While the technology is certainly "bleeding edge", it's too bad that the fundamental Drag and Drop metaphor they extended is a broken one to begin with.
The dragging part is fine, but the dropping part does not properly communicate state and context. That means, it's not clearly communicated to you what kind of objects are dropped where. Even on the desktop, dragging and dropping *anything* anywhere outside the standard file manager is pure guesswork.
Do you want to copy the file? Perhaps merge it to another one already open? Would you like to move it to the target? Is the target the PDA, or an application on its screen? How do you consistently communicate all this?
In addition, if performed across two PDA users, this also invades personal comfort zones by making *you* touch *their* screen with your stylus. Even spelling it out like this will feel "dirty" to some people.
There's plenty of other obstacles they come across, and certainly a few niches where this will be the Perfect Solution. And as some people already said, until that niche is found this is a solution seeking a problem. And no matter how they'd like to think so, inter-PDA file transfer is not it.
The future is more about finding and sharing than it is about pushing and dropping.
Gator also hits even the less oblivious user as many times as it takes to score. There is unfortunately no option to "never trust this vendor" in IE.
This little oversight has been patched by PopUpCop. While the Google toolbar already protects us from most pop-up windows, the pesky software installation prompts only go away with something such as this.
The less than $20 pricepoint might be just in the budget of a childcare center too.
Steve Grand explores many interesting questions of life and intelligence in his book "Creation: Life and How To Make It". The problem with modifying live beings is that there is a point where experiments have to end because ethics kick in - even more so in experiments with humans rather than animals.
Even if we found genes to evolve our own intellect, we would have to fight many battles and wars to be allowed to make our children brighter.
However, digital life may well sneak past all legistlation and surpass humans in at least cold intellect before we realize it. If they demonstrate a mind equal with ours (or even that of a young child!) we'll have plenty to contemplate before pulling the proverbial plug.
In similar fashion, those crossing the boundary on the biological side would be brought up in secrecy. Being no criminals themselves, these beings or creatures could not be simply aborted long past the facts.
I'm quite convinced that human clones have already been born, but are privately allowed to develop into normal human beings to guarantee their rights to life.
It's very easy to see why Palm would be doing this - there is a fairly big stock of devices out there.
Touting the new OS 6 as the best thing since sliced bread would make it extremely hard to ship pre-6 devices, both for themselves and all the licensors. So understandably they have to downplay its meaning to avoid sitting on warehouses full of Tungsten devices nobody wants to buy.
It's somewhat amusing that the only named benefits they can find for the old OS is smaller footprint and cost.:) If there are two real market segments for the two operating system versions, they would be "people frustrated with crippled non-multithreading 16-bit legacy OS" and "people who just don't care". Unfortuntely, you can't sell Tungsten @ 400 USD for the second group.
I will hold my judgement on whether Palm OS 6 really is the savior of Palm, but as with any projects this magnitude, expect this too will take a while to mature.
This sweet Z5-SI case from Zero Halliburton protected my now retired laptop perfectly through 50+ international flights. First time I carried it through an airport I got body searched by the security. It collected a few glances because Zero cases are often used as movie props whenever someone has to carry drugs, money, automatic weapons or all of the above.:-)
A little pricey, but worth being acting nice all year for. Well hard protection for your preciouss.
Going by the story; the doctors grafted the nerves for the amputated arm on to a minor muscle on the chest, and used sensors on top of the muscle to drive the bionic arm. Attaching directly to actual nerve-endings still bears a few too many challenges to be practical, but this is nevertheless an impressive step.
Now, this technology could also be used to drive biomechanic armored exoskeletons...:-)
I'm surprised this hasn't already been pointed out, but Bionor Immuno is a "partially GAVI/Norweigian Research Council funded project" and GAVI is largely launched with the $750M grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
AIDS tamed with a helping hand form Bill? Stranger things could happen. I just can't imagine what they are.:-)
I applaud the research and accomplishments of the project!
"I'd like to see the full OpenGL implemented, or at least OpenGL with some sections taken out."
OpenGL ES is just that; OpenGL with some sections taken out and a few additions to make software-only rendering and math go faster.
It's nice to point out that we had Quake, etc. on machines with lesser capabilities, however those never were able to get sufficient performance through general use APIs. They weren't ported to OpenGL before we had hardware acceleration on the PC.
With OpenGL ES, however, it's now completely feasible to make a Quake equivalent for the faster PDAs without custom rendering code. This will happen well before we have mobile 3D hardware acceleration. Bring on the Bluetooth Deathmatch!:-)
The lump sum offered by French government is approximately the size of the development budget for one full size multi-console game title. One.
They could put the money into small developers who are just getting started, but this won't help serious development houses over the tough times.
Developers in Finland can also apply for money from the government, from organizations like TEKES. The percentage of support is up to 50% and the pool is many times larger than what the French government offers, in a country with much smaller population.
Don't get me wrong, I think what the French government is doing is great, and much more is needed. It's a good start, but not big enough to be important to most serious developers.
...casual gamers were buying The Matrix because they liked the movie (and never read the game reviews) or anything else they feel like when at the store.
How do you develop a feel for wanting to play those geeky, blocky, 80's games? By having played them in the first place. You're not going to know Dig Dug or Bosconian if you weren't a pretty hardcore gamer some time along the way.
Now, don't get me wrong - this is cool, in a very geeky kind of way. It just sounds like it would best sell to the core gamers, rather than the casual ones like the poster suggests.
Of course, if you're really hardcore, you're already playing these on the original hardware, or at least a cycle-accurate emulator...
When people talk about the "quality" of computer graphics, they wander off into very subjective opinions. What's the graphical quality of a photograph?
In games, the job of graphics is to maintain a consistent level of visual abstraction. We use computer graphics in games to build the impression of a character, a shiny sword or an alien world of fantasy in the minds of the players.
Back in the 8-bit days we only had low resolution 2D graphics; still, that was enough to give us a chance to experience our dreams on screen. Sure, the cars didn't look like much but we were racing like champions. The football had a few corners in it, but our team still kicked ass.
The limited graphics we were treated to were symbolic or iconic; now they are often aiming for realistic representation. Ironically, as we now have the capability to display much greater degree of realism in games, our minds jump at what they do best; pick out artifacts, inconsistencies in the patterns of representation. Realism is a double edged sword, when we are represented a picture that looks almost real we become more likely to pick at its faults than its merits.
Games as a visual media are closer to cartoons than they are to movies. Live video is rarely used, instead, the images are generated with modeling programs and digital paintbrushes. It's no accident that some of the greatest designers like Sid Meier and Warren Spector refer Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics as one of the most important pieces of literature to read if you want to make games. When I say literature, I mean it - don't be put off by the fact that the book itself is in cartoon format.
Just as well it's no accident that recent gaming masterpieces like Zelda: Wind Waker and Metroid: Prime avoid representing realistic humanoids altogether. It's also easy to see Pixar's reasoning in animating worlds that have no humans at all; living toys, silly monsters and talking fish slip under our radar of artifact perception.
Abstraction extends into all areas of game design; properly abstracted games let you complete the play in your head. Grand Theft Auto series leaves the main character almost a blank slate and The Sims speak a sort of abstract gibberish that relays the message via tone of voice. The grand master of abstractions in recent history - ICO - should not be missed by anyone who is even remotely into games.
The general ignorance about the role of graphics was summed up best by someone who said, a few years back, "Soon all games will be done with polygons so they will all look the same."
In most cases, brand owners are very protective of their cash cow licenses. The characters should act like the originals would, they should be recognizable and they should not involve anything inappropriate. What is appropriate is deemed by the brand owner and not the game developer, and this often introduces snags into the development process.
The degree of hand-holding by the brand owner varies, in some cases a developer is allowed to run and get quite creative with a character-based license (like the earlier mentioned Goldeneye with James Bond) while in the case of Enter the Matrix the game was apparently co-directed by the Wachowski brothers themselves. And truly, it is a fitting story in the Matrix universe.
One of the major differences in games vs. movies is the ownership of the experience; games try to give you some illusion of free will to allow you feel like it is you choosing to fight the bad guys and you on the screen kicking ass.
Enter the Matrix was built to tell the Wachowski story, and while an interesting one in the multi-threaded Matrix universe (like the great Animatrix shorts) and tied to the rest of the legacy, it does not leave many open-ended choices to the player. While not the basis for very deep or varied gameplay, this ironically fits with the Matrix universe and the question of free will in human life. You are ultimately on rails, and you will either ride to the finish, or you will perish along the way. That has not stopped the game from selling more than 2.5 million copies, which means they must have done something right.
Chris Crawford and many others have debated the depth of the story tree and mechanisms to create interesting and playable content inside multi-threaded story trees. I have yet to find a massively multiplayer game that was able to carry a coherent story (except about the story of the player himself exploiting a strange world full of rats and squirrels to get "exp" and "eq") and have grown too jaded to enjoy pseudo-random generator worlds like Morrowind. However, I find a lot of pleasure in visiting the grandfathers of 16- and 32-bit roleplaying, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, with a dozen or more possible endings each.
An ideal game gives you a strong illusion of ownership over the evolution and direction of the story while filling all the possible branches of gameplay with interesting content. Spector's Deus Ex 2 is very ambitious in this aspect, and everyone is hoping it turns out as good or better as the first one. However, like The Sims have shown you can also create enjoyable environments with no story at all besides the one you create in your head. Even the Sim-speak is an abstraction that allows you to fill in your own words.
Interestingly for those of us in the business of making games, the financial details of Larry Wachowski's involvement in The Matrix are detailed on The Smoking Gun archives because of his divorce battle with his ex-wife. Fair? I don't know, but educational to the rest of us. Life is a game too, the ultimate license property...:-)
Most designers are completely lost when trying to figure out what women want to play. They figure it must be some sort of cultural or social difference that makes women gravitate towards the "other" kinds of games. They consider FPS to be too "physical" or maybe a sci-fi game too "abstract" for women. So they try to make the games soft, pink, and fuzzy around the edges. And they fail miserably.
It's like the myth that says women only want romance and girls only play with dolls.
The facts are really simple: women share most of the same neurology and physiology as men. They can enjoy games - voluntary challenges full of interesting choices - just as men can. However, they also hate the same things - they hate feeling like a failure, feeling stupid or embarrassed.
Most games today are designed for male neurology and skill level; that is, high degree of spatial and hand-to-eye coordination, navigational skills, and logical puzzles. The core gameplay is right, but the reward/punishment mechanisms are not accounting for the gender difference.
If you look at Bejeweled, it's easy to see why the logical yet forgiving gameplay appeals equally to both genders. It's built around reward, not punishment. Even if you didn't know what to do at all, you get rewards just by clicking around on the screen. You will never be embarrassed or humiliated by the game regardless of what degree of skills you have. And on the second go, you will probably better your score.
Another great example is the city building series by Sierra, which allows you to choose between the path of the warrior or the path of the builder. Almost always, you can pay off your enemies by running a successful economy instead of fighting the war.
This pattern of non-punitive, positively rewarding gameplay is core to almost all titles that have enjoyed high degree of success with women.
Greg Costikyan had pretty heavy things to say about the current state of the games industry in his brilliant blog. He also published his thoughts in a PowerPoint after his Digital Genres presentation.
It's a tough time in the games industry, and anyone contemplating getting in should do the research thoroughly. While the risks are high, I believe game development could be refined into long term sustainable, profitable business by re-thinking the process of game creation.
Meanwhile, even government organizations like TEKES in Finland have started to seriously support the development of games and related technology and IGDA has already networked thousands of game developers together. Individual developers may fall, but game development is still a growing industry.
And we all heard about the return of shareware. PopCap's Bejeweled may not turn the heads of VCs with it's content, but a million copies sold is no peanuts.
Maybe if I finally updated my Palm games (/shameless plug) I could get rich quick, too.:-)
I like my Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet PC, while it doesn't win any records for 3D performance it's the best laptop I've used so far.
Of course, I happen to be in the niche group who makes use of the integrated BT, WLAN and pressure sensitive Wacom stylus capabilities without expecting it to replace my PDA.
Incidentally, the folding down screen design makes it great for watching movies in-flight. And the pen can be used to simulate PDA stylus while developing wireless applications.
It's hard to imagine a Tablet PC with 17" screen, I think I'm comfortable with the current size but could use a bit more resolution. How about it, Toshiba? Can I have one with 1280x960 and a Radeon for Christmas, please?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Dude,
:) Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...
you just published your address on SlashDot as a mailto link.
Jouni
Jouni
Jouni
Nethack, of course. :) You could also include the graphical Falcon's Eye front end on the list.
Jouni
While the technology is certainly "bleeding edge", it's too bad that the fundamental Drag and Drop metaphor they extended is a broken one to begin with.
The dragging part is fine, but the dropping part does not properly communicate state and context. That means, it's not clearly communicated to you what kind of objects are dropped where. Even on the desktop, dragging and dropping *anything* anywhere outside the standard file manager is pure guesswork.
Do you want to copy the file? Perhaps merge it to another one already open? Would you like to move it to the target? Is the target the PDA, or an application on its screen? How do you consistently communicate all this?
In addition, if performed across two PDA users, this also invades personal comfort zones by making *you* touch *their* screen with your stylus. Even spelling it out like this will feel "dirty" to some people.
There's plenty of other obstacles they come across, and certainly a few niches where this will be the Perfect Solution. And as some people already said, until that niche is found this is a solution seeking a problem. And no matter how they'd like to think so, inter-PDA file transfer is not it.
The future is more about finding and sharing than it is about pushing and dropping.
Jouni
Gator also hits even the less oblivious user as many times as it takes to score. There is unfortunately no option to "never trust this vendor" in IE.
This little oversight has been patched by PopUpCop. While the Google toolbar already protects us from most pop-up windows, the pesky software installation prompts only go away with something such as this.
The less than $20 pricepoint might be just in the budget of a childcare center too.
Jouni
Even if we found genes to evolve our own intellect, we would have to fight many battles and wars to be allowed to make our children brighter.
However, digital life may well sneak past all legistlation and surpass humans in at least cold intellect before we realize it. If they demonstrate a mind equal with ours (or even that of a young child!) we'll have plenty to contemplate before pulling the proverbial plug. In similar fashion, those crossing the boundary on the biological side would be brought up in secrecy. Being no criminals themselves, these beings or creatures could not be simply aborted long past the facts.
I'm quite convinced that human clones have already been born, but are privately allowed to develop into normal human beings to guarantee their rights to life.
Cheers,
Jouni
It's very easy to see why Palm would be doing this - there is a fairly big stock of devices out there.
:) If there are two real market segments for the two operating system versions, they would be "people frustrated with crippled non-multithreading 16-bit legacy OS" and "people who just don't care". Unfortuntely, you can't sell Tungsten @ 400 USD for the second group.
Touting the new OS 6 as the best thing since sliced bread would make it extremely hard to ship pre-6 devices, both for themselves and all the licensors. So understandably they have to downplay its meaning to avoid sitting on warehouses full of Tungsten devices nobody wants to buy.
It's somewhat amusing that the only named benefits they can find for the old OS is smaller footprint and cost.
I will hold my judgement on whether Palm OS 6 really is the savior of Palm, but as with any projects this magnitude, expect this too will take a while to mature.
Jouni
A little pricey, but worth being acting nice all year for. Well hard protection for your preciouss.
Holiday Cheers, Jouni
Cheers, Jouni
Now, this technology could also be used to drive biomechanic armored exoskeletons... :-)
Jouni
Please mod the original article down -2 for trolling and flamebait. :-)
Jouni
Talk about bunny girls... what would Mr. Hefner say?
Jouni
AIDS tamed with a helping hand form Bill? Stranger things could happen. I just can't imagine what they are. :-)
I applaud the research and accomplishments of the project!
Jouni
And, with a bit of afterthought I realized you were probably talking about the Original Scorched Earth.
:)
Sorry for the confusion.
Jouni
Development never ceased. Releases did, for a while. I've been working on an update even most of this week. ;)
Send me an email and I'll send you a replacement registration code.
Cheers,
Jouni
Scorched Earth was amazing, I loved it so much that I wrote a shareware tribute for it on the Palm OS some three years ago. :-)
Sure, mine was just black and white, but at least it beat playing snake on the cell phone...
Jouni
OpenGL ES is just that; OpenGL with some sections taken out and a few additions to make software-only rendering and math go faster.
It's nice to point out that we had Quake, etc. on machines with lesser capabilities, however those never were able to get sufficient performance through general use APIs. They weren't ported to OpenGL before we had hardware acceleration on the PC.
With OpenGL ES, however, it's now completely feasible to make a Quake equivalent for the faster PDAs without custom rendering code. This will happen well before we have mobile 3D hardware acceleration. Bring on the Bluetooth Deathmatch! :-)
Jouni
They could put the money into small developers who are just getting started, but this won't help serious development houses over the tough times.
Developers in Finland can also apply for money from the government, from organizations like TEKES. The percentage of support is up to 50% and the pool is many times larger than what the French government offers, in a country with much smaller population.
Don't get me wrong, I think what the French government is doing is great, and much more is needed. It's a good start, but not big enough to be important to most serious developers.
Jouni
How do you develop a feel for wanting to play those geeky, blocky, 80's games? By having played them in the first place. You're not going to know Dig Dug or Bosconian if you weren't a pretty hardcore gamer some time along the way.
Now, don't get me wrong - this is cool, in a very geeky kind of way. It just sounds like it would best sell to the core gamers, rather than the casual ones like the poster suggests.
Of course, if you're really hardcore, you're already playing these on the original hardware, or at least a cycle-accurate emulator...
Jouni
In games, the job of graphics is to maintain a consistent level of visual abstraction. We use computer graphics in games to build the impression of a character, a shiny sword or an alien world of fantasy in the minds of the players.
Back in the 8-bit days we only had low resolution 2D graphics; still, that was enough to give us a chance to experience our dreams on screen. Sure, the cars didn't look like much but we were racing like champions. The football had a few corners in it, but our team still kicked ass.
The limited graphics we were treated to were symbolic or iconic; now they are often aiming for realistic representation. Ironically, as we now have the capability to display much greater degree of realism in games, our minds jump at what they do best; pick out artifacts, inconsistencies in the patterns of representation. Realism is a double edged sword, when we are represented a picture that looks almost real we become more likely to pick at its faults than its merits.
Games as a visual media are closer to cartoons than they are to movies. Live video is rarely used, instead, the images are generated with modeling programs and digital paintbrushes. It's no accident that some of the greatest designers like Sid Meier and Warren Spector refer Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics as one of the most important pieces of literature to read if you want to make games. When I say literature, I mean it - don't be put off by the fact that the book itself is in cartoon format.
Just as well it's no accident that recent gaming masterpieces like Zelda: Wind Waker and Metroid: Prime avoid representing realistic humanoids altogether. It's also easy to see Pixar's reasoning in animating worlds that have no humans at all; living toys, silly monsters and talking fish slip under our radar of artifact perception.
Abstraction extends into all areas of game design; properly abstracted games let you complete the play in your head. Grand Theft Auto series leaves the main character almost a blank slate and The Sims speak a sort of abstract gibberish that relays the message via tone of voice. The grand master of abstractions in recent history - ICO - should not be missed by anyone who is even remotely into games.
The general ignorance about the role of graphics was summed up best by someone who said, a few years back, "Soon all games will be done with polygons so they will all look the same."
They could. Luckily for us, they don't have to.
Jouni
The degree of hand-holding by the brand owner varies, in some cases a developer is allowed to run and get quite creative with a character-based license (like the earlier mentioned Goldeneye with James Bond) while in the case of Enter the Matrix the game was apparently co-directed by the Wachowski brothers themselves. And truly, it is a fitting story in the Matrix universe.
One of the major differences in games vs. movies is the ownership of the experience; games try to give you some illusion of free will to allow you feel like it is you choosing to fight the bad guys and you on the screen kicking ass.
Enter the Matrix was built to tell the Wachowski story, and while an interesting one in the multi-threaded Matrix universe (like the great Animatrix shorts) and tied to the rest of the legacy, it does not leave many open-ended choices to the player. While not the basis for very deep or varied gameplay, this ironically fits with the Matrix universe and the question of free will in human life. You are ultimately on rails, and you will either ride to the finish, or you will perish along the way. That has not stopped the game from selling more than 2.5 million copies, which means they must have done something right.
Chris Crawford and many others have debated the depth of the story tree and mechanisms to create interesting and playable content inside multi-threaded story trees. I have yet to find a massively multiplayer game that was able to carry a coherent story (except about the story of the player himself exploiting a strange world full of rats and squirrels to get "exp" and "eq") and have grown too jaded to enjoy pseudo-random generator worlds like Morrowind. However, I find a lot of pleasure in visiting the grandfathers of 16- and 32-bit roleplaying, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, with a dozen or more possible endings each.
An ideal game gives you a strong illusion of ownership over the evolution and direction of the story while filling all the possible branches of gameplay with interesting content. Spector's Deus Ex 2 is very ambitious in this aspect, and everyone is hoping it turns out as good or better as the first one. However, like The Sims have shown you can also create enjoyable environments with no story at all besides the one you create in your head. Even the Sim-speak is an abstraction that allows you to fill in your own words.
Interestingly for those of us in the business of making games, the financial details of Larry Wachowski's involvement in The Matrix are detailed on The Smoking Gun archives because of his divorce battle with his ex-wife. Fair? I don't know, but educational to the rest of us. Life is a game too, the ultimate license property... :-)
Jouni
It's like the myth that says women only want romance and girls only play with dolls.
The facts are really simple: women share most of the same neurology and physiology as men. They can enjoy games - voluntary challenges full of interesting choices - just as men can. However, they also hate the same things - they hate feeling like a failure, feeling stupid or embarrassed.
Most games today are designed for male neurology and skill level; that is, high degree of spatial and hand-to-eye coordination, navigational skills, and logical puzzles. The core gameplay is right, but the reward/punishment mechanisms are not accounting for the gender difference.
If you look at Bejeweled, it's easy to see why the logical yet forgiving gameplay appeals equally to both genders. It's built around reward, not punishment. Even if you didn't know what to do at all, you get rewards just by clicking around on the screen. You will never be embarrassed or humiliated by the game regardless of what degree of skills you have. And on the second go, you will probably better your score.
Another great example is the city building series by Sierra, which allows you to choose between the path of the warrior or the path of the builder. Almost always, you can pay off your enemies by running a successful economy instead of fighting the war.
This pattern of non-punitive, positively rewarding gameplay is core to almost all titles that have enjoyed high degree of success with women.
Making games for women is not rocket science. :-)
Jouni
It's a tough time in the games industry, and anyone contemplating getting in should do the research thoroughly. While the risks are high, I believe game development could be refined into long term sustainable, profitable business by re-thinking the process of game creation.
Meanwhile, even government organizations like TEKES in Finland have started to seriously support the development of games and related technology and IGDA has already networked thousands of game developers together. Individual developers may fall, but game development is still a growing industry.
And we all heard about the return of shareware. PopCap's Bejeweled may not turn the heads of VCs with it's content, but a million copies sold is no peanuts.
Maybe if I finally updated my Palm games (/shameless plug) I could get rich quick, too. :-)
Jouni
Of course, I happen to be in the niche group who makes use of the integrated BT, WLAN and pressure sensitive Wacom stylus capabilities without expecting it to replace my PDA.
Incidentally, the folding down screen design makes it great for watching movies in-flight. And the pen can be used to simulate PDA stylus while developing wireless applications.
It's hard to imagine a Tablet PC with 17" screen, I think I'm comfortable with the current size but could use a bit more resolution. How about it, Toshiba? Can I have one with 1280x960 and a Radeon for Christmas, please? :-)
Jouni