before I accidentally (I swear) drowned and decided to hop on the iPhone bandwagon, the Z22 was a very great machine... cheap cheerful and effective., even at the lower screen rez I liked it better than the higher end Sony Clie it replaced, in part because of the great feel form factor (too often in hardware, Palm designers aimed for slim without sacrificing screen width, leading to uncomfortably "sharp" devices.
But enjoying my iPhone - despite the current lack of TODOs, and my bad feelings about Outlook meaning I'm not actually synching my data to my PC - it makes me sad at how blatantly Palm dropped the ball.
the terrible thing about that is how lame Unistrokes are... look at the image 1/3 of the way down http://www.cs.uta.fi/~scott/text/Unistroke.html -- the cool thing about Graffiti is that most every stroke has some physical similarity to the letter it represents.
I don't know the details but it feels like an abuse of the patent system to me.
Ok, I see your point... are the sound and movements of "the Pokemon Trainer" defined in any of the later console games, or will they be derived fresh for the brawl?
Also, just a technical question, did Ash get retroconned into one of the gameboy remakes, or just Pikachu?
I don't really disagree with you, but I think many sequels tend to be more remake-y than you argue.
Or at least it's a very gray area. But I think the attempts to use book and movie metaphors here are flawed, because (most) games are not only about a story. I think what makes gaming interesting is the ability to provide a new style of interaction. If a sequel has the same core mechanic, and the same general story (like Z:OoT vs Twilight Princess) it might not be a remake per se but it's much less of a sequel than Die Hard to Die Hard 3.
I guess I don't have a strong point here, just wanted to point out that your analysis (which isn't bad!) as well as the book-metaphor people is very story-centric, and games are cool because they are about story plus interaction.
No, that actually is pretty funny, and likely not a coincidence... I'm a pretty phonetic typer, it turns out. (And sometimes do odd swaps, like "be" for "me"....pseudo-dyslexia?)
And he does put up with the jokes with humor and grace, even when Howard Stern was getting in on it. He does sound like a bit of a "queen", and I like him all the more for it, he's likely living the life that feels that much more natural for him, and probably having a ball doing it.
And the character of Sulu was always one of the coolest ones on that bridge. Kirk was always a bit too much bluster for young people to relate to quite as well, Chekov (inspired by the Monkees) was a bit too goofy. Sulu was all professionalism and skills.
Random Trek bit... one line that they say got through the sensors was when there was that mind-altering virus thing and everyone goes nuts, bare-chested swashbuckling Sulu addresses Uhura "Fair maiden..." and she replies "sorry, neither" -- very cute.
I haven't heard much about the plans with offline Ajax: all I know is that I'd love to make useful webapps to use on my iPhone but still usethem when I'm on the subway etc; either I haven't done the right research on offline Ajax or it's not there yet.
Also, on my friend's hacked iPhone, I saw stuff that would be useful but probably not too viable via Ajax, like an ssh client. Or DOOM.
Then there's a certain amount of potentially useful stuff that probably can never be safely exposed, stuff that leverages the iPhone-ness, rather than the PDA aspect. (Heh, just like there are "Wii aware" websites, I'd love to be able to read the state of the angle sensors.
And Apples standards are high, but they're not perfect; otherwise I wouldn't see obvious no-brainers like "gee, maybe the magnifying glass content should be onscreen even when the area being mangified is near the top";-) (in general I think there are some kludgey or under-QA'd aspects to landscape mode, maybe that's why they've been so slow bringing it to other apps that could REALLY use a wider keyboard.)
Not reading TFA, it reminds me a bit of my custom db/ui solution that I use for generalized information storage: links, books and movies I watch, developer notes, etc... it some web-based Perl CGI and is, in effect, a big old flat table database, the columns defined by text files, and it auto-generates a convenient form with the usual spattering of HTML input types...
Man, that's terrible! Is it a side effect of some significant advantage of GSM over other technologies? I thought RF interference was considered a bad thing...
I see some similar things when I look at a variety of Java toolkits, some offering very OO "you can pretend you're a swing app and ignore the HTTPRequest cycle"
I worry that a decade of homebrew Perl CGI has warped my brain, but frankly, HashMaps wrapping HTTP Request parameters seems really natural to me, and if you use a Model2+ approach w/ servlet and JSP pairs, you're writing your business logic in Java, your HTML in HTML (well, JSP... and honestly, I don't think I've ever been on a team that manage to leverage real benefit from tricks to let you edit HTML in HTML editors, and make that round trip) your CSS in CSS, your Javascript in Javascript, etc etc.
I see the flow control stuff as glue language... directing a user from page to page just ISNT THAT HARD... and its the stuff that's tightly coupled to EVERYTHING, and so I long for that to be as simple and not-get-in-your-way as possible, so that you can spend your mental cycles thinking about the stuff that's actually doing the heavy lifting.
Lots of toolkits offer lots of neat bells and whistles, but most really imply you need to learn the whole language and often new paradigm of thinking about flow control. And unlike APIs and things, your flow control tends not to be isolatable, so if you get something wrong, it's going to be harder to work your way out of. (And the more-OO-ish you get for flow control, the harder it'll be to make sense of your stacktrace, since the danger is that you screwed up something when establishing in your objects, not when the actual interaction was performed...)
On the other hand, I know I tend to be resistant to new core server technologies, unless they make a SUPER clear value proposition. So I'm worried I'm going to be some crazy old curmudgeon. Still, like in TFA, the guy took some good design lessons from the new language, and then stuck with what people really know, and that makes a lot of sense to me.
Given the fat-thumb nature of the beast, I think the AutoCorrect as is at least "makes sense" though agree an option would be nice... though I would guess Apple is shy of over-optioning the beast.
In terms of audio output... I've used it with some speaker setups designed for it, and while I see the "this device wasn't meant for use with X, go to Airplane mode?" dialog, everything still works... as far as I can tell, it's them saying "uhh, you're going to get lots of weird GSM-ish staticky noise that this isn't shielded for"
That said, the thing I miss the most is ubiquitous landscape. Also, they need to smarten up the algorithm for the magnifier, ESPECIALLY in landscape: it needs to go to some place ON THE DAMN SCREEN where my thumb isn't. -5 points for excessive duh.
It seems to be the way Linux et al is heading. It seems like an extremely convenient place to stash some metadata for ubiquitous access w/o having to open the file, easy to modify, and that convenience outweighs the risk.
Who does it right, in your view? The old Mac "resource fork" thing? Unix magic? Some other OS that has made fewer inroads on the world stage?
I'd have to say games don't do things as well as other "real world" pursuits: I don't think that they tell stories as well as movies and books. I don't think that they do "challenge" as well as physical sports (from team sports all the way to darts and bowling") In some ways, I don't think do "gaming" as well as traditional board, card, and RPGs (though it depends on what you're looking for...)
What I think games do really well, that no other genre can touch, is making new, creative, interactive systems and worlds. It's just amazing that we can have these virtual microcosms to run around in and can make immersive but utterly fantastic envirionments.
That's why I don't dig on traditional RPGs, where your interaction is menu-driven, and the only thing that changes is the story. I understand that the first-person aspect makes it more immersive than some other forms of storytelling, but still. Basically, if what makes your game different is strictly a team of writers and artists, I think you have a less engrossing product. (Conversely, I find a game with a well fleshed out story and heavy use of real world elements to be more engaging than an abstract or pure sandbox title.)
Even when the core of the game is tried-and-true, like w/ BioShock, there magic-ish elements and enemy behaviors allow for some novel interactions, and really that's what I'm after.
I think that's one reason other traditional media are jealous of their definition of art... they're ultimately more limited in how they interact. And that pure-cerebral, artist-mentally-changing-the-audience idea is important, but games have more objective novelty creative space to play in.
edition, not version
on
Republic.com 2.0
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That earlier version was written before blogger was purchased by google
Heh. It took me clicking on the Read More to realized "Republic 2.0" is not blogging software.
The term for books is, I think "edition" rather than "version".
(Wasn't there late-90s publishing software called Frontier or something? i may have been influenced by thinking of that.)
Star Trek apologia is an ancient form. I remember reading book compilations of... what was that fanzine in the 80s, "Trek"? And that one column of explaining how someone could possibly be waiting for a turbolift given this and such scheduling and people inside the lift having stopped it... the twin assumptions that A. Star Trek is 100% consistent universe and B. Its portrayal onscreen is 100% faithful to that reality.
You're taking this rather seriously. And not just in the "look, it's just a show sense", but in ignoring the "heheh well if humans on one damn planet can't agree on simple universal measures, you think species of total disconnected evolutionary and cultural history will?"
Re:Started with Perl-CGI, went to OO
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 1
So, a topic that will come up on the wicket board: do you think inner classes are a positive, negative, or neutral sign of thoughtful OO?
I'm not sure if you mistyped, but I said there are times I wish Perl had a more sane object model.
The thing about the oopbad guy is... he makes some very fair, and almost inarguable points, even if you don't agree with the gist or the conclusion. People in his camp view OO enthusiasts as zealots of a specific, unshakable but not 100% justified faith, and people in the OO enthusiasts camp view him as something akin to the conspiracy theorists, full of odd little points, but it's too tiring to rebuke those points *en masse* because you don't think you'll convince him anyway.
And it's not like I'm in the oopbad camp anyway. And with enough stretch and strain, you end up kind of saying it often comes to be similar to the same thing, whether it's the fact that OO of course relies on procedures, or the way a Perl script and its output webpage can kind of be viewed as a kind of sort of object, or at LEAST an encapsulated "thing" with definitive inputs and outputs, and data and code being stored together.
I mean often, the issue is what flavor of OO to use; I mean, I think the recent emphasis on "prefer encapsulation to inheritance" goes against the grain of mediocre enthusiast OO.
Slashdot Mirror
I might be on Nintendo's side for stuff like this if it wasn't for the #$&(U@#$ region lock codes.
before I accidentally (I swear) drowned and decided to hop on the iPhone bandwagon, the Z22 was a very great machine... cheap cheerful and effective., even at the lower screen rez I liked it better than the higher end Sony Clie it replaced, in part because of the great feel form factor (too often in hardware, Palm designers aimed for slim without sacrificing screen width, leading to uncomfortably "sharp" devices.
But enjoying my iPhone - despite the current lack of TODOs, and my bad feelings about Outlook meaning I'm not actually synching my data to my PC - it makes me sad at how blatantly Palm dropped the ball.
the terrible thing about that is how lame Unistrokes are...
look at the image 1/3 of the way down http://www.cs.uta.fi/~scott/text/Unistroke.html --
the cool thing about Graffiti is that most every stroke has some physical similarity to the letter it represents.
I don't know the details but it feels like an abuse of the patent system to me.
Ok, I see your point...
are the sound and movements of "the Pokemon Trainer" defined in any of the later console games, or will they be derived fresh for the brawl?
Also, just a technical question, did Ash get retroconned into one of the gameboy remakes, or just Pikachu?
Right, but why?
It smacks of an odd rights and character ownership issue, or maybe even Voice Acting...
Why is it "The Pokemon Trainer" and not "Ash"?
I don't really disagree with you, but I think many sequels tend to be more remake-y than you argue.
Or at least it's a very gray area. But I think the attempts to use book and movie metaphors here are flawed, because (most) games are not only about a story. I think what makes gaming interesting is the ability to provide a new style of interaction. If a sequel has the same core mechanic, and the same general story (like Z:OoT vs Twilight Princess) it might not be a remake per se but it's much less of a sequel than Die Hard to Die Hard 3.
I guess I don't have a strong point here, just wanted to point out that your analysis (which isn't bad!) as well as the book-metaphor people is very story-centric, and games are cool because they are about story plus interaction.
No, that actually is pretty funny, and likely not a coincidence... I'm a pretty phonetic typer, it turns out. (And sometimes do odd swaps, like "be" for "me"....pseudo-dyslexia?)
Well said.
And he does put up with the jokes with humor and grace, even when Howard Stern was getting in on it. He does sound like a bit of a "queen", and I like him all the more for it, he's likely living the life that feels that much more natural for him, and probably having a ball doing it.
And the character of Sulu was always one of the coolest ones on that bridge. Kirk was always a bit too much bluster for young people to relate to quite as well, Chekov (inspired by the Monkees) was a bit too goofy. Sulu was all professionalism and skills.
Random Trek bit... one line that they say got through the sensors was when there was that mind-altering virus thing and everyone goes nuts, bare-chested swashbuckling Sulu addresses Uhura "Fair maiden..." and she replies "sorry, neither" -- very cute.
So, good for him.
I haven't heard much about the plans with offline Ajax: all I know is that I'd love to make useful webapps to use on my iPhone but still usethem when I'm on the subway etc; either I haven't done the right research on offline Ajax or it's not there yet.
;-) (in general I think there are some kludgey or under-QA'd aspects to landscape mode, maybe that's why they've been so slow bringing it to other apps that could REALLY use a wider keyboard.)
Also, on my friend's hacked iPhone, I saw stuff that would be useful but probably not too viable via Ajax, like an ssh client. Or DOOM.
Then there's a certain amount of potentially useful stuff that probably can never be safely exposed, stuff that leverages the iPhone-ness, rather than the PDA aspect. (Heh, just like there are "Wii aware" websites, I'd love to be able to read the state of the angle sensors.
And Apples standards are high, but they're not perfect; otherwise I wouldn't see obvious no-brainers like "gee, maybe the magnifying glass content should be onscreen even when the area being mangified is near the top"
Twat are you saying?
Yes, it's really a pity how if Apple allowed 3rd party software, everyone would have to put it on their phone.
Oh, you wouldn't? Then what's your point again?
I wouldn't mind even a highly sandboxed environment, s long as there was some kind of local storage and "offline" functionality.
Bleh, I was lurking for so long before I got an account, not too too long after the chips-n-dips era...now I wished I had grabbed the UID. nerd pride!
Not reading TFA, it reminds me a bit of my custom db/ui solution that I use for generalized information storage: links, books and movies I watch, developer notes, etc... it some web-based Perl CGI and is, in effect, a big old flat table database, the columns defined by text files, and it auto-generates a convenient form with the usual spattering of HTML input types...
Man, that's terrible!
Is it a side effect of some significant advantage of GSM over other technologies?
I thought RF interference was considered a bad thing...
I see some similar things when I look at a variety of Java toolkits, some offering very OO "you can pretend you're a swing app and ignore the HTTPRequest cycle"
I worry that a decade of homebrew Perl CGI has warped my brain, but frankly, HashMaps wrapping HTTP Request parameters seems really natural to me, and if you use a Model2+ approach w/ servlet and JSP pairs, you're writing your business logic in Java, your HTML in HTML (well, JSP... and honestly, I don't think I've ever been on a team that manage to leverage real benefit from tricks to let you edit HTML in HTML editors, and make that round trip) your CSS in CSS, your Javascript in Javascript, etc etc.
I see the flow control stuff as glue language... directing a user from page to page just ISNT THAT HARD... and its the stuff that's tightly coupled to EVERYTHING, and so I long for that to be as simple and not-get-in-your-way as possible, so that you can spend your mental cycles thinking about the stuff that's actually doing the heavy lifting.
Lots of toolkits offer lots of neat bells and whistles, but most really imply you need to learn the whole language and often new paradigm of thinking about flow control. And unlike APIs and things, your flow control tends not to be isolatable, so if you get something wrong, it's going to be harder to work your way out of. (And the more-OO-ish you get for flow control, the harder it'll be to make sense of your stacktrace, since the danger is that you screwed up something when establishing in your objects, not when the actual interaction was performed...)
On the other hand, I know I tend to be resistant to new core server technologies, unless they make a SUPER clear value proposition. So I'm worried I'm going to be some crazy old curmudgeon. Still, like in TFA, the guy took some good design lessons from the new language, and then stuck with what people really know, and that makes a lot of sense to me.
I have an iPhone.
Do all GSM phones have that weird effect on computer speakers?
If so... WTF? How did this get to be an Int'l standard?
Given the fat-thumb nature of the beast, I think the AutoCorrect as is at least "makes sense" though agree an option would be nice... though I would guess Apple is shy of over-optioning the beast.
In terms of audio output... I've used it with some speaker setups designed for it, and while I see the "this device wasn't meant for use with X, go to Airplane mode?" dialog, everything still works... as far as I can tell, it's them saying "uhh, you're going to get lots of weird GSM-ish staticky noise that this isn't shielded for"
That said, the thing I miss the most is ubiquitous landscape.
Also, they need to smarten up the algorithm for the magnifier, ESPECIALLY in landscape: it needs to go to some place ON THE DAMN SCREEN where my thumb isn't. -5 points for excessive duh.
What's the argument against it?
It seems to be the way Linux et al is heading. It seems like an extremely convenient place to stash some metadata for ubiquitous access w/o having to open the file, easy to modify, and that convenience outweighs the risk.
Who does it right, in your view? The old Mac "resource fork" thing? Unix magic? Some other OS that has made fewer inroads on the world stage?
I'd have to say games don't do things as well as other "real world" pursuits:
I don't think that they tell stories as well as movies and books.
I don't think that they do "challenge" as well as physical sports (from team sports all the way to darts and bowling")
In some ways, I don't think do "gaming" as well as traditional board, card, and RPGs (though it depends on what you're looking for...)
What I think games do really well, that no other genre can touch, is making new, creative, interactive systems and worlds. It's just amazing that we can have these virtual microcosms to run around in and can make immersive but utterly fantastic envirionments.
That's why I don't dig on traditional RPGs, where your interaction is menu-driven, and the only thing that changes is the story. I understand that the first-person aspect makes it more immersive than some other forms of storytelling, but still. Basically, if what makes your game different is strictly a team of writers and artists, I think you have a less engrossing product. (Conversely, I find a game with a well fleshed out story and heavy use of real world elements to be more engaging than an abstract or pure sandbox title.)
Even when the core of the game is tried-and-true, like w/ BioShock, there magic-ish elements and enemy behaviors allow for some novel interactions, and really that's what I'm after.
I think that's one reason other traditional media are jealous of their definition of art... they're ultimately more limited in how they interact. And that pure-cerebral, artist-mentally-changing-the-audience idea is important, but games have more objective novelty creative space to play in.
Heh. It took me clicking on the Read More to realized "Republic 2.0" is not blogging software.
The term for books is, I think "edition" rather than "version".
(Wasn't there late-90s publishing software called Frontier or something? i may have been influenced by thinking of that.)
Alright.
Star Trek apologia is an ancient form. I remember reading book compilations of... what was that fanzine in the 80s, "Trek"? And that one column of explaining how someone could possibly be waiting for a turbolift given this and such scheduling and people inside the lift having stopped it... the twin assumptions that A. Star Trek is 100% consistent universe and B. Its portrayal onscreen is 100% faithful to that reality.
You're taking this rather seriously. And not just in the "look, it's just a show sense", but in ignoring the "heheh well if humans on one damn planet can't agree on simple universal measures, you think species of total disconnected evolutionary and cultural history will?"
So, a topic that will come up on the wicket board: do you think inner classes are a positive, negative, or neutral sign of thoughtful OO?
I'm not sure if you mistyped, but I said there are times I wish Perl had a more sane object model.
The thing about the oopbad guy is... he makes some very fair, and almost inarguable points, even if you don't agree with the gist or the conclusion. People in his camp view OO enthusiasts as zealots of a specific, unshakable but not 100% justified faith, and people in the OO enthusiasts camp view him as something akin to the conspiracy theorists, full of odd little points, but it's too tiring to rebuke those points *en masse* because you don't think you'll convince him anyway.
And it's not like I'm in the oopbad camp anyway. And with enough stretch and strain, you end up kind of saying it often comes to be similar to the same thing, whether it's the fact that OO of course relies on procedures, or the way a Perl script and its output webpage can kind of be viewed as a kind of sort of object, or at LEAST an encapsulated "thing" with definitive inputs and outputs, and data and code being stored together.
I mean often, the issue is what flavor of OO to use; I mean, I think the recent emphasis on "prefer encapsulation to inheritance" goes against the grain of mediocre enthusiast OO.
Probably for the same reason we don't all use the metric system, or have Time Zones that shift by a quarter or half hour...