stuff." I need to be able to do the exact same stuff, in exactly the same way.
If Autodesk announced a mac version of AutoCAD was shipping tomorrow, that'd be awesome, but I'm not sure I'd be able to use it. It might be called AutoCAD and look like AutoCAD, but I'm guessing it'd take them at least a few versions before they got it up to a real useful level of parity.
The best part of all of this is that I really hate AutoCAD, it's horribly designed and buggy as all hell. But it's still very powerful, it's still the default CAD program for most architects and for almost all of our consultants, and I'm stuck with it for the forseeable future.
AutoCAD is a big one, I'm an architect so that's a fairly specific industry. There are mac cad programs, but AutoCAD is the 800 lb gorilla in that field, and there are various reasons why a different CAD program isn't workable for me currently. Then there's some other basic work stuff (timekeeping, expense keeping) where I have to use what my office uses, and I'm not the one who always gets to decide what the office uses. Another one is less important, but still signifincant to me, a game. I'm fairly attached to an MMO that currently does not have a mac client, although they recently announced that they're working on one. Whoop!
I've been using macs for the bulk of my computing for over a decade, so I'm well aware that there's plenty of software available for most every need. Most of my issues have been with a few very specific pieces of software, but unfortunately life puts me in positions where I can't always choose how I'm going to solve a problem.
Correct. Besides the "if it weren't for the last 10 minutes, nothing would ever get done" effect that deadlines can have, design in general is one of those things where you can almost never step back and say 100% that it's finished. There's always going to be something else to tweak, or another idea to try, etc. Eventually you have to just call it a day and save the rest for the next project.
While MS will surely take your money for a copy of Windows, don't think for a second that they don't care if you run OS X as well. They want everwhere to be Windows, because not only does that mean they sell more copies of windows today, but it means that they have crazy lock-in and control, which makes it much easier for them to continue making money in the future.
When your competitors are only 5% of the market, you can convince developers that it makes business sense to ignore them. When your competitors are 15% of the market, you're still selling way more copies of your OS than they are, but 3rd party developers are going to want a piece of that other 15%. And once more software goes that way, it because easier for people to switch, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I use a mac for most of my computing needs, but there's still a few pieces of windows only software that I have to use. I don't know where the marketshare needs to be before it'll make sense for those various developers to consider a mac version, or for a new developer to notice that potential market and take a shot at it. If/when that happens, I won't need a windows machine anymore, and I'll happily leave it behind. I recently read that one of those pieces of software is getting ported. That's only one, but it leaves me optimistic about the future.
I've got a pismo that I've pretty much run into the ground. But I did totally abuse it for about 5 years in college. I'm treating my newer macbook pro a bit more delicately these days, so hopefully it'll last a long time.
Well, you could always just have the NPC's panic and run away. But imagine having NPC's negotiate the sort of schemes that a crime boss might be interested in getting involved in. It can work in a single player game like GTA because there can be a pre-written script that presents certain choices to an individual and only has to react to one person, but that system can't really be scaled, because the game designers can't accurately predict interactions between different players.
An example that might be helpful to look at is EvE-online. It has basically evolved into two games with a little bit of overlap. You can run around by yourself, interacting only with NPC characters and going on the little missions that the devs have created, but you won't have any significant impact on the game as a whole, you'll experience very little continuity in terms of the bigger picture, and you'll miss out on half of the game. The other option is to get involved in the player driven part of the game, where things like politics, negotiation, long term wars, etc occur. It's a very vibrant part of the game, but it's almost entirely devoid of NPC interaction.
Mixing the two doesn't really work, because NPC's can't react realistically. The way eve works, however, the game universe is set up so that it still makes sense without a bunch of random civilians running around everywhere. A crime boss type game set in city would really suffer from not having a population.
It'd be a tough game to make though. It'd likely end up being mostly PvP gang warfare. Mostly because nobody would want to play the everyday normal people/businesses/etc that would have to make up the bulk of the population in a game like that. You could try and fill it out with NPC's, but I don't think the AI is there to make it really work. I don't think it's feasible to have a virtual city with a bunch of virtual residents realistically react to the actions of a sizeable amount of players.
I guess you could try to have employees playing scripted roles within the game, similar to what the matrix MMO did, but I don't see that as a long term workable solution.
Avatar physics should not be handled that way then. It is annoying. I'm sure that changing that would probably break all sorts of other things that I'm not thinking of though.
If the iPhone fails and takes Apple down and my powerbook spontaneously turns into dust, hopefully the rest of the cell phone industry will adopt "Random access" voicemail. That is the single most attractive feature I've seen on the iPhone, and hopefully an idea that everyone else will steal.
Three or four years from now, I'm guessing Dvorak will mention in an article about how his iphone prediction was right because Apple won't dominate the phone market the way they've dominated the music player market.
I have a hard time seeing it play out in a way where the iPhone could be considered a failure unless your expectations are just ridiculous. Apple is not going to own 70% of the phone market in a few years, and they certainly know that.
Dvorak talking about how Apple still has only managed 5% marketshare with the Mac sort of goes against his main point. Apple is only holding a small slice of the pie, but it's a big yummy pie, and they're making good money. All the same, Apple does not need to obliterate the phone competition to have successful product line and pull in some serious cash.
There's one thing, more than anything else, that I'd hope someone will change. If you move quickly across the SL landscape, you can easily outpace the rate at which the server can stream stuff to you. But what often happens to me is that my avatar starts bumping into objects that aren't yet visible. Basically, the client knows that they're there, because it's performing a collision detection and stopping my character. But I guess since it hasn't gotten enough texture data or whatever, it has chosen not to show me anything.
Needless to say, this ends up being very frustrating. I end up trapped inside of buildings where I can't actually see any of the walls/ceilings/floors, and if it's a complicated area it could be a couple minutes before enough textures load that the client will display enough geometry for me to find my way out.
It seems that a pretty simple solution would be for the client to immediately render any objects that it's aware of, maybe just use a flat shading or something temporarily until it has recieved the actual texture. I don't know why it functions differently right now, and it drives me nuts.
I think that you need to take a slightly different approach to MMOG's. To me, more than anything, they're social games. EvE is just a big universe full of spaceships and such that serve as ways of getting people to interact. The generally slow pace of the game (with the occasional flash of hectic mayhem) gives groups of people a lot of time to organize or work on strategy or just socialize. There are people who sort of do their own thing all by themselves, and if they're having a good time then that's great. But what makes EVE really interesting is the other people.
Keeping that in mind, EvE does not do a very good job in terms of plugging new players into any social settings. An organized and even mildly sucessful corporation/alliance in EVE is bound to have an active TeamSpeak server going, and most likely does a lot of communicating through their own external forums. But for a single person, just starting out all alone in the EVE universe, that part of the game isn't always immediately visible or reachable. CCP needs to do more to help with that.
All that said, that sort of social gameplay isn't for everybody. Maybe you're constantly dealing with a bunch of people all day at work, and want to turn that part of your brain off and relax while playing video games at home. That's fine, there's still plenty of room for both types of games. And both directions should be able to integrate some of the MMO possibilities in cool ways.
Four or Five years from now, the latest incarnations of the iPhone could potentially replace the high-end ipods, as the phone increases its onboard storage, and provides everything that the ipod does plus the phone stuff. Battery life might still be an issue, but I'm going to pretend like that'll get figured out because it'd make the world of gadgets so much better.
But like you said, the nano/shuffles has two major advantages, price and physical size. A phone can only get so small before it's not useable to hold up to the side of my head and talk. A music player doesn't need to have those restrictions. There will always be demand for smaller players, even if they don't have all the fun features that their bigger siblings offer.
Creativity and innovation do not need to spring forth from a blank slate. Problem solving is probably the most common route towards creativity. Attacking a problem that no one's really looked at before, or looking for a new approach to a problem that already has solutions is plenty creativity for one person. Applying new technology to an already existing process, there's lots of room for creativity there as well.
I spend my time designing buildings, and interestingly enough, for many projects we can spend almost as much time helping the client figure out what they want their building to accomplish as we do designing a building that will accomplish those things. (This is all at an early schematic level though, the bulk of our time is actually spent doing a lot of the detailing and making useful drawings for construction.)
A really well designed building generally starts with a well defined program. Then we'll often look at the surrounding environment to develop a sense of the context, which gives us another set of guidelines. And if after all that, you're still not sure where you're going, you usually end up coming up with some sort of seemingly arbitrary directive (I want my building to be as transparent as possible, I want my building to have a real heavy sense of mass, whatever). And then you stick to that and try to keep the design true to that idea.
Regardless of where the problem to be solved comes from, having that problem is what motivates creativity and keeps your mind focused enough to end up with something good.
I completely agree, except that I don't really see a workable solution for Sony. How do you allow players to interact in any way without a whole bunch of them doing dirty stuff? The best you can do is have it very strongly policed by real people (moderators), which is expensive and annoying to the player base.
Then consider the fact that Sony's console is strongly marketed towards the hardcore gamer, which is that young male demographic which is mostly likely to want to introduce porn into the system, and most likely to react negatively to policing by Sony.
Even if you're not interested in any porn content, the limitations that would be necessary to truly prevent it would limit what you can do.
I didn't mean it wouldn't work technically, I mean I'm not convinced that it's going to work in terms of customers really getting into it.
And don't call me a troll and crap on my posting history if you can't even be bother to log in and expose your own. That's just silly. I don't make any effort to hide the fact that I'm a Nintendo fan, but I'm a bigger fan of video games in general. I owned and enjoyed all three consoles last generation, I have a PC that I purchased for the sole purpose of playing games. Sadly I'm not in college anymore, I have to spend the better part of my days working for a living, and I have fiscal responsibilities now.
Taking those realities of my life into account, Nintendo's strategy works really well with how I can fit gaming into my life. And the fact that they can do it all for cheap is excellent too. Sony, on the other hand, in both their words and their deeds so far in regards to the PS3 seem to have sprinted even harder than before down the hardcore gamer path, and their higher ups have been kind of dicks about it too. I'm less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. I never gave MS the benefit of the doubt because windows has caused me so much anguish in the past. I've been giving the 360 some serious consideration lately though.
I would love for Sony to make something awesome. I would love for Nintendo to feel more pressure to develop the online capabilities of the Wii. I even like Second Life, so if Sony could take that sort of idea forwards, I'd be fascinated. But until Sony convinces me that this home stuff is going to live up to some of the hype, I'm not going to get too excited.
Yeah, I've read all that. But I don't think it's going to work. Almost everything you've listed there has been solved in simpler and more convenient ways already on the web.
If this place is basically just a big online marketplace dressed up as some sort of graphically rich virtual shopping mall, I don't think consumers are going to flock to it the way they hoped. When I want to spend money on stuff, I want to find what I'm looking for, enter my credit card, and get whatever I'm buying as quickly as possible. Having to run my virtual avatar through a store and window shop to find what I want might be fun the first time, but it's not something that is going to keep me coming back for more.
"Persistent Worlds" are not made interesting just by the fact that they're persistent. They're made interesting by the fact that the players can seriously modify what's going on. It allows creativity, showing off, and hopefully leads towards collaboration. I don't care what sony is providing third parties, unless that third party is anyone who owns a PS3. Because otherwise it's just another way for companies to shove their wares in front of me, and the internet already provides me with lots of easy, efficient, and varied ways to shop.
If they're going to provide some real creative opportunities, then that's awesome, it could be a lot of fun. But my original point was that if they provide those opportunities, lots of people are going to find ways to turn it into porn/sex/etc. You can't keep that from happening without either locking down the content creation to the point where it doesn't really exist, or having moderators constantly policing everything that's made. Both of those will drive away the creative types that would find such a thing interesting in the first place.
I think Sony's best bet is to not really worry about what individuals are doing on their service in terms of porn, and just make sure it's possible for a parent to fully lock out their kids from the home service if they so desire. Trying to monitor what everyone's doing isn't realistic without taking out just about every way that individuals can customize their "homes." And once you've done that, then what's the point?
They should just not care, and let people make out of it what they want. Sure, it'll probably end up just like Second Life with better graphics, but pretty much anything with significant user created content is 95% crap, and a large percentage porn.
Maybe all Sony's going for is a glorified chat room. If that's the case, then I don't see the initial excitement about it lasting much beyond release. If they're instead trying to tie in to more of the myspace/flickr/blogging mindset, then they're going to have to give people some free reign to be creative. And yes, that means there's going to be a lot of people trying to do dirty things. But you know what, give the customers what they want, and they're going to be more willing to give you money.
The price differences between the various consoles in the previous generation were not nearly significant as they are now. I can justify $50 or maybe $100 more for one console over another if it's offering me something that the competition doesn't. But for $250+ more (at least double the price), that's a tough sell. Right now, the only thing the PS3 can really offer that I can't get elsewhere is Blu-ray, and neither myself or the bulk of the mass market is as excited about Blu-ray as Sony is.
Yeah, and now they're trying to play it off as if they were imagining it as being some sort of fancy status symbol product, instead of admitting that they had their hand forced by the Xbox360, and had to release the PS3 well before they really wanted to.
Or maybe they really were going for that sort of market, which if is the case, was an entirely retarded move. A playstation is not a car, it's not even an ipod. The idea of "hip" social status is not what motivates the hardcore gamer market, and a video game console that sits in your living room is not going to work as a status symbol with the general populace, no matter how awesome/powerful it is. They tried the same thing when they initially marketed the PSP, and it didn't work then either.
That still doesn't make any sense. It obviously doesn't cost anywhere near that much to manufacture the vehicle, because if it did, it would be reflected in the sticker price. Toyota might be taking a little bit of a hit in order to fund R&D and just to get the idea of hybrids out there, but there's no way they're eating hundreds of thousands of dollars per car.
As for the disposal fee, I find it hard to believe that it would be that expensive. Even considering the fact that there are batteries full of nasty chemicals in them, various industries have dealt with large batteries and many other sources of toxic stuff for a long time. You're not talking about a hundred thousand bucks to get rid of whats in a Prius.
Basically, there are no free rides. Someone is going to pay for just about all of it somewhere along the line, and if any of those prices are unreasonable, the project isn't going to happen (unless the govt. is funding it maybe). You can make up fuzzy numbers about environmental impact, and maybe that's what they're doing here, but they certainly didn't explain it well if that's the case.
It can be especially difficult with something containing a lot of creativity, because so much of those design processes can be iterative, meaning that the first half of the work you do is done only to figure out what you need to do for the second half of the project. Basically, if you don't throw out most of your original ideas, you're either some sort of super genius, or you're making a crappy product.
Good ideas often turn out to bad ideas, or lead to better and different ideas. The only way you can flush all that out is by trying those ideas and seeing where they go. Showing off that work-in-progress is tough, because there's a good chance that the final product will be very different. And forget about those last few layers of polish that really make your end result good. You don't want to waste time on that until you're really happy with the underlying product.
It's too bad that the hype based advertising system that the games industry has embraced doesn't take into account the way design really works. Instead it forces developers to waste time making little demos of projects that are nowhere near from ready, and can force the design process into corners from which they can't escape, resulting in mediocre games.
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I'd suggest having the floor plan printed out on a piece of paper, rolling it up, and taking that with you. You can read it, measure it, draw/write/make notes on it. A tiny screen is not a particularly useful tool for reading architectural drawings.
It looks like Apple's sort of stuck between two sets of laws that don't mesh well, and the only way to avoid running afoul of either set is pack up their stuff and leave.
Is that the "right thing" that Apple should do? While having a fractured and confusing jumble of iTMS's is not the perfect solution, if the alternative is no iTMS, is that really any better for the citizens of the EU? Or are you suggesting that they just sell whatever music wherever, and get sued by all the music copyright holders? What other choices do they have? Send a bunch of lobbyists to try and get legislative changes? Is that a good solution?
The record companies are the ones who really should change their priorities. And the EU should be hassling them. If Apple shuts down iTMS Europe, then the EU is just going to end up stuck with the same problems with whatever store tries to take its place.
Yeah, it's important to have some perspective here. You can argue till your face turns blue that DRM doesn't work/doesn't make sense/is evil/whatever, but the reality of it is that there are people out there with different opinions. And a bunch of those people are old businessmen who run big companies that see, over the horizon, the end of the business model on which they've built their little empires and made their fortunes.
/. mentality is correct, and DRM is not a workable solution, then the market will flesh that out and we can all get on with our lives. But to expect and preach anti-DRM like the heavens will open up and everyone will see the light and hold hands and all DRM will disappear tomorrow is not only unrealistic, it makes you look silly.
It's easy for you as a consumer or a musician to argue for the new "music economy" because you have little to lose and much to gain. A lot of these big record companies have plenty to lose. You might be able to make an argument that with the right business savvy and some smart decisions that they have a lot to gain as well, but nothing is guaranteed, and big companies tend to be risk adverse.
The point is, if the general
Baby steps are what we should expect and really hope for. Each sign of progress should be a reason for celebration, not a bitch session about everything you still don't like about the music industry. Yay for steps in the right direction!
There are a number of reasons why I need to use AutoCAD. As far as the world of architecture is concerned, CATIA is really a non-issue, almost everyone we work with uses AutoCAD.
I'm not going to argue that macs can't do CAD. I have done CAD on macs with various pieces of software, I've done 3D architectural modeling, I've done just about everything that I need to do at work on a mac, the only thing missing is 100% compatibility with autoCAD, in regards both to file formats as well as things like specific plug-ins. Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than "oh, there's a piece of software that can do mostly the same stuff." I need to be able to do the exact same stuff, in exactly the same way.
If Autodesk announced a mac version of AutoCAD was shipping tomorrow, that'd be awesome, but I'm not sure I'd be able to use it. It might be called AutoCAD and look like AutoCAD, but I'm guessing it'd take them at least a few versions before they got it up to a real useful level of parity.
The best part of all of this is that I really hate AutoCAD, it's horribly designed and buggy as all hell. But it's still very powerful, it's still the default CAD program for most architects and for almost all of our consultants, and I'm stuck with it for the forseeable future.
AutoCAD is a big one, I'm an architect so that's a fairly specific industry. There are mac cad programs, but AutoCAD is the 800 lb gorilla in that field, and there are various reasons why a different CAD program isn't workable for me currently. Then there's some other basic work stuff (timekeeping, expense keeping) where I have to use what my office uses, and I'm not the one who always gets to decide what the office uses. Another one is less important, but still signifincant to me, a game. I'm fairly attached to an MMO that currently does not have a mac client, although they recently announced that they're working on one. Whoop!
I've been using macs for the bulk of my computing for over a decade, so I'm well aware that there's plenty of software available for most every need. Most of my issues have been with a few very specific pieces of software, but unfortunately life puts me in positions where I can't always choose how I'm going to solve a problem.
Correct. Besides the "if it weren't for the last 10 minutes, nothing would ever get done" effect that deadlines can have, design in general is one of those things where you can almost never step back and say 100% that it's finished. There's always going to be something else to tweak, or another idea to try, etc. Eventually you have to just call it a day and save the rest for the next project.
While MS will surely take your money for a copy of Windows, don't think for a second that they don't care if you run OS X as well. They want everwhere to be Windows, because not only does that mean they sell more copies of windows today, but it means that they have crazy lock-in and control, which makes it much easier for them to continue making money in the future.
When your competitors are only 5% of the market, you can convince developers that it makes business sense to ignore them. When your competitors are 15% of the market, you're still selling way more copies of your OS than they are, but 3rd party developers are going to want a piece of that other 15%. And once more software goes that way, it because easier for people to switch, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I use a mac for most of my computing needs, but there's still a few pieces of windows only software that I have to use. I don't know where the marketshare needs to be before it'll make sense for those various developers to consider a mac version, or for a new developer to notice that potential market and take a shot at it. If/when that happens, I won't need a windows machine anymore, and I'll happily leave it behind. I recently read that one of those pieces of software is getting ported. That's only one, but it leaves me optimistic about the future.
I've got a pismo that I've pretty much run into the ground. But I did totally abuse it for about 5 years in college. I'm treating my newer macbook pro a bit more delicately these days, so hopefully it'll last a long time.
Well, you could always just have the NPC's panic and run away. But imagine having NPC's negotiate the sort of schemes that a crime boss might be interested in getting involved in. It can work in a single player game like GTA because there can be a pre-written script that presents certain choices to an individual and only has to react to one person, but that system can't really be scaled, because the game designers can't accurately predict interactions between different players.
An example that might be helpful to look at is EvE-online. It has basically evolved into two games with a little bit of overlap. You can run around by yourself, interacting only with NPC characters and going on the little missions that the devs have created, but you won't have any significant impact on the game as a whole, you'll experience very little continuity in terms of the bigger picture, and you'll miss out on half of the game. The other option is to get involved in the player driven part of the game, where things like politics, negotiation, long term wars, etc occur. It's a very vibrant part of the game, but it's almost entirely devoid of NPC interaction.
Mixing the two doesn't really work, because NPC's can't react realistically. The way eve works, however, the game universe is set up so that it still makes sense without a bunch of random civilians running around everywhere. A crime boss type game set in city would really suffer from not having a population.
It'd be a tough game to make though. It'd likely end up being mostly PvP gang warfare. Mostly because nobody would want to play the everyday normal people/businesses/etc that would have to make up the bulk of the population in a game like that. You could try and fill it out with NPC's, but I don't think the AI is there to make it really work. I don't think it's feasible to have a virtual city with a bunch of virtual residents realistically react to the actions of a sizeable amount of players.
I guess you could try to have employees playing scripted roles within the game, similar to what the matrix MMO did, but I don't see that as a long term workable solution.
Ah, I was not aware of that.
Avatar physics should not be handled that way then. It is annoying. I'm sure that changing that would probably break all sorts of other things that I'm not thinking of though.
If the iPhone fails and takes Apple down and my powerbook spontaneously turns into dust, hopefully the rest of the cell phone industry will adopt "Random access" voicemail. That is the single most attractive feature I've seen on the iPhone, and hopefully an idea that everyone else will steal.
Three or four years from now, I'm guessing Dvorak will mention in an article about how his iphone prediction was right because Apple won't dominate the phone market the way they've dominated the music player market.
I have a hard time seeing it play out in a way where the iPhone could be considered a failure unless your expectations are just ridiculous. Apple is not going to own 70% of the phone market in a few years, and they certainly know that.
Dvorak talking about how Apple still has only managed 5% marketshare with the Mac sort of goes against his main point. Apple is only holding a small slice of the pie, but it's a big yummy pie, and they're making good money. All the same, Apple does not need to obliterate the phone competition to have successful product line and pull in some serious cash.
There's one thing, more than anything else, that I'd hope someone will change. If you move quickly across the SL landscape, you can easily outpace the rate at which the server can stream stuff to you. But what often happens to me is that my avatar starts bumping into objects that aren't yet visible. Basically, the client knows that they're there, because it's performing a collision detection and stopping my character. But I guess since it hasn't gotten enough texture data or whatever, it has chosen not to show me anything.
Needless to say, this ends up being very frustrating. I end up trapped inside of buildings where I can't actually see any of the walls/ceilings/floors, and if it's a complicated area it could be a couple minutes before enough textures load that the client will display enough geometry for me to find my way out.
It seems that a pretty simple solution would be for the client to immediately render any objects that it's aware of, maybe just use a flat shading or something temporarily until it has recieved the actual texture. I don't know why it functions differently right now, and it drives me nuts.
I think that you need to take a slightly different approach to MMOG's. To me, more than anything, they're social games. EvE is just a big universe full of spaceships and such that serve as ways of getting people to interact. The generally slow pace of the game (with the occasional flash of hectic mayhem) gives groups of people a lot of time to organize or work on strategy or just socialize. There are people who sort of do their own thing all by themselves, and if they're having a good time then that's great. But what makes EVE really interesting is the other people.
Keeping that in mind, EvE does not do a very good job in terms of plugging new players into any social settings. An organized and even mildly sucessful corporation/alliance in EVE is bound to have an active TeamSpeak server going, and most likely does a lot of communicating through their own external forums. But for a single person, just starting out all alone in the EVE universe, that part of the game isn't always immediately visible or reachable. CCP needs to do more to help with that.
All that said, that sort of social gameplay isn't for everybody. Maybe you're constantly dealing with a bunch of people all day at work, and want to turn that part of your brain off and relax while playing video games at home. That's fine, there's still plenty of room for both types of games. And both directions should be able to integrate some of the MMO possibilities in cool ways.
Four or Five years from now, the latest incarnations of the iPhone could potentially replace the high-end ipods, as the phone increases its onboard storage, and provides everything that the ipod does plus the phone stuff. Battery life might still be an issue, but I'm going to pretend like that'll get figured out because it'd make the world of gadgets so much better.
But like you said, the nano/shuffles has two major advantages, price and physical size. A phone can only get so small before it's not useable to hold up to the side of my head and talk. A music player doesn't need to have those restrictions. There will always be demand for smaller players, even if they don't have all the fun features that their bigger siblings offer.
Creativity and innovation do not need to spring forth from a blank slate. Problem solving is probably the most common route towards creativity. Attacking a problem that no one's really looked at before, or looking for a new approach to a problem that already has solutions is plenty creativity for one person. Applying new technology to an already existing process, there's lots of room for creativity there as well.
I spend my time designing buildings, and interestingly enough, for many projects we can spend almost as much time helping the client figure out what they want their building to accomplish as we do designing a building that will accomplish those things. (This is all at an early schematic level though, the bulk of our time is actually spent doing a lot of the detailing and making useful drawings for construction.)
A really well designed building generally starts with a well defined program. Then we'll often look at the surrounding environment to develop a sense of the context, which gives us another set of guidelines. And if after all that, you're still not sure where you're going, you usually end up coming up with some sort of seemingly arbitrary directive (I want my building to be as transparent as possible, I want my building to have a real heavy sense of mass, whatever). And then you stick to that and try to keep the design true to that idea.
Regardless of where the problem to be solved comes from, having that problem is what motivates creativity and keeps your mind focused enough to end up with something good.
I completely agree, except that I don't really see a workable solution for Sony. How do you allow players to interact in any way without a whole bunch of them doing dirty stuff? The best you can do is have it very strongly policed by real people (moderators), which is expensive and annoying to the player base.
Then consider the fact that Sony's console is strongly marketed towards the hardcore gamer, which is that young male demographic which is mostly likely to want to introduce porn into the system, and most likely to react negatively to policing by Sony.
Even if you're not interested in any porn content, the limitations that would be necessary to truly prevent it would limit what you can do.
I didn't mean it wouldn't work technically, I mean I'm not convinced that it's going to work in terms of customers really getting into it.
And don't call me a troll and crap on my posting history if you can't even be bother to log in and expose your own. That's just silly. I don't make any effort to hide the fact that I'm a Nintendo fan, but I'm a bigger fan of video games in general. I owned and enjoyed all three consoles last generation, I have a PC that I purchased for the sole purpose of playing games. Sadly I'm not in college anymore, I have to spend the better part of my days working for a living, and I have fiscal responsibilities now.
Taking those realities of my life into account, Nintendo's strategy works really well with how I can fit gaming into my life. And the fact that they can do it all for cheap is excellent too. Sony, on the other hand, in both their words and their deeds so far in regards to the PS3 seem to have sprinted even harder than before down the hardcore gamer path, and their higher ups have been kind of dicks about it too. I'm less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. I never gave MS the benefit of the doubt because windows has caused me so much anguish in the past. I've been giving the 360 some serious consideration lately though.
I would love for Sony to make something awesome. I would love for Nintendo to feel more pressure to develop the online capabilities of the Wii. I even like Second Life, so if Sony could take that sort of idea forwards, I'd be fascinated. But until Sony convinces me that this home stuff is going to live up to some of the hype, I'm not going to get too excited.
Yeah, I've read all that. But I don't think it's going to work. Almost everything you've listed there has been solved in simpler and more convenient ways already on the web.
If this place is basically just a big online marketplace dressed up as some sort of graphically rich virtual shopping mall, I don't think consumers are going to flock to it the way they hoped. When I want to spend money on stuff, I want to find what I'm looking for, enter my credit card, and get whatever I'm buying as quickly as possible. Having to run my virtual avatar through a store and window shop to find what I want might be fun the first time, but it's not something that is going to keep me coming back for more.
"Persistent Worlds" are not made interesting just by the fact that they're persistent. They're made interesting by the fact that the players can seriously modify what's going on. It allows creativity, showing off, and hopefully leads towards collaboration. I don't care what sony is providing third parties, unless that third party is anyone who owns a PS3. Because otherwise it's just another way for companies to shove their wares in front of me, and the internet already provides me with lots of easy, efficient, and varied ways to shop.
If they're going to provide some real creative opportunities, then that's awesome, it could be a lot of fun. But my original point was that if they provide those opportunities, lots of people are going to find ways to turn it into porn/sex/etc. You can't keep that from happening without either locking down the content creation to the point where it doesn't really exist, or having moderators constantly policing everything that's made. Both of those will drive away the creative types that would find such a thing interesting in the first place.
I think Sony's best bet is to not really worry about what individuals are doing on their service in terms of porn, and just make sure it's possible for a parent to fully lock out their kids from the home service if they so desire. Trying to monitor what everyone's doing isn't realistic without taking out just about every way that individuals can customize their "homes." And once you've done that, then what's the point?
They should just not care, and let people make out of it what they want. Sure, it'll probably end up just like Second Life with better graphics, but pretty much anything with significant user created content is 95% crap, and a large percentage porn.
Maybe all Sony's going for is a glorified chat room. If that's the case, then I don't see the initial excitement about it lasting much beyond release. If they're instead trying to tie in to more of the myspace/flickr/blogging mindset, then they're going to have to give people some free reign to be creative. And yes, that means there's going to be a lot of people trying to do dirty things. But you know what, give the customers what they want, and they're going to be more willing to give you money.
The price differences between the various consoles in the previous generation were not nearly significant as they are now. I can justify $50 or maybe $100 more for one console over another if it's offering me something that the competition doesn't. But for $250+ more (at least double the price), that's a tough sell. Right now, the only thing the PS3 can really offer that I can't get elsewhere is Blu-ray, and neither myself or the bulk of the mass market is as excited about Blu-ray as Sony is.
Yeah, and now they're trying to play it off as if they were imagining it as being some sort of fancy status symbol product, instead of admitting that they had their hand forced by the Xbox360, and had to release the PS3 well before they really wanted to.
Or maybe they really were going for that sort of market, which if is the case, was an entirely retarded move. A playstation is not a car, it's not even an ipod. The idea of "hip" social status is not what motivates the hardcore gamer market, and a video game console that sits in your living room is not going to work as a status symbol with the general populace, no matter how awesome/powerful it is. They tried the same thing when they initially marketed the PSP, and it didn't work then either.
That still doesn't make any sense. It obviously doesn't cost anywhere near that much to manufacture the vehicle, because if it did, it would be reflected in the sticker price. Toyota might be taking a little bit of a hit in order to fund R&D and just to get the idea of hybrids out there, but there's no way they're eating hundreds of thousands of dollars per car.
As for the disposal fee, I find it hard to believe that it would be that expensive. Even considering the fact that there are batteries full of nasty chemicals in them, various industries have dealt with large batteries and many other sources of toxic stuff for a long time. You're not talking about a hundred thousand bucks to get rid of whats in a Prius.
Basically, there are no free rides. Someone is going to pay for just about all of it somewhere along the line, and if any of those prices are unreasonable, the project isn't going to happen (unless the govt. is funding it maybe). You can make up fuzzy numbers about environmental impact, and maybe that's what they're doing here, but they certainly didn't explain it well if that's the case.
It can be especially difficult with something containing a lot of creativity, because so much of those design processes can be iterative, meaning that the first half of the work you do is done only to figure out what you need to do for the second half of the project. Basically, if you don't throw out most of your original ideas, you're either some sort of super genius, or you're making a crappy product.
Good ideas often turn out to bad ideas, or lead to better and different ideas. The only way you can flush all that out is by trying those ideas and seeing where they go. Showing off that work-in-progress is tough, because there's a good chance that the final product will be very different. And forget about those last few layers of polish that really make your end result good. You don't want to waste time on that until you're really happy with the underlying product.
It's too bad that the hype based advertising system that the games industry has embraced doesn't take into account the way design really works. Instead it forces developers to waste time making little demos of projects that are nowhere near from ready, and can force the design process into corners from which they can't escape, resulting in mediocre games.