You make a couple good points, but that last line really bugs me. Are you serious? I know what you mean: people use charts and graphs in situations they shouldn't. But you should qualify that by pointing out that it's only because people don't use them properly. I can go on and on about my data all day long, or I could show you a picture, and you could understand instantly. (You might say that without a paragraph of explanation, you'd never be able to understand the graphic, but the original version has a couple sentences to describe what you're looking at. As a crutch, shall we say, to the graphic.)
What about a system that combines a thumbnail of the site with your excerpt and statistics? If I'm looking for a site that I recently visited, it's going to save me a lot of time if I can look for that bright green background I remember instead of reading a synopsis for each site...
Ok, while I applaud Cyan Worlds/Ubisoft for making the bold attempt to take Myst to the Internet, who in their right mind would've thought it would've worked...?
Uru, at the very least, was a great idea. One of the most original games to come along recently, and hey, no guts, no glory. It's easy for you to see in hindsight that it was destined to be a flop, right? It didn't fail because it was a bad idea. It failed because Cyan made some poor design decisions and some mistakes implementing the multiplayer aspect of the game.
1) The Myst series has been and will probably remain a series for the casual player. A lot of people who are turned off by the blood and action of fast paced FPS and involving RPGS and RTSes typically enjoy Myst.
Download the demo and play the game. Uru doesn't have anything to do with blood and action, except for the occasional deserted torture chamber. Uru was poised to appeal to the same players that Myst did with one glaring exception, which I'll get into later.
2) People aren't going to pay for a service that they won't make use of.
The service was free to start with. The reason people didn't play was not because of the cost. It was because the online part of the game didn't work. Read the Uru Live forums, and you'll see that probably more than half of the posts have to do with unbearable lag, authentication glitches, and other problems with multiplayer that basically made the game unplayable. Those customers that did sign up knew what they were getting into for the most part. Those that didn't were most likely waiting until the word was out that most of the glitches were solved.
I've played Uru Live twice in about a month since I've been registered. Both times, the game was frozen, feverishly transmitting network data, more often than it was running smoothly. It was decidedly not fun, and there was not much to see or do. It failed to deliver on its promise, and Cyan knows that.
3) Casual gamers don't usually have a whole lot of time to commit to a game for an extended period of time.
I know a lot of "casual gamers" that spent several weeks on Myst and Riven. Those games suck you in and keep calling your name. Get someone into an online game for a couple weeks, and I think it's a good bet that they'll be hooked for a while. As long as the content keeps coming and the quality is high. People make time for things they enjoy, but Uru Live was not enjoyable in its current state.
4) Since the user base for the Myst series isn't "hard-core" they most likely will not have the time to justify for paying for something like Uru (which was to ultimately become a pay-for service)
The casual gamer is the holy grail of the video game industry. Myst and Riven were so successful specifically because non-hard-core people invested so much time and money into the games. I think part of the vision of Uru was to do the same thing with a multiplayer game.
Cyan made the mistake of alienating a lot of their fans by focusing a large percentage of the game on dexterity. Part of what made Myst and Riven so accessible was their simplicity. The technology at the time probably felt restrictive, but it provided the perfect interface. There was no way to walk somewhere you weren't supposed to, nothing to click on or move that wasn't supposed to be clicked on or moved. In Uru, you have to jump at the just the right time from one moving platform to another. You have to bump into objects on the floor and move them into the appropriate places. Keep in mind that you have no use of your frickin hands, so you just have to slide things around on the floor. Little interface issues like that only get in the way of the fun for experienced gamers, but they make the game unplayable for novices.
Uru didn't fail because it wasn't a good idea. It failed because multiplayer was broken, and the interface alienated users that otherwise might have given the game a shot.
This is just another one of those MIT projects that makes it to slashdot.
I'm sorry, but did you even go to the page? Did you watch the movie? It's frickin' rad!
Who cares if this is just another one of those MIT projects. This is a useful, fun, and ingenious toy! People (i.e. me) are giving this project attention because it's interesting and unique, not because it's from MIT. Please.
Your post was interesting, but I think your arguments for the demise of the DVD format are a little weak. Other posters have noted some important points like the fact that DVD-R seems a little questionable.
DVD is the big thing right now, but history has proven that formats with meteoric rises (as in, DVD went from nowhere to everywhere in four years) is that they have meteoric falls. Case in point: 8-Track tape.
8-tracks sucked for a lot of reasons that DVDs don't. You pointed quite a few out in one of your later posts. Primarily: lots of moving parts that break, lack of portability, and no cheap easy way to record your own. How many 8-tracks could you fit in your glove box? How many cassettes? How many CDs?
Every day, someone builds a shorter wavelength blue laser, and someone else builds a better compression algorithm, or even a better copy-prevention scheme. How long until the DVD format is revamped or replaced? Will the new players play the old discs?
Here are some counter points to your argument that "better" technologies will quickly replace DVD: Betamax is better-quality than VHS, so why didn't it replace VHS? 8-tracks had far better sound quality than cassettes, but cassettes are still around and in use today, as practically the only existing alternative to CDs.
VHS was introduced in about 1977, and home VCRs didn't achieve anywhere near the market penetration of the DVD player for 15 years. CD players took almost 10 years to achieve ubiquity.
The dominance of both VHS and CD are what lead to the wide-spread acceptance of DVDs. VHS gave birth to the home video market, on which DVDs could easily leech. Size and shape of a CD? That's familiar. We have the tools to store them, and we know how to handle them. There's no learning curve since the players work like (and usually double as) CD players. There has been no other medium in history that has had so much of the work done for it in advance. DVD is a format on which the music, film, and computer industries agree, and none other can reasonably make that claim.
That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the design team!
Actually, I think it does. There's really not much a designer can do about a stylus apart from tethering it to the PDA, but I think most would agree that a tether would suck. It's the only necessarily separate object, and bound to be lost. Seems like a smart thing to do, including multiples of an easily lost object...
By not re-releasing older consoles, Nintendo has nothing to lose
This decision by Nintendo (if they make it) probably has more to do with the fact that older technology is still selling there, and less to do with the fact that Nintendo wants to crack down on ROM pirates. Unless by ROM pirates you mean cartridge priates.
And I'm betting that copying the GC mini-dvd is a heck of a lot harder and more expensive than copying pretty much any cartridge game.
By re-releasing older consoles, Nintendo can shutdown ROM piracy by claiming that the games are actively on the market.
I doubt that Nintentdo is going to bring old games back to the non-China market, and even if they do, I don't think it's going to change their current stance on game piracy.
The real reason they might do this is to make some money in a market that is notorious for bogus, pirate products. Since all of these technologies already exist, Nintendo doesn't have to spend any time or money on development, and they can try to outdo priates by selling legitimate copies for cheap. If people in China are currently buying this stuff (and I have no idea if they are), then why not try to sell them the real thing?
Then you've never done any development work for a Microsoft Office product. There are so many nuts and bolts differences between releases that it's nearly always impossible to upgrade without breaking legacy code.
From a non-developer standpoint, why should I ever expect my old stuff to be incompatible with an upgraded version of my platform? If it breaks everything, then as far as I can tell it's not much of an upgrade.
COM is a good idea. It has a few disadvantages, but you make a good point. The problem is that COM fits really nicely into the Microsoft way of breaking the work that has been done to force users into upgrading. Keep the COM objects, but change their interfaces, only support new objects, etc. Some Microsoft innovations are good. Some Microsoft products are good. But for developers, their pattern of breaking the old and selling the new is bad.
This isn't meant to be a flame or a troll, but...could Microsoft be partially to blame? It seems to me, based on my experience, that software development favors a Microsoft paradigm versus say a Unix paradigm. i.e. reinvent the wheel and make money by being proprietary vs. make lots of little pieces that work independently or can be stacked together.
"I'll never quit," said the 57-year-old master of spam. "I like what I do. This is the greatest business in the world."
I like what I do, even though I have to hide from everyone, use unlisted numbers, and pretend like it's not bothering anyone. It's truly the greatest business in the world. And the dog feces that keep coming in the mail don't bother me that much, either.
I think there's a high potential for the misconception that Microsoft-haters are Linux users. I would argue that almost everyone can see the evil in Microsoft. They don't make it too hard. My personal relationship with Microsoft is very love-hate, as, I would bet, is most of the Slashdot crowd's. You don't have to be a Linux user or open source programmer to see (or to point out) that Microsoft plays unfair.
The problem is that Microsoft Office for the most part is an awesome product, particularly Word, Outlook, and Excel. IE is a kickass browser. Other posters have made good points about being stuck with Windows at work, and games obviously play an important role.
In fact, they wound up taking the pool table away because it was causing "productivity" to slip.
I suspect this difference has something to do with the people at Google enjoying what they work on. Don't get me wrong, I have no idea what the atmosphere was like at Eudora. Maybe everyone was totally into email clients. But at Google, especially after reading Craigs answers, you get the feeling that they're all on the same page. Not just your usual group of developers that has nothing more in common than beer, but a group of people excited about what they're doing.
(I really don't mean to slam Eudora, but Google does seem like an interesting exception to the rule.)
If it helps Apple sell more iPods without having to pay for support, Apple wins.
Of course, I can see your point, but I don't think it's quite that simple for Apple. This has been mentioned here before in other articles, but Apple doesn't support Windows or any other alternative OS because they want to sell their hardware. Not their cheap hardware (iPod), their expensive hardware (iBook, PowerBook, etc.). Call me crazy, but the iPod was one of the stronger reasons that I was considering an Apple for my next computer. Now that it works with Windows, that's one less incentive for me to switch.
Whether Apple can make up the profit they lost on me by selling 20 iPaqs to other Windows users that never would've switched, well, that's what Apple has a room rull of statisticians (read: Steve Jobs sitting all by himself) for. I'm sure that "they" know what they're doing:)
Uh. Doesn't anyone else see that this has nothing to do with Walmart taking on Microsoft, or Walmart sticking up for the Slashdot linux kiddies. It's not going to convert the unsuspecting rednecks (nice...) to Linux. It's not going to save the world, and I doubt that it will even make too many customers unhappy. It has everything to do with Walmart's bottom line, and that's it.
I have been wondering lately if the original, unmodified versions of the sequels will be released on DVD. After reading reports like this one, it makes me very doubtful, and it makes me more disappointed in Lucas. There's something sacred about Star Wars, and he's been ruining it for a lot of us for the last 10 years. He needs to get over it and just move on with his life. Star Wars is what it is, and no matter how many fart jokes or computer-generated Jabbas you work into the old trilogy, it's still the same story. The constant tweaking to get "what he wanted to do originally but lacked the technology" (and in this case, the actress) doesn't add anything. The new stuff is just distracting. It upsets my stomach and makes me cringe.
My brother was really into collecting movies before the advent of DVD, and somewhere along the line he grabbed laserdisc copies of The Star Wars trilogy. It's an awesome set, not the special edition. Not upgraded. If the non-special-edition movies aren't released on DVD, I'm really tempted to make a DVD copy of this set for my own use.
Would it be legal since I already own the trilogy on VHS? Would it be legal for me to make a copy for a friend that owns the trilogy on VHS?
This is probably too late to be modded up, and it's somewhat off topic, but this post touched on one of the things that really bugs me about the new batch of Star Wars movies.
Lucas has really screwed up by doing the exact opposite of what jayhawk suggests. There is way too much of our current culture in Star Wars, and it's one of the biggest problems with the movies. And it's not the interesting stuff, it's the annoying stuff, like the pod race announcer(s). The futuristic diner scene, the Blade-runner-esque advertising ridden cityscapes.
It doesn't make Star Wars seem like it's taking place in a galaxy far, far away. It's bright and flashy and more like Las Vegas Star Wars to me. Compared to the ambiance, style, and aesthetic of the sequels, the prequels are way off. Painfully so. After watching Phantom Menace, I'm always left wondering if Lucas has even watched the sequels. How could he screw it all up so badly?
Initially, Apple was a welcome antidote to the elitism and cluelessness of the tech elites who designed early computers.
Slightly off topic, but I doubt I'm the only one that took offense to the above.
I agree that the early Apple was revolutionary, but making computers more accessible was not an antidote to anything. It was the logical next step in bringing an inordinately useful and complex tool into the mainstream, and it didn't come quickly for Apple either. Their first computer, the Apple I, was not a mainstream machine. Hobbyists at the time didn't respond very much until the Apple II, but we're still talking hobbyists. The Apple that we know today didn't really show its face until the release of the unforgettable Macintosh.
Computers are products of science, and engineers struggled long and hard to bring them to the point of mass consumption. Apple has employed and continues to employ some of the most adept computer engineers of the time (including quite a few of the "tech elites" that you mark the cluelessness of), but it has also stood on the shoulders of a lot of great minds that predate Apple. And you managed to insult practically all of them with one little sentence...
The movies look great, but it's not impossible that they are fakes. Something looks a little fishy about them to me, but the secret will be out on Monday anyway, right?
I don't think that anyone needs to be reminded how sophisticated augmented reality has become. Here's a great (albeit a little dated) example of homebrew special effects involving a jet airliner. Most of you probably saw it a couple of years ago when it was released.
Slashdot Mirror
Another missed opportunity to use the internet's, uh, hottest new acronym: FGI.
What about a system that combines a thumbnail of the site with your excerpt and statistics? If I'm looking for a site that I recently visited, it's going to save me a lot of time if I can look for that bright green background I remember instead of reading a synopsis for each site...
Uru, at the very least, was a great idea. One of the most original games to come along recently, and hey, no guts, no glory. It's easy for you to see in hindsight that it was destined to be a flop, right? It didn't fail because it was a bad idea. It failed because Cyan made some poor design decisions and some mistakes implementing the multiplayer aspect of the game.
1) The Myst series has been and will probably remain a series for the casual player. A lot of people who are turned off by the blood and action of fast paced FPS and involving RPGS and RTSes typically enjoy Myst.
Download the demo and play the game. Uru doesn't have anything to do with blood and action, except for the occasional deserted torture chamber. Uru was poised to appeal to the same players that Myst did with one glaring exception, which I'll get into later.
2) People aren't going to pay for a service that they won't make use of.
The service was free to start with. The reason people didn't play was not because of the cost. It was because the online part of the game didn't work. Read the Uru Live forums, and you'll see that probably more than half of the posts have to do with unbearable lag, authentication glitches, and other problems with multiplayer that basically made the game unplayable. Those customers that did sign up knew what they were getting into for the most part. Those that didn't were most likely waiting until the word was out that most of the glitches were solved.
I've played Uru Live twice in about a month since I've been registered. Both times, the game was frozen, feverishly transmitting network data, more often than it was running smoothly. It was decidedly not fun, and there was not much to see or do. It failed to deliver on its promise, and Cyan knows that.
3) Casual gamers don't usually have a whole lot of time to commit to a game for an extended period of time.
I know a lot of "casual gamers" that spent several weeks on Myst and Riven. Those games suck you in and keep calling your name. Get someone into an online game for a couple weeks, and I think it's a good bet that they'll be hooked for a while. As long as the content keeps coming and the quality is high. People make time for things they enjoy, but Uru Live was not enjoyable in its current state.
4) Since the user base for the Myst series isn't "hard-core" they most likely will not have the time to justify for paying for something like Uru (which was to ultimately become a pay-for service)
The casual gamer is the holy grail of the video game industry. Myst and Riven were so successful specifically because non-hard-core people invested so much time and money into the games. I think part of the vision of Uru was to do the same thing with a multiplayer game.
Cyan made the mistake of alienating a lot of their fans by focusing a large percentage of the game on dexterity. Part of what made Myst and Riven so accessible was their simplicity. The technology at the time probably felt restrictive, but it provided the perfect interface. There was no way to walk somewhere you weren't supposed to, nothing to click on or move that wasn't supposed to be clicked on or moved. In Uru, you have to jump at the just the right time from one moving platform to another. You have to bump into objects on the floor and move them into the appropriate places. Keep in mind that you have no use of your frickin hands, so you just have to slide things around on the floor. Little interface issues like that only get in the way of the fun for experienced gamers, but they make the game unplayable for novices.
Uru didn't fail because it wasn't a good idea. It failed because multiplayer was broken, and the interface alienated users that otherwise might have given the game a shot.
I'm sorry, but did you even go to the page? Did you watch the movie? It's frickin' rad!
Who cares if this is just another one of those MIT projects. This is a useful, fun, and ingenious toy! People (i.e. me) are giving this project attention because it's interesting and unique, not because it's from MIT. Please.
DVD is the big thing right now, but history has proven that formats with meteoric rises (as in, DVD went from nowhere to everywhere in four years) is that they have meteoric falls. Case in point: 8-Track tape.
8-tracks sucked for a lot of reasons that DVDs don't. You pointed quite a few out in one of your later posts. Primarily: lots of moving parts that break, lack of portability, and no cheap easy way to record your own. How many 8-tracks could you fit in your glove box? How many cassettes? How many CDs?
Every day, someone builds a shorter wavelength blue laser, and someone else builds a better compression algorithm, or even a better copy-prevention scheme. How long until the DVD format is revamped or replaced? Will the new players play the old discs?
Here are some counter points to your argument that "better" technologies will quickly replace DVD: Betamax is better-quality than VHS, so why didn't it replace VHS? 8-tracks had far better sound quality than cassettes, but cassettes are still around and in use today, as practically the only existing alternative to CDs.
VHS was introduced in about 1977, and home VCRs didn't achieve anywhere near the market penetration of the DVD player for 15 years. CD players took almost 10 years to achieve ubiquity.
The dominance of both VHS and CD are what lead to the wide-spread acceptance of DVDs. VHS gave birth to the home video market, on which DVDs could easily leech. Size and shape of a CD? That's familiar. We have the tools to store them, and we know how to handle them. There's no learning curve since the players work like (and usually double as) CD players. There has been no other medium in history that has had so much of the work done for it in advance. DVD is a format on which the music, film, and computer industries agree, and none other can reasonably make that claim.
Actually, I think it does. There's really not much a designer can do about a stylus apart from tethering it to the PDA, but I think most would agree that a tether would suck. It's the only necessarily separate object, and bound to be lost. Seems like a smart thing to do, including multiples of an easily lost object...
http://www.computerbytesman.com/tia/
(Link for creepy logo only! Well, the cached pages are kind of interesting too.)
Those aren't the sidewalks!
Bill Gates weighs 70 pounds and only goes 10 mph, and just look at all the damage he has caused!
This decision by Nintendo (if they make it) probably has more to do with the fact that older technology is still selling there, and less to do with the fact that Nintendo wants to crack down on ROM pirates. Unless by ROM pirates you mean cartridge priates.
And I'm betting that copying the GC mini-dvd is a heck of a lot harder and more expensive than copying pretty much any cartridge game.
I doubt that Nintentdo is going to bring old games back to the non-China market, and even if they do, I don't think it's going to change their current stance on game piracy.
The real reason they might do this is to make some money in a market that is notorious for bogus, pirate products. Since all of these technologies already exist, Nintendo doesn't have to spend any time or money on development, and they can try to outdo priates by selling legitimate copies for cheap. If people in China are currently buying this stuff (and I have no idea if they are), then why not try to sell them the real thing?
From a non-developer standpoint, why should I ever expect my old stuff to be incompatible with an upgraded version of my platform? If it breaks everything, then as far as I can tell it's not much of an upgrade.
COM is a good idea. It has a few disadvantages, but you make a good point. The problem is that COM fits really nicely into the Microsoft way of breaking the work that has been done to force users into upgrading. Keep the COM objects, but change their interfaces, only support new objects, etc. Some Microsoft innovations are good. Some Microsoft products are good. But for developers, their pattern of breaking the old and selling the new is bad.
Not universal, but seems to be pretty prevalent.
I like what I do, even though I have to hide from everyone, use unlisted numbers, and pretend like it's not bothering anyone. It's truly the greatest business in the world. And the dog feces that keep coming in the mail don't bother me that much, either.
The problem is that Microsoft Office for the most part is an awesome product, particularly Word, Outlook, and Excel. IE is a kickass browser. Other posters have made good points about being stuck with Windows at work, and games obviously play an important role.
I suspect this difference has something to do with the people at Google enjoying what they work on. Don't get me wrong, I have no idea what the atmosphere was like at Eudora. Maybe everyone was totally into email clients. But at Google, especially after reading Craigs answers, you get the feeling that they're all on the same page. Not just your usual group of developers that has nothing more in common than beer, but a group of people excited about what they're doing.
(I really don't mean to slam Eudora, but Google does seem like an interesting exception to the rule.)
Whether Apple can make up the profit they lost on me by selling 20 iPaqs to other Windows users that never would've switched, well, that's what Apple has a room rull of statisticians (read: Steve Jobs sitting all by himself) for. I'm sure that "they" know what they're doing :)
Uh. Doesn't anyone else see that this has nothing to do with Walmart taking on Microsoft, or Walmart sticking up for the Slashdot linux kiddies. It's not going to convert the unsuspecting rednecks (nice...) to Linux. It's not going to save the world, and I doubt that it will even make too many customers unhappy. It has everything to do with Walmart's bottom line, and that's it.
My brother was really into collecting movies before the advent of DVD, and somewhere along the line he grabbed laserdisc copies of The Star Wars trilogy. It's an awesome set, not the special edition. Not upgraded. If the non-special-edition movies aren't released on DVD, I'm really tempted to make a DVD copy of this set for my own use.
Would it be legal since I already own the trilogy on VHS? Would it be legal for me to make a copy for a friend that owns the trilogy on VHS?
Lucas has really screwed up by doing the exact opposite of what jayhawk suggests. There is way too much of our current culture in Star Wars, and it's one of the biggest problems with the movies. And it's not the interesting stuff, it's the annoying stuff, like the pod race announcer(s). The futuristic diner scene, the Blade-runner-esque advertising ridden cityscapes.
It doesn't make Star Wars seem like it's taking place in a galaxy far, far away. It's bright and flashy and more like Las Vegas Star Wars to me. Compared to the ambiance, style, and aesthetic of the sequels, the prequels are way off. Painfully so. After watching Phantom Menace, I'm always left wondering if Lucas has even watched the sequels. How could he screw it all up so badly?
H
W
orld
It's in C!
Slightly off topic, but I doubt I'm the only one that took offense to the above.
I agree that the early Apple was revolutionary, but making computers more accessible was not an antidote to anything. It was the logical next step in bringing an inordinately useful and complex tool into the mainstream, and it didn't come quickly for Apple either. Their first computer, the Apple I, was not a mainstream machine. Hobbyists at the time didn't respond very much until the Apple II, but we're still talking hobbyists. The Apple that we know today didn't really show its face until the release of the unforgettable Macintosh.
Computers are products of science, and engineers struggled long and hard to bring them to the point of mass consumption. Apple has employed and continues to employ some of the most adept computer engineers of the time (including quite a few of the "tech elites" that you mark the cluelessness of), but it has also stood on the shoulders of a lot of great minds that predate Apple. And you managed to insult practically all of them with one little sentence...
I don't think that anyone needs to be reminded how sophisticated augmented reality has become. Here's a great (albeit a little dated) example of homebrew special effects involving a jet airliner. Most of you probably saw it a couple of years ago when it was released.
405