In the UK there are "Open Prisons": low security places for low-risk criminals. Armed robbers, gangsters, murderers, rapists etc. go in high security prisons, while perjurers, embezzlers, tax avoiders, shoplifters, manslaughterers by negligence and, er, copyright infringers are put in open prisons.
As I understand it, in an open prison, you're locked in a cell -- more like university accommodation than a barred cell like in Prison Break -- for stretches of time, but if you wanted to escape, you could just wander off during the time you're not locked up. Very few people do escape, because when you're re-apprehended, your original crime is trumped by the worse crime of escaping from prison, and this time you get put in a far more unpleasant high security jail.
More like, "The safest thing for us to do right now is close up, refund our customers, form a new company, sell our stock to said new company, and carry on trading." (maybe not selling Sony hardware this time).
Lik-Sang got closed down once before, and sprang back.
The reason VR (by which I mean the illusion of reality through 3D googles and motion sensing) was such a flash in the pan was that the concept was sound but the technology wasn't ready.
I remember trying it out in arcades in the early 90s. This was a time when we'd see the first Ridge Racer coin op and be astonished by the texture mapped 3D.
The VR stuff was low res (whether due to the graphics cards used or the screen technology in the goggles), used flat shaded models with low poly counts. But that wasn't the problem, the problem was the low frame rate combined with the slow response time of position detector in the helmet. You got an adequate sensation of seeing a 3D world, but if you turned your head it would take 0.25 seconds for your view to catch up. It was unconvincing, disorienting and nauseous.
So most of us wrote off VR, and the world moved on.
I'd argue that, largely due to the gaming industry, we're now long past the technological barriers that broke VR back then. Hardcore PC gamers insist on crazy framerates for games like Quake, so you can now buy commodity hardware that could present beautiful 3D worlds as a stereo pair on two displays as 120FPS without breaking a sweat.
Nintendo has demonstrated that it can deliver an affordable, small, 3D (or 6D if you agree with Sony that pitch/yaw/roll are extra) position sensor, with a gamer-friendly response time (I don't know how fast, but the point of the sensor bar rather than using lightgun technology is to get a response time of 1/60 s)
And finally, LCD colour screens have come of age.
I have doubts about this article - most people prefer to sketch on a 2D piece of paper than make 3D clay models. But I do think it's about time VR got a second chance.
With music playing, I can't concentrate fully on anything else (I wish I'd realised this *before* graduating from university!)
What I'd need to improve my concentration in a chattery environment, I guess is a constant background noise which is ignorable yet chatter blends into.
But then, since I choose not to work from home because the chatter is condusive to productivity, I don't need it.
I guess my question to you is: if itunes is difficult to use and a stinker, what legit alternative have you used that's better? i'd like to give it a try.
I'm not the OP, but I'll give it a shot.
I've not tried every MP3 library or portable player available, but my perception is that iTunes and iPod are the most usable of the bunch. So no, I couldn't recommend you an alternative.
However, that's a depressing state of affairs. Why hasn't someone made something better?
iTunes has gradually improved, although it retains a number of extremely confusing elements (e.g. overloaded meaning of checked/unchecked songs, the stuff you think you can do with smart playlists then find you can't).
The iPod benefits from the brilliance of the click wheel -- presumably patents hold everyone but Apple back -- but there are oodles of irritations in the iPod interface -- especially if you've got a couple of thousand tracks including a few compilations -- that could be removed with an iota of effort. As long as Apple has no close competitors in this area, though, what's the commercial pressure to improve.
B) Is it just me or do "meat pies" seem obscenely disgusting?
I don't understand this, because to me, putting meat in some pastry seems pretty obvious.
On a holiday in the States, we went to the whaling museum in New Bedford, MA. On display were some whalebone pastry crimpers, with an informational label saying "We may be used to fruit in pies, but in the 18th century it was common to put meat in pies and serve them as a main course."
We were nonplussed. Surely Americans weren't strangers to a savoury pie.
So the next time we passed a Walmart, we looked in their freezer section, where there was sizeable range of chicken, lamb and beef pies. So now I'm doubly confused. You can get meat pies in the States, yet now I've seen two sources talking about them as if it's something exotic, surprising and even disgusting.
Or are you just disgusted by the non-specific use of the word "meat"? Fear not. "Meat" means beef (unless you're in a curry house, when it means lamb). They're right about one thing though, buy the wrong meat pie and you're getting mechanically recovered cow eyelid.
People really DONT care about how to circumvent copyright protection. You buy an iPod, install iTunes on your computer, buy songs, and put them on the iPod - off you go. And frankly, that's all there's to it.
Geeks: get a life!
We're only trying to help. That "frankly, that's all there is to it" works until your iPod dies; it fails or you get bored of it, you want something new. Want to try some other brand of player? Say goodbye to your iTMS purchases, or start burning and re-ripping.
If you're thinking "that's OK, I'll never want a non-Apple music player", then please accept my sympathy for your lack of imagination. Never is a long time, technology changes fast, and music ought to be an investment.
We are talking specifically about iTunes Music Store, which does foist DRM on you. I do own an iPod, I set iTunes to rip to MP3, and I'm perfectly happy with that portable, non-DRM solution.
The iTunes Vendor lock-in myth:
- because in the 70s, our songs weren't locked into 8-tracks and LPs
- because in the 80s, our songs weren't locked into cassettes (and taping records introduced no sound quality loss)
- because in the 90s, our songs weren't locked into CDs (and recording CDs to tape introduced no sound quality loss)
These do not represent vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in means you've bought yourself into a position where you can't change vendor. For example, a company that's invested so much in Windows applications that it's all but impossible for them to consider migrating to a different OS. LPs, cassettes, CDs were all open cross-industry standards: if your Sony turntable broke, you could replace it with a Phillips turntable and all your old records would continue to work.
All of these technologies allowed you to buy music and continue using it forever, without locking you into a vendor. They didn't allow lossless copies, because that was not a reasonable expectation given the technology available at the time.
- because since the CD, music hasn't come under attack from the draconian DRM forced into DAT, MiniDisc, DVD-Audio, WMA and ATRAC.
And because it's come under attack before, we should now roll over and accept it? I had a MiniDisc, and I was stung by its copy protection while trying to do perfectly reasonable things (specific example, compile a musical intros quiz). That experience is one of the reasons I avoid DRM'd content now, and warn others about it.
Look, there is one simple fact, not a myth, which I think many Apple customers sinking hundreds of dollars into iTMS are unaware of:
If you have a significant amount of music purchased from iTMS, then to listen to it on a portable device you will either have to buy Apple devices for the rest of your life, or one day you will have to go through an inconvenient and potentially illegal protection stripping exercise.
It's the iPod accessory ecosystem that really locks you in.
Here, I agree with you. I'm even in that trap myself.
I think Apple's competitors (the Samsungs and iRivers and Creatives) should form a consortium and agree on some connectivity standards. I don't think there's scope for a serious iRiver accessory ecosystem to thrive, but if enough companies get together, there would be a decent market for (for example) a car connector that fits any player that meets the shared standard.
I'd sell that non-iPod piece of crap to some sucker for cheap and then buy a new iPod. End of problem.
And that's vendor lock in.
As long as iPods are better than their competitors, you can be complacent about this state of affairs. For the moment, I'll agree that iPods are the best MP3 player out there, or at least the least-worst. But the bigger your DRM'd music collection gets, the more locked in you'll be, and the less Apple will need to worry about retaining your custom.
I'm guessing from your sentence structure you're young. Do you see the music you buy as something you'll be listening to in 60 years time? I know I always have. Is it entirely beyond your imagination that anybody but Apple will ever improve on the iPod?
A lay user can be offended by inelegance. I think most people can see that converting one file into another by moving it onto a piece of plastic, then moving it off the piece of plastic, ain't right.
But most non-nerds aren't going to back up at all. And where we came in is that they're the people who will get a shock when they get some other MP3 playing device and find out DRM stops them from using it.
Him: "My iPod broke and my gran bought me a cool new player to replace it. It's not an iPod but it's still cool. Now, how do I copy all that stuff I bought off iTunes onto it?" You: "It's easy. Just burn them all to CD, then rip them again. If you didn't buy whole albums at a time, you'll have to type in the artist and track names yourself." Him: "What? I bought 50 albums" You: "Then you'll need 50 CDRs and a spare weekend."
I'd feel cheated. Wouldn't you?
Re:Doublespeak he can't avoid...
on
Jobs Unfazed by Zune
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Come on. The buy-burn-rip option is offensively inelegant and wasteful. The DRM workaround I had in mind was JHymn, which is geeky enough that I wouldn't want to talk my Mum through it.
A stack of audio CDRs is not a sensible backup: they take up too much space, you lose your metadata, you lose some quality (not a massive deal, but galling nonetheless), and re-ripping any significant volume of music is a huge chore -- especially if your backups don't match anything in CDDB.
You might have the energy for that. I'll be backing up by copying files to a removable HDD.
"How can you get less hassle then buying a song from iTunes and backing it up?" : buy it, rip it, own it forever, play it anywhere.
You're saying "but now you have no backup". If you just treat music files as files, they get covered by your existing backup strategy (although admittedly, a digital music collection will push up the size of backup you need).
If you're buying from iTunes and DRM isn't an issue for you then either
(a) a geek who knows how to work around it (b) a non-geek who's due for a shock some time down the line, when you find you've sunk significant money into a music collection that doesn't play on your new equipment.
I *can* work around iTunes DRM, but I choose to buy non-DRM media because it's less hassle, and I don't want to reward a vendor who treats me that way.
Think about the job, not the employer
on
Microsoft or Google?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I worked for IBM for about 5 years. What I found out was that a corporation is not homogenous. In IBM, you could be an egghead in one of the research labs working on cool cutting edge stuff, or you could be a suited consultant plugging software components together on a customer site, or you could be buried in an obscure backwater maintaining 30 year old mainframe code.
I bet MS is the same. I even bet Google's approaching that stage: I've already read one Slashdotter refuting the statement that Google engineers can move projects any time no questions asked. Of course, if you're in the right bit of Google, it might appear that way.
So, look at the job, not the company. And, I agree with everyone who's mentioned location too.
I'll take issue with the "you can't rush good cooking" bullet.
Many dishes are best when done quickly and often at high heat. Think of fajitas, calamari, tuna steaks, shrimp, stir-fry,
But to stretch the analogy to breaking point: those kinds of dish rely on careful preparation. If you're making a chicken stir fry, you don't want to brown the meat, then find you've not chopped your onion yet.
One could, of course, take this as a metaphor for traditional software engineering methodology. Producing the High Level Design is preparing the ingredients; chucking them in a wok is the coding. Skimp on the former and you end up with a mess.
But I don't buy that. Developing software is more like creating a recipe than following one. And that's a whole new analogy to stretch.
I think Google's either very lucky or very clever not to have genuine externally created deadlines to work to. The number one source of genuine deadlines in my career has been the sunsetting of legacy services: "Our network provider is pulling their SNA service in 18 months. We need to provide an alternative to the 40,000 customers who reach our service using SNA, and migrate them by that date, or pay AT&T $x million dollars to extend the service."
Of course, you can forestall this kind of issue by smelling the coffee and moving your customers off dying platforms before you're forced to -- but it's not glamourous work by any means, so surely it's not going to attract engineers in a company where you can jump onto any project you like on a whim.
I bet you $20 that this thing will work perfectly with AirTunes.
And how does that help?
Re:Wii-Mote is not the end of the world
on
The Wii Takes NYC
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· Score: 1
Do people realize that you WILL be able to use a NORMAL controller for the games too? So even if the wiimote stinks, the system will still be a good buy. If the wiimote gets old, or tiring, or even if it doesn't work right... it's not going to be the only control option!
For many, many games, the Wiimote will be the only control option. This is a good thing. I'm buying a Wiimote, and a bundle of electronics and media that lets me play games with it!
Q: When is a novelty no longer a novelty? A: When it is common place
No. Q: When is a novelty no longer a novelty to an individual? A: When that individual is used to it.
I bought a Saturn 3D controller from a car boot sale once, and the man who sold it to me said "Ooh, it's good that. When you push it a short way, Sonic walks, but if you push it further, he runs!". To him, analogue control was still a novelty. That's nothing to do with how commonplace analogue control was. It's to do with how much exposure he'd had to it.
For the first couple of days with a Wii, you're going to be going: "Look! When I swing the wiimote up, the wee fella swings his golf club to match! Club goes up! Club goes down! Club goes up! Club goes down!". After a while, the novelty will fade, and you'll have a motion sensing controller that's no longer a novelty to you. No matter how many Nintendo sold.
And every Wii owner will go through the same experience.
I think you'll agree that enough Wii games will be out there to merit at least a few Wii-exclusive titles (and of course, the first-party stuff will all be Wii exclusive). This that for the first time there will be developers working on titles for a platform where EVERY USER will have a motion sensing controller and be familiar with it -- not considering it to be a novelty. And that's what excites me.
Re:still supprised at the $250 price tag.
on
The Wii Takes NYC
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· Score: 1
you're stuck with Wii sports, when the game you really want is Zelda.
I think Nintendo would like everyone to play with the full range of Wiimote features early on. It looks as if Zelda will mostly use a more traditional control method (with some tacked on stuff for the Wiimote).
Since the Wiimote is the one big thing that distinguishes Wii from Gamecube (3x performance increase isn't that big a deal; nor is slighly better graphics), you'll be a happier consumer if you get to use it right away, right?
If they enjoy Wii and Wii Sports for a few weeks, and then allow it to gather dust, like so many other toys, the company's gambit will have failed, and it will need to fight it out as an also-ran third place player.
Well, it's a risk I guess. But I imagine that anyone vaguely social who bought the basic Wii package on its own, would be out buying one or more extra controllers very shortly thereafter. It looks like a game that cries out to be played multiplayer.... and once you're in a buying pattern...
The article says this too: The reward for playing a game has to be the game itself. We often overlook this fact, making the reward the ending or leveling up or getting to explore new areas.
Me, I've a very low boredom threshold, and if I'm not having fun, I'll stop playing. This happens in most "explore the dungeon" type games; when Link has killed all the baddies in an area, I'm running around trying to spot the doorway or switch I must have missed, and just getting from one end of the level to the other takes 5 minutes of uneventful play. In that kind of situation, I give up and play something that's fun instead.
Whereas, a fun game, I don't mind whether I'm winning or losing, because I'm having fun; I'll replay the level I've just beaten, because it was just so much fun to play. In GTA3, going off and raising hell was so much fun, that I never finished the game because there was always something more entertaining IN THE GAME than finishing the latest mission.
And you best hope that the wiimote is not the defining feature of the console. Motion sensing is cool, but I don't want every damn game to require me to wave the wand at it to play. No more than I want to use a light gun to shoot goombas in super mario brothers.
I think the intention is that most Wii games will use wiimote features. The difference between this and the Powerglove is that this is the controller that comes with the console. A developer knows that if their customer has a Wii, they have a wiimote. The great thing about this is that the controller will very quickly cease to be a novelty, and developers will be able to look past that and use it as a tool for great game experiences.
And users will quickly get past "I don't want to wave a wand at every game", any more than they currently think "I don't want to mash buttons to do something" today.
OTOH I *like* novelty controllers, and to an extent the wiimote will mean fewer of them. A Donkey Conga type game on Wii, for example, would use the wiimote rather than custom bongos. A Wii "Samba de Amigo" won't have real maracas, it'll use the wiimote. Sad, because those controllers are a whole lot of fun. Nice though, because there's less of a barrier to creating or owning games like those.
Slashdot Mirror
There really is no other type.
In the UK there are "Open Prisons": low security places for low-risk criminals. Armed robbers, gangsters, murderers, rapists etc. go in high security prisons, while perjurers, embezzlers, tax avoiders, shoplifters, manslaughterers by negligence and, er, copyright infringers are put in open prisons.
As I understand it, in an open prison, you're locked in a cell -- more like university accommodation than a barred cell like in Prison Break -- for stretches of time, but if you wanted to escape, you could just wander off during the time you're not locked up. Very few people do escape, because when you're re-apprehended, your original crime is trumped by the worse crime of escaping from prison, and this time you get put in a far more unpleasant high security jail.
Isn't there something similar in the US?
More like, "The safest thing for us to do right now is close up, refund our customers, form a new company, sell our stock to said new company, and carry on trading." (maybe not selling Sony hardware this time).
Lik-Sang got closed down once before, and sprang back.
The reason VR (by which I mean the illusion of reality through 3D googles and motion sensing) was such a flash in the pan was that the concept was sound but the technology wasn't ready.
I remember trying it out in arcades in the early 90s. This was a time when we'd see the first Ridge Racer coin op and be astonished by the texture mapped 3D.
The VR stuff was low res (whether due to the graphics cards used or the screen technology in the goggles), used flat shaded models with low poly counts. But that wasn't the problem, the problem was the low frame rate combined with the slow response time of position detector in the helmet. You got an adequate sensation of seeing a 3D world, but if you turned your head it would take 0.25 seconds for your view to catch up. It was unconvincing, disorienting and nauseous.
So most of us wrote off VR, and the world moved on.
I'd argue that, largely due to the gaming industry, we're now long past the technological barriers that broke VR back then. Hardcore PC gamers insist on crazy framerates for games like Quake, so you can now buy commodity hardware that could present beautiful 3D worlds as a stereo pair on two displays as 120FPS without breaking a sweat.
Nintendo has demonstrated that it can deliver an affordable, small, 3D (or 6D if you agree with Sony that pitch/yaw/roll are extra) position sensor, with a gamer-friendly response time (I don't know how fast, but the point of the sensor bar rather than using lightgun technology is to get a response time of 1/60 s)
And finally, LCD colour screens have come of age.
I have doubts about this article - most people prefer to sketch on a 2D piece of paper than make 3D clay models. But I do think it's about time VR got a second chance.
With music playing, I can't concentrate fully on anything else (I wish I'd realised this *before* graduating from university!)
What I'd need to improve my concentration in a chattery environment, I guess is a constant background noise which is ignorable yet chatter blends into.
But then, since I choose not to work from home because the chatter is condusive to productivity, I don't need it.
I guess my question to you is: if itunes is difficult to use and a stinker, what legit alternative have you used that's better? i'd like to give it a try.
I'm not the OP, but I'll give it a shot.
I've not tried every MP3 library or portable player available, but my perception is that iTunes and iPod are the most usable of the bunch. So no, I couldn't recommend you an alternative.
However, that's a depressing state of affairs. Why hasn't someone made something better?
iTunes has gradually improved, although it retains a number of extremely confusing elements (e.g. overloaded meaning of checked/unchecked songs, the stuff you think you can do with smart playlists then find you can't).
The iPod benefits from the brilliance of the click wheel -- presumably patents hold everyone but Apple back -- but there are oodles of irritations in the iPod interface -- especially if you've got a couple of thousand tracks including a few compilations -- that could be removed with an iota of effort. As long as Apple has no close competitors in this area, though, what's the commercial pressure to improve.
B) Is it just me or do "meat pies" seem obscenely disgusting?
I don't understand this, because to me, putting meat in some pastry seems pretty obvious.
On a holiday in the States, we went to the whaling museum in New Bedford, MA. On display were some whalebone pastry crimpers, with an informational label saying "We may be used to fruit in pies, but in the 18th century it was common to put meat in pies and serve them as a main course."
We were nonplussed. Surely Americans weren't strangers to a savoury pie.
So the next time we passed a Walmart, we looked in their freezer section, where there was sizeable range of chicken, lamb and beef pies. So now I'm doubly confused. You can get meat pies in the States, yet now I've seen two sources talking about them as if it's something exotic, surprising and even disgusting.
Or are you just disgusted by the non-specific use of the word "meat"? Fear not. "Meat" means beef (unless you're in a curry house, when it means lamb). They're right about one thing though, buy the wrong meat pie and you're getting mechanically recovered cow eyelid.
People really DONT care about how to circumvent copyright protection. You buy an iPod, install iTunes on your computer, buy songs, and put them on the iPod - off you go. And frankly, that's all there's to it.
Geeks: get a life!
We're only trying to help. That "frankly, that's all there is to it" works until your iPod dies; it fails or you get bored of it, you want something new. Want to try some other brand of player? Say goodbye to your iTMS purchases, or start burning and re-ripping.
If you're thinking "that's OK, I'll never want a non-Apple music player", then please accept my sympathy for your lack of imagination. Never is a long time, technology changes fast, and music ought to be an investment.
The "iTunes/iPod requires DRM" Myth
we all know it doesn't.
We are talking specifically about iTunes Music Store, which does foist DRM on you. I do own an iPod, I set iTunes to rip to MP3, and I'm perfectly happy with that portable, non-DRM solution.
The iTunes Vendor lock-in myth:
- because in the 70s, our songs weren't locked into 8-tracks and LPs
- because in the 80s, our songs weren't locked into cassettes (and taping records introduced no sound quality loss)
- because in the 90s, our songs weren't locked into CDs (and recording CDs to tape introduced no sound quality loss)
These do not represent vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in means you've bought yourself into a position where you can't change vendor. For example, a company that's invested so much in Windows applications that it's all but impossible for them to consider migrating to a different OS. LPs, cassettes, CDs were all open cross-industry standards: if your Sony turntable broke, you could replace it with a Phillips turntable and all your old records would continue to work.
All of these technologies allowed you to buy music and continue using it forever, without locking you into a vendor. They didn't allow lossless copies, because that was not a reasonable expectation given the technology available at the time.
- because since the CD, music hasn't come under attack from the draconian DRM forced into DAT, MiniDisc, DVD-Audio, WMA and ATRAC.
And because it's come under attack before, we should now roll over and accept it? I had a MiniDisc, and I was stung by its copy protection while trying to do perfectly reasonable things (specific example, compile a musical intros quiz). That experience is one of the reasons I avoid DRM'd content now, and warn others about it.
Look, there is one simple fact, not a myth, which I think many Apple customers sinking hundreds of dollars into iTMS are unaware of:
If you have a significant amount of music purchased from iTMS, then to listen to it on a portable device you will either have to buy Apple devices for the rest of your life, or one day you will have to go through an inconvenient and potentially illegal protection stripping exercise.
It's the iPod accessory ecosystem that really locks you in.
Here, I agree with you. I'm even in that trap myself.
I think Apple's competitors (the Samsungs and iRivers and Creatives) should form a consortium and agree on some connectivity standards. I don't think there's scope for a serious iRiver accessory ecosystem to thrive, but if enough companies get together, there would be a decent market for (for example) a car connector that fits any player that meets the shared standard.
I'd sell that non-iPod piece of crap to some sucker for cheap and then buy a new iPod. End of problem.
And that's vendor lock in.
As long as iPods are better than their competitors, you can be complacent about this state of affairs. For the moment, I'll agree that iPods are the best MP3 player out there, or at least the least-worst. But the bigger your DRM'd music collection gets, the more locked in you'll be, and the less Apple will need to worry about retaining your custom.
I'm guessing from your sentence structure you're young. Do you see the music you buy as something you'll be listening to in 60 years time? I know I always have. Is it entirely beyond your imagination that anybody but Apple will ever improve on the iPod?
A lay user can be offended by inelegance. I think most people can see that converting one file into another by moving it onto a piece of plastic, then moving it off the piece of plastic, ain't right.
But most non-nerds aren't going to back up at all. And where we came in is that they're the people who will get a shock when they get some other MP3 playing device and find out DRM stops them from using it.
Him: "My iPod broke and my gran bought me a cool new player to replace it. It's not an iPod but it's still cool. Now, how do I copy all that stuff I bought off iTunes onto it?"
You: "It's easy. Just burn them all to CD, then rip them again. If you didn't buy whole albums at a time, you'll have to type in the artist and track names yourself."
Him: "What? I bought 50 albums"
You: "Then you'll need 50 CDRs and a spare weekend."
I'd feel cheated. Wouldn't you?
Come on. The buy-burn-rip option is offensively inelegant and wasteful. The DRM workaround I had in mind was JHymn, which is geeky enough that I wouldn't want to talk my Mum through it.
A stack of audio CDRs is not a sensible backup: they take up too much space, you lose your metadata, you lose some quality (not a massive deal, but galling nonetheless), and re-ripping any significant volume of music is a huge chore -- especially if your backups don't match anything in CDDB.
You might have the energy for that. I'll be backing up by copying files to a removable HDD.
"How can you get less hassle then buying a song from iTunes and backing it up?" : buy it, rip it, own it forever, play it anywhere.
You're saying "but now you have no backup". If you just treat music files as files, they get covered by your existing backup strategy (although admittedly, a digital music collection will push up the size of backup you need).
If you're buying from iTunes and DRM isn't an issue for you then either
(a) a geek who knows how to work around it
(b) a non-geek who's due for a shock some time down the line, when you find you've sunk significant money into a music collection that doesn't play on your new equipment.
I *can* work around iTunes DRM, but I choose to buy non-DRM media because it's less hassle, and I don't want to reward a vendor who treats me that way.
I worked for IBM for about 5 years. What I found out was that a corporation is not homogenous. In IBM, you could be an egghead in one of the research labs working on cool cutting edge stuff, or you could be a suited consultant plugging software components together on a customer site, or you could be buried in an obscure backwater maintaining 30 year old mainframe code.
I bet MS is the same. I even bet Google's approaching that stage: I've already read one Slashdotter refuting the statement that Google engineers can move projects any time no questions asked. Of course, if you're in the right bit of Google, it might appear that way.
So, look at the job, not the company. And, I agree with everyone who's mentioned location too.
I'll take issue with the "you can't rush good cooking" bullet.
Many dishes are best when done quickly and often at high heat. Think of fajitas, calamari, tuna steaks, shrimp, stir-fry,
But to stretch the analogy to breaking point: those kinds of dish rely on careful preparation. If you're making a chicken stir fry, you don't want to brown the meat, then find you've not chopped your onion yet.
One could, of course, take this as a metaphor for traditional software engineering methodology. Producing the High Level Design is preparing the ingredients; chucking them in a wok is the coding. Skimp on the former and you end up with a mess.
But I don't buy that. Developing software is more like creating a recipe than following one. And that's a whole new analogy to stretch.
I think Google's either very lucky or very clever not to have genuine externally created deadlines to work to. The number one source of genuine deadlines in my career has been the sunsetting of legacy services: "Our network provider is pulling their SNA service in 18 months. We need to provide an alternative to the 40,000 customers who reach our service using SNA, and migrate them by that date, or pay AT&T $x million dollars to extend the service."
Of course, you can forestall this kind of issue by smelling the coffee and moving your customers off dying platforms before you're forced to -- but it's not glamourous work by any means, so surely it's not going to attract engineers in a company where you can jump onto any project you like on a whim.
"TV on to browse your music collection."
I bet you $20 that this thing will work perfectly with AirTunes.
And how does that help?
Do people realize that you WILL be able to use a NORMAL controller for the games too? So even if the wiimote stinks, the system will still be a good buy. If the wiimote gets old, or tiring, or even if it doesn't work right... it's not going to be the only control option!
For many, many games, the Wiimote will be the only control option. This is a good thing. I'm buying a Wiimote, and a bundle of electronics and media that lets me play games with it!
I wont hold my breath, I really want the Wii, but I reckon it wont be out here (the UK) until long after I have stopped really wanting it
The European press conference is tomorrow an noon UK time. So you needn't hold your breath that long.
Dreamcast had mouse and keyboard. So did PS2.
But by not being bundled, they were too obscure for most devs to bother supporting.
Q: When is a novelty no longer a novelty?
A: When it is common place
No.
Q: When is a novelty no longer a novelty to an individual?
A: When that individual is used to it.
I bought a Saturn 3D controller from a car boot sale once, and the man who sold it to me said "Ooh, it's good that. When you push it a short way, Sonic walks, but if you push it further, he runs!".
To him, analogue control was still a novelty. That's nothing to do with how commonplace analogue control was. It's to do with how much exposure he'd had to it.
For the first couple of days with a Wii, you're going to be going: "Look! When I swing the wiimote up, the wee fella swings his golf club to match! Club goes up! Club goes down! Club goes up! Club goes down!". After a while, the novelty will fade, and you'll have a motion sensing controller that's no longer a novelty to you. No matter how many Nintendo sold.
And every Wii owner will go through the same experience.
I think you'll agree that enough Wii games will be out there to merit at least a few Wii-exclusive titles (and of course, the first-party stuff will all be Wii exclusive). This that for the first time there will be developers working on titles for a platform where EVERY USER will have a motion sensing controller and be familiar with it -- not considering it to be a novelty. And that's what excites me.
you're stuck with Wii sports, when the game you really want is Zelda.
I think Nintendo would like everyone to play with the full range of Wiimote features early on. It looks as if Zelda will mostly use a more traditional control method (with some tacked on stuff for the Wiimote).
Since the Wiimote is the one big thing that distinguishes Wii from Gamecube (3x performance increase isn't that big a deal; nor is slighly better graphics), you'll be a happier consumer if you get to use it right away, right?
The pack-in analysis is kinda interesting.
... and once you're in a buying pattern...
If they enjoy Wii and Wii Sports for a few weeks, and then allow it to gather dust, like so many other toys, the company's gambit will have failed, and it will need to fight it out as an also-ran third place player.
Well, it's a risk I guess. But I imagine that anyone vaguely social who bought the basic Wii package on its own, would be out buying one or more extra controllers very shortly thereafter. It looks like a game that cries out to be played multiplayer.
I prefer to 'Play' the game.
The article says this too:
The reward for playing a game has to be the game itself. We often overlook this fact, making the reward the ending or leveling up or getting to explore new areas.
Me, I've a very low boredom threshold, and if I'm not having fun, I'll stop playing. This happens in most "explore the dungeon" type games; when Link has killed all the baddies in an area, I'm running around trying to spot the doorway or switch I must have missed, and just getting from one end of the level to the other takes 5 minutes of uneventful play. In that kind of situation, I give up and play something that's fun instead.
Whereas, a fun game, I don't mind whether I'm winning or losing, because I'm having fun; I'll replay the level I've just beaten, because it was just so much fun to play. In GTA3, going off and raising hell was so much fun, that I never finished the game because there was always something more entertaining IN THE GAME than finishing the latest mission.
And you best hope that the wiimote is not the defining feature of the console. Motion sensing is cool, but I don't want every damn game to require me to wave the wand at it to play. No more than I want to use a light gun to shoot goombas in super mario brothers.
I think the intention is that most Wii games will use wiimote features. The difference between this and the Powerglove is that this is the controller that comes with the console. A developer knows that if their customer has a Wii, they have a wiimote. The great thing about this is that the controller will very quickly cease to be a novelty, and developers will be able to look past that and use it as a tool for great game experiences.
And users will quickly get past "I don't want to wave a wand at every game", any more than they currently think "I don't want to mash buttons to do something" today.
OTOH I *like* novelty controllers, and to an extent the wiimote will mean fewer of them. A Donkey Conga type game on Wii, for example, would use the wiimote rather than custom bongos. A Wii "Samba de Amigo" won't have real maracas, it'll use the wiimote. Sad, because those controllers are a whole lot of fun. Nice though, because there's less of a barrier to creating or owning games like those.