Yeah, but in never winter nights since you could see the dice rolls/etc if you walked by someone who was a thief and pick pocketed you, you'd suddenly see that our money was reduced by 3 coins...
Again, the computer repeats the lack of realism brought about by a system that's hamstrung by the need to be simple enough for dice rolls.
In real life, you wouldn't discover you'd been pickpocketed until some time later -- if at all. I have only an approximate idea of how much cash is in my jeans pocket right now.
Actually, I don't find the technology very suitable for D&D and other role playing games (while it would be perfect for chess).
Surely, though, there's no better medium for face-to-face chess than a real chess board with wooden pieces. For distance playing, or for playing against an AI, there's nothing much wrong with a traditional computer implementation.
You could use Surface with special pieces to record the moves - but it would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
I love seeing the virtual dice rolls in Neverwinter Nights, because then I know just what an impact raising my AC by 1 point has, etc.
It just goes to show; tastes vary.
Myself, I'd prefer the "system" to be as hidden as possible, in order to be more lifelike. So you don't "raise your AC by one point". Rather, you'd get some better armour. Internally, the model of "better armour" could be as crude as incementing a single variable, or as sophisticated as modeling the physics every time the armour collides with a sword.
If I were a barbarian in a fantasy world, I wouldn't be rejoicing because my HP had increased. I would be reflecting on how I feel vaguely fitter and stronger.
In real life, if I practice guitar for a week, I am not aware of the improvement as a "+1 guitar playing bonus".
I was put off D&D at school when lunchtime sessions would degenerate into endless dice rolling, rather than, you know, roleplaying fantasy adventures. (no giggling at the back - Family Guy already did that joke)
I think baby steps might be the way forward. Take an established board game, in which some piece of game state is somewhat inconvenient for a human to work out on the fly -- and use AR to provide that info.
Frivolous example: in Carcassonne, scoring for farmers is slightly fiddly. AR could highlight each farm and automate the scoring.
I think there's a lot of value in trying *not* to overstep the mark at first; enhance a board game with AR, rather than turn it into an AR game.
If this catches on, watching people play should provide plenty of ideas of how to make an "AR game" that keeps people playing with the on-board objects.
A good way, of course, is to design the game so you can't win without touching with the pieces!
cloud services - in the sense of resources that are shared with external customers
As you stated a couple of levels up, we haven't agreed terms.
what I'm getting at is the vaguery surrounding what "cloud computing" actually is
I see what you mean.
To me, cloud computing means massively parallel deployments, ideally running applications optimised for that environment. So Google Search is a cloud application, and always has been. Amazon's catalogue is a cloud application, since whatever time they realised that traditional web hosting couldn't scale to their needs.
And because they were smart, they built themselves cloud platforms that were generally useful; used them themselves for various purposes; then finally made them available to external developers.
Whether you build your own cloud, or use someone else's, is not part of my definition.
But, more people can benefit from huge clouds than have the resources to build one. For example, if I host my images on S3, a client anywhere in the world is likely to get it from a cache near them - my chickenfeed web site gets all the capacity benefits of Amazon's huge infrastructure.
However, there's a lot of scope for re-use of that setup. Not great for the creative DM who writes his own campaigns, but if you treat it as a way to ship commercially designed campaigns it could well work.
In that scenario (in a hypothetical world where something Surface-like is affordable for the home), you'd buy the scenario, click a couple of buttons, and everything would be set up and ready to go.
How about if all the players had e-ink character sheets, updated wirelessly, too?:D
A "virtual 20 sided dice"? No, no, no. This is *not* the way to apply computing to roleplaying. The computer can hide the dice rolls, in fact it can hide the whole "combat system" from you, and just allow you to roleplay.
Now, I *would* like to see augmented reality applied to board gaming. Something that combines the tactile experience of playing with wooden pieces, with the convenience of computer gaming. For example, what if you could play Acquire, and see the current stock value hovering over the company tiles, rather than having to stop to count?
I appreciate that's something to be considered - but people buy services from third parties all the time.
I strongly suspect that, at least more recently, Google and Amazon would be structured internally such that different units are responsible for providing the cloud platform, and for providing applications.
I guess it would be fairly straightforward for Amazon to split itself into a bookshop company and a cloud company, with one being a customer of the other.
In the case of software-as-a-service (just one example of cloud computing), it's pretty much as you describe.
Does Microsoft say, for example, that the new Office 2012 is entirely cloud-based; no need for apps on your local machine, but they own the server farms to host all of the thousands of Office cloud apps that people are running?
Just substitute Google for Microsoft, and Google Apps for Office 2012, and you've got an exact description of how Google Apps works.
It is scary to think the government will hand over data and processing to the cloud instead of providing a federally managed private cloud on a secure private network. This reeks of lobbying and special interests.
The only thing it reeks of, is what the US and UK governments have favoured for the last 20 years or more -- discourage public projects, encourage private sector projects. Don't let the government build a hospital when you can enter into a "Public Private Partnership" instead.
There's plenty of precedence for trusting private companies with government data.
I do agree that a state-owned private cloud would make the most sense - but alas that's not how the US and UK governments have tended to go for a long time.
A couple of things that cloud computing has, that time-sharing doesn't capture:
- fault tolerance by virtue of distributed-ness
- performance by virtue of distributed-ness
For applications well suited to cloud computing (e.g. S3) this is a big win. If a node goes down, it's no big deal. If your user gets (for instance) an image from S3, they're likely to be getting it from a node that's geographically close to them.
However I have friends who choose to send me a Facebook message instead (perhaps they're bad at managing their address book?). When they do so, Facebook forwards it to my email account -- this is the default.
I'm not defending Facebook as a replacement for email -- it's a walled garden and that makes no sense.
But you're showing all the signs of not knowing what Facebook does. Although when using Facebook in a browser there's a rudimentary IM client, the primary way of communicating people is essentially a closed email system. "Click here to leave a message for John".
Only a few months ago did I manage to explain how email works to my parents (and what the purpose of email is).
I just cannot see them accepting the loss of control of their data by moving to Google Wave.
Woah, you waited until 2009 to explain email to your parents, and you bothered telling them where the message is physically located?
That's a great way to make it hard for yourself. All it takes is "Type my name here, type a message here, hit 'send', look, now I can read what you sent me."
Contracts aren't a guarantee. They may sign a contract and not follow the terms. They may go bankrupt. A massive failure may make the total amount of compensation to be paid larger than the money the company has.
By that logic, you'd never outsource anything at all. Never hire in an external company to do your office catering: they may sign a contract and not follow the terms!
The thing with Wave is that it *is* an email replacement. If you use it a certain way, it's directly analogous to email.
You can then *choose* to bring Wave's other features into your conversation.
The way I see it, email is almost perfect, except that sometimes it would be better to insert comments directly into someone's message, than to paste a quote into my reply. Sometimes it would be better to edit someone's text directly, than to reply with my suggested amendments. And Wave let's you do that.
Like email, it won't take off unless you have a critical mass of contacts on it. It's no good using Wave to organise a BBQ, if most of the people I want to invite don't have Wave. I tried to push adoption of email in an organisation which didn't already use it, once. People would seldom check their inbox, because it was usually empty. People used other methods to contact people, because they knew email inboxes seldom got checked. Catch 22.
I know my songs, videos, and other important files are backed-up across triple drives. I don't know if the same is true if I stored them online, and this major failure of Sidekick demonstrates I'm right not to trust them.
That depends entirely on the online storage service you use. If your contract says the files are backed up across triple drives, then you've a right to expect that they are. If your contract doesn't say that, then you shouldn't expect it. Simple.
Now, I'd argue that any cloud service worthy of the name ought to have very robust mirrored storage. But since there's no legal definition of the word, you'd better read the contract.
All that is true - you're looking for a more direct analogy than I intended.
The similarity is that in both cases, the feature (exportability of content in the case of Facebook; absence of DRM in the case of iTunes) is something that a typical non-technical punter doesn't know they want, until they need it.
Hence, it's not a factor they consider when choosing a service -- at least, not the first time they choose a service. And hence we can't expect market forces to lead companies to provide these things.
In the case of iTunes, of course, consumers became more aware of the issues, and Apple had to provide.
Still the implicit problem remains: *if* people do indeed value that kind of security. Which they don't.
If consumers don't care about it, then it's not a problem.
The problem comes when they discover they care about it, too late. Compare with DRM, and the iTunes customer who's perfectly satisfied, until he buys a new non-Apple MP3 player.
Email conversations are not message board conversations, where third parties may enter in the middle of a discussion and might require some context.
In my professional life, they very frequently are. A few people will start discussing an issue by email. Then they'll decide it might be a database problem, so they'll add the database guy to the recipient list, who'll get an email out of the blue with 50 quoted messages. A couple of days and another 50 messages later, they'll bring a network guy in. He gets 100 quoted messages.
Wave (of something like it) is perfect for this kind of thing. It means you no longer have to quote the message you're replying to, because anyone added to the wave will be able to see the history.
Of course, people in this situation should be using existing tools such as bug trackers. But all too often they keep using email instead. My theory is that it's because of the bug trackers' unwieldy UIs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but in never winter nights since you could see the dice rolls /etc if you walked by someone who was a thief and pick pocketed you, you'd suddenly see that our money was reduced by 3 coins...
Again, the computer repeats the lack of realism brought about by a system that's hamstrung by the need to be simple enough for dice rolls.
In real life, you wouldn't discover you'd been pickpocketed until some time later -- if at all. I have only an approximate idea of how much cash is in my jeans pocket right now.
Eh, sometimes you need to know that you missed the monster after rolling a 17
Would that happen in real life combat? Does it happen in the fantasy novels D&D tries to simulate?
Actually, I don't find the technology very suitable for D&D and other role playing games (while it would be perfect for chess).
Surely, though, there's no better medium for face-to-face chess than a real chess board with wooden pieces. For distance playing, or for playing against an AI, there's nothing much wrong with a traditional computer implementation.
You could use Surface with special pieces to record the moves - but it would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
I love seeing the virtual dice rolls in Neverwinter Nights, because then I know just what an impact raising my AC by 1 point has, etc.
It just goes to show; tastes vary.
Myself, I'd prefer the "system" to be as hidden as possible, in order to be more lifelike. So you don't "raise your AC by one point". Rather, you'd get some better armour. Internally, the model of "better armour" could be as crude as incementing a single variable, or as sophisticated as modeling the physics every time the armour collides with a sword.
If I were a barbarian in a fantasy world, I wouldn't be rejoicing because my HP had increased. I would be reflecting on how I feel vaguely fitter and stronger.
In real life, if I practice guitar for a week, I am not aware of the improvement as a "+1 guitar playing bonus".
I was put off D&D at school when lunchtime sessions would degenerate into endless dice rolling, rather than, you know, roleplaying fantasy adventures. (no giggling at the back - Family Guy already did that joke)
The video is pretty neat.
I think baby steps might be the way forward. Take an established board game, in which some piece of game state is somewhat inconvenient for a human to work out on the fly -- and use AR to provide that info.
Frivolous example: in Carcassonne, scoring for farmers is slightly fiddly. AR could highlight each farm and automate the scoring.
I think there's a lot of value in trying *not* to overstep the mark at first; enhance a board game with AR, rather than turn it into an AR game.
If this catches on, watching people play should provide plenty of ideas of how to make an "AR game" that keeps people playing with the on-board objects.
A good way, of course, is to design the game so you can't win without touching with the pieces!
cloud services - in the sense of resources that are shared with external customers
As you stated a couple of levels up, we haven't agreed terms.
what I'm getting at is the vaguery surrounding what "cloud computing" actually is
I see what you mean.
To me, cloud computing means massively parallel deployments, ideally running applications optimised for that environment. So Google Search is a cloud application, and always has been. Amazon's catalogue is a cloud application, since whatever time they realised that traditional web hosting couldn't scale to their needs.
And because they were smart, they built themselves cloud platforms that were generally useful; used them themselves for various purposes; then finally made them available to external developers.
Whether you build your own cloud, or use someone else's, is not part of my definition.
But, more people can benefit from huge clouds than have the resources to build one. For example, if I host my images on S3, a client anywhere in the world is likely to get it from a cache near them - my chickenfeed web site gets all the capacity benefits of Amazon's huge infrastructure.
However, there's a lot of scope for re-use of that setup. Not great for the creative DM who writes his own campaigns, but if you treat it as a way to ship commercially designed campaigns it could well work.
In that scenario (in a hypothetical world where something Surface-like is affordable for the home), you'd buy the scenario, click a couple of buttons, and everything would be set up and ready to go.
How about if all the players had e-ink character sheets, updated wirelessly, too? :D
A "virtual 20 sided dice"? No, no, no. This is *not* the way to apply computing to roleplaying. The computer can hide the dice rolls, in fact it can hide the whole "combat system" from you, and just allow you to roleplay.
Now, I *would* like to see augmented reality applied to board gaming. Something that combines the tactile experience of playing with wooden pieces, with the convenience of computer gaming. For example, what if you could play Acquire, and see the current stock value hovering over the company tiles, rather than having to stop to count?
I appreciate that's something to be considered - but people buy services from third parties all the time.
I strongly suspect that, at least more recently, Google and Amazon would be structured internally such that different units are responsible for providing the cloud platform, and for providing applications.
I guess it would be fairly straightforward for Amazon to split itself into a bookshop company and a cloud company, with one being a customer of the other.
In the case of software-as-a-service (just one example of cloud computing), it's pretty much as you describe.
Does Microsoft say, for example, that the new Office 2012 is entirely cloud-based; no need for apps on your local machine, but they own the server farms to host all of the thousands of Office cloud apps that people are running?
Just substitute Google for Microsoft, and Google Apps for Office 2012, and you've got an exact description of how Google Apps works.
I wasn't going to watch 24 again, but it might be worth watching another series to see whether they get a cloud reference in.
"Open me a socket into the FBI cloud NOW!"
It is scary to think the government will hand over data and processing to the cloud instead of providing a federally managed private cloud on a secure private network. This reeks of lobbying and special interests.
The only thing it reeks of, is what the US and UK governments have favoured for the last 20 years or more -- discourage public projects, encourage private sector projects. Don't let the government build a hospital when you can enter into a "Public Private Partnership" instead.
There's plenty of precedence for trusting private companies with government data.
I do agree that a state-owned private cloud would make the most sense - but alas that's not how the US and UK governments have tended to go for a long time.
Cloud computing offers nothing. And by nothing I mean nothing new.
Of course not. Amazon and Google have been using it for over a decade with great success.
It's nice, though, that the rest of us can now join in cheaply and easily.
A couple of things that cloud computing has, that time-sharing doesn't capture:
- fault tolerance by virtue of distributed-ness
- performance by virtue of distributed-ness
For applications well suited to cloud computing (e.g. S3) this is a big win. If a node goes down, it's no big deal. If your user gets (for instance) an image from S3, they're likely to be getting it from a node that's geographically close to them.
FWIW, I'd prefer to be contacted by email too.
However I have friends who choose to send me a Facebook message instead (perhaps they're bad at managing their address book?). When they do so, Facebook forwards it to my email account -- this is the default.
I'm not defending Facebook as a replacement for email -- it's a walled garden and that makes no sense.
But you're showing all the signs of not knowing what Facebook does. Although when using Facebook in a browser there's a rudimentary IM client, the primary way of communicating people is essentially a closed email system. "Click here to leave a message for John".
Only a few months ago did I manage to explain how email works to my parents (and what the purpose of email is).
I just cannot see them accepting the loss of control of their data by moving to Google Wave.
Woah, you waited until 2009 to explain email to your parents, and you bothered telling them where the message is physically located?
That's a great way to make it hard for yourself. All it takes is "Type my name here, type a message here, hit 'send', look, now I can read what you sent me."
Your email client and the custom local settings.
How do you *know* my email client is more "professional" than my Facebook API client?
Contracts aren't a guarantee. They may sign a contract and not follow the terms. They may go bankrupt. A massive failure may make the total amount of compensation to be paid larger than the money the company has.
By that logic, you'd never outsource anything at all. Never hire in an external company to do your office catering: they may sign a contract and not follow the terms!
The thing with Wave is that it *is* an email replacement. If you use it a certain way, it's directly analogous to email.
You can then *choose* to bring Wave's other features into your conversation.
The way I see it, email is almost perfect, except that sometimes it would be better to insert comments directly into someone's message, than to paste a quote into my reply. Sometimes it would be better to edit someone's text directly, than to reply with my suggested amendments. And Wave let's you do that.
Like email, it won't take off unless you have a critical mass of contacts on it. It's no good using Wave to organise a BBQ, if most of the people I want to invite don't have Wave. I tried to push adoption of email in an organisation which didn't already use it, once. People would seldom check their inbox, because it was usually empty. People used other methods to contact people, because they knew email inboxes seldom got checked. Catch 22.
I know my songs, videos, and other important files are backed-up across triple drives. I don't know if the same is true if I stored them online, and this major failure of Sidekick demonstrates I'm right not to trust them.
That depends entirely on the online storage service you use. If your contract says the files are backed up across triple drives, then you've a right to expect that they are. If your contract doesn't say that, then you shouldn't expect it. Simple.
Now, I'd argue that any cloud service worthy of the name ought to have very robust mirrored storage. But since there's no legal definition of the word, you'd better read the contract.
All that is true - you're looking for a more direct analogy than I intended.
The similarity is that in both cases, the feature (exportability of content in the case of Facebook; absence of DRM in the case of iTunes) is something that a typical non-technical punter doesn't know they want, until they need it.
Hence, it's not a factor they consider when choosing a service -- at least, not the first time they choose a service. And hence we can't expect market forces to lead companies to provide these things.
In the case of iTunes, of course, consumers became more aware of the issues, and Apple had to provide.
OK, the article doesn't list Facebook and MySpace as cloud applications, but it does list Twitter and Google apps. I just generalized it a bit.
By direct analogy, the Wikipedia article on word processors doesn't mention Excel or 123, but it does list Word and WordPerfect. Amazing.
Still the implicit problem remains: *if* people do indeed value that kind of security. Which they don't.
If consumers don't care about it, then it's not a problem.
The problem comes when they discover they care about it, too late. Compare with DRM, and the iTunes customer who's perfectly satisfied, until he buys a new non-Apple MP3 player.
Email conversations are not message board conversations, where third parties may enter in the middle of a discussion and might require some context.
In my professional life, they very frequently are. A few people will start discussing an issue by email. Then they'll decide it might be a database problem, so they'll add the database guy to the recipient list, who'll get an email out of the blue with 50 quoted messages. A couple of days and another 50 messages later, they'll bring a network guy in. He gets 100 quoted messages.
Wave (of something like it) is perfect for this kind of thing. It means you no longer have to quote the message you're replying to, because anyone added to the wave will be able to see the history.
Of course, people in this situation should be using existing tools such as bug trackers. But all too often they keep using email instead. My theory is that it's because of the bug trackers' unwieldy UIs.