The fact that Flash is commonly used for ads, and that those ads annoy everyone and cause many people to hate Flash, doesn't detract from the high quality user interfaces that you can build with it, if you use it for good instead of evil.
OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.
Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.
Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of its overwhelming installed base and consistency across multiple platforms.
The problem with SVG is that it's extremely spotty and inconsistent across the different browsers and plug-ins and cell phones that implement it. So the lowest common denominator is very very low indeed. Dynamic HTML has the same inconsistency problems but with much worse graphics, and it's that horrible inconsistency that forces cross-browser web applications to be so clumsy and hard to use -- because they must restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator. But Flash is consistent across all platforms, and it has high quality graphics.
I've written complex, rich interactive web based applications in both SVG and Laszlo, and I like them both. I've also used Microsoft's VML, which enabled animated vector graphics inline with html many years ago, and DynamicHTMLBehaviorControls, which work pretty well, but only in Explorer, so they're a dead end.
SVG is wonderful, but it's lost its steam: too little, too late. Adobe, once its main proponent, has totally forgotten about it, and they're quite unlikely to put any more effort into it, now that they've bought Macromedia. Batik development has been stalled, and it's slow because it's "100% Pure Java". SVG has some nice advantages over Flash, but it will never beat Flash's 98% penetration.
I'd love to see SVG get its shit together, but it's going to be a long time the way the companies that were once sponsoring it like Adobe, Canon and Kodak, have appearently given up and gone on to other things. I'd love for somebody to prove that I'm wrong, but Flash has kicked SVG's ass in the market.
Once there's a fast, stable, full featured, ubiquitious SVG renderer (like Firefox may someday support), it will make a lot of sense to target it with the Laszlo compiler. But SVG is a huge complex standard, and it will take a lot of work to completely implement it in Firefox.
But there's a much more interesting and efficient route than building everything including SVG and the kitchen sink into a web browser, and that's to factor out and develop a reusable open source Flash-compatible SWF player,
I wonder if this scene ever happened: Scott McNealy struts down the hall toward Gosling's office, with an entourage of Fast Company and Wired Magazine writers in tow, hoping for them to hear pearls of object oriented wisdom rolling forth, but only to walk into the middle of yet another round in the eternal argument:
Emacs! VI! Emacs! VI! No, Emacs!!! No, VI!!!
-Don
You're quoting out of context, unlike Softpanorama, which is quite meticulous about revealing their sources and labeling their commentary as opinion. You're trying to do a hatchet job on Softpanorama, but if you provided links to your sources and put the quotes in context, that would undermine your argument.
The quote about hijacking the Minix community is clearly labeled as an opinion about a comment written by ESR in The Cathedral and the Bazar. The first person to accuse anyone of trying to hijack Minix was Andrew Tanenbaum himself in 1992. That opinion has been around a long time, and many people agree with it. If it's news to you, then you're wet behind the ears.
By and large, I agree with what Glen said. A lot of folks really wanted free
BSD, and tried to hijack MINIX in that direction. Then they successively
tried to use Coherent, Linux, BSDI, HURD, and no doubt more in the future.
Fine.
In fact, I think Linus' cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do." Lazy like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein might have said, too lazy to fail.
IMHO the hijacking of Minix community was the cleverest Linux hack (along with the adoption of GPL.). This way he got a lot of skilled developers and the community that can appreciate their efforts. Without them his efforts would probably collapse OSS or no OSS. This argument about invention of the development model does not look realistic...
As you can see from the quotes in context, Softpanorama is actually criticizing ESR, and complementing Linus.
Now we get to the part where you accuse Softpanorama of "bringing up his fathers membership of the communist party". Get your attributions straight. That was a straight-up, attributed quote from Wired Magazine, which you're quoting out of context in order to imply it's something that originated from Softpanorama, when it's not:
In a way, Linus was born to be a revolutionary. His parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. Torvalds' father was a card-carrying Communist who spent a year studying in Moscow when his son was about 5. He served a stint as a minor elected official (he's now a prominent television and radio exec). Other kids teased Linus about his father's politics. "Growing up, I was terribly embarrassed by him," Torvalds says.
"Torvalds was active in the Communist Party since he was a college student during the 1960s His political beliefs developed after learning of the atrocities committed against communist sympathizers in Finland. He later charged that his enthusiasm for the Party and its beliefs were the result of naiveté. He met his wife Anna at their university. As the family
"I also think that Linus' cult of personality is one of the most significant negative moments of the movement for various reasons propagated by such different people/groups including but not limited to Eric Raymonds, Slashdot founders, Slate's Andrew Leonard, Linux distributors, etc. That's why this chapter can be considered as a modest attempt to address "Linux mythology" issue. All-in-all in this chapter I will try to paint a vivid picture of a talented, colorful and sharply individualistic Linux dictator: one of the most fascinating figures among open source pioneers. It's important to understand that this chapter was written as an antidote to publications emulating North Korean party newspapers articles that depict achievement of the party leaders with just substitution of Linux and Linus Torvalds in several places;-)."
Using both an electronically controlled resistance simulating the variations in neck resistance caused by vocal fold vibratory patterns and live measurements of vocal fold contact area, it is shown that the Glottal Enterprises EG series electroglottograph (EGG) has an inherent background noise that is less than that of the Laryngograph/Kay Elemetrics EGG units by roughly 15 to 20 dB, and less than the noise in a F-J Electronics EGG unit by at least 11 dB. The measurements presented support the claim that the lower noise in the Glottal Enterprises units make them usable with almost all men, women, and children over the age of four.
Introduction
An electroglottograph is a device that transduces the small variations of transverse electrical resistance of the neck at the level of the larynx that are caused by the variations in vocal fold contact as the folds vibrate during voice production. To make this measurement, a small AC voltage of about one volt rms or less, and usually at two to three megahertz, is applied to the surface of the neck via a pair of gold-plated electrodes.
In the early 1970s, interest in the use of the electroglottographs a non-invasive means for monitoring vocal fold vibratory patterns increased when the Laryngograph company introduced a form of the EGG that produced usable waveforms with most adult subjects and older children. Their EGG (also known variously as an 'laryngograph' or 'electrolaryngograph') featured circular electrodes having concentric rings that were believed to focus the field of sensitivity of the unit within the neck, to reduce the level of noise artifacts. Proper electrode position was determined by moving the electrodes on the neck during a prolonged vowel or voiced sonorant consonant articulation until a maximum EGG signal level was obtained. This, of course, assumed a relatively stationary larynx position during the testing procedure, though some laryngeal movement could be tolerated once the nominally optimal electrode position was located, and also assumed a larynx height low enough with respect to the mandible that the electrodes can be moved above the larynx during the positioning maneuver (which may be problematic with some women and children). Since the Laryngograph EGG has been marketed for over a decade in the U.S. by Kay Elemetrics, sometimes under Kay's brand name, we refer to it here as the Laryngograph/Kay electroglottograph.
However, the Laryngograph/Kay EGG, though a significant technological advance for its time, still did not give usable waveforms for many subjects, most noticeably women (and some men) with a considerable amount of fatty and/or muscular tissue covering the larynx, and younger children. Another EGG introduced more recently by F-J Electronics appeared to present similar problems, namely, excessive noise for some subjects and difficulty in monitoring the correct placement of the electrodes on the neck.
During the 1990s, Glottal Enterprises developed a new EGG that employed a dual-channel configuration that allows the user to continuously monitor the location of the larynx with respect to the electrodes and provides to the user an unambiguous front panel indication of the proper electrode location. [M. Rothenberg, A Multichannel Electroglottograph, Journal of Voice, Vol. 6., No. 1, pp. 36-43] For subjects with a high larynx position, this feature also meant that positioning of the electrodes did not require the user to move the electrodes above the level of the larynx. When made available on the front or rear panel, the value of the display could also be recorded along with the EGG signal.
In addition to its unique ability to indicate the position of the glottis with respect to the electrodes, the new Glottal Enterprises EGG was designed with a high si
"Advice: If you have a weird idea that's so outside of the box, don't forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to." -Will Wright
-Don
Same as podcast, but without the misleading brand
on
PSPCasting
·
· Score: 1
"Better Bad News is a blogcast. That's the same as podcast, but without the misleading brand name."
Extremely well put. I hate the term "Podcast". It seems like people who use it are trying to hitch their stars to Apple's fortune and the popularity of the iPod, because they have doubts what they're doing can't make it on its own merits. Ok, it rhymes with "broadcast", which is worth about a half chuckle (but not as funny as Fen Lebalm's term "Broadcatch"). But it turns off people who aren't iPod fanatics, even though there's nothing about it that requires an iPod. It's like the "CDROM" industry focusing on the medium instead of the message. But the fact that Apple's so anti-free-speech is an even better reason not to use the term.
Are you going to change your ways and start calling it "Blogcasting", or are you going to continue to be a shill for Apple and Sony?
Which begs the question, does the colorisation algorithm work with sound? Can it turn white noise into pink noise? Can it convert a boring monochromatic soundtrack into the blues?
You forgot the dimension of Smell, pioneered by John Waters' Polyester, and the bankrupt dot-com company iSmell.
As long as we're counting Z buffers, what about texture map coordinate buffers (UV), or object identity buffers (ID), or transparency buffers (Alpha), or any of the other millions of buffers you could theoretically overlay on a 2D image? Photoshop supports arbitrary numbers of layers and channels.
Oh, we were discussing DIMENSIONS of video, not LAYERS of PSD files? Never mind.
Now I'm really confused. So you're saying the first channel of sound counts as a dimension, but the others don't? If that's true, then how big a leap is it to multiply by the number of sense organs?
IF you count audio, then you might as well count it twice for stereo, and claim that video is 5-dimensional. Or even more, if you have surround sound. Might as well multiply that by two because most people have two eyes. Oh, don't forget the two ears. What are we up to, now? I lost count.
Let's count the dimensions of video: There's X. There's Y. There's time. There isn't any Z buffer. So far I've counted three. What total did you come up with?
I took those notes at the talk. I asked Will to review the notes and fill in a few details I missed. He suggested some changes and told me which issue of Wired the illustration was in, and I dug it up and scanned it in.
No screen shots, but the a diagram showing the design for Spore was published in Wired Magazine more than a year ago.
Wired asked Will for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn't tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It's in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)
Yes, the title and presumed subject of the talk was a guise, but not to fool the game developers attending the conference. There were some very surprized EA suits in the audience, who were not expecting Will to show as much as he did. It's no coincidence that the second showing of his talk was canceled.
I woudn't call the levels "mini" games, in the conventional sense of games like in Grand Theft Auto that have very little effect on the overall gameplay.
The evolutionary ladder from bacteria to galactic god is not a bunch of "mini games", it's actually a goal-oriented TUTORIAL and SANDBOX that trains you to play the real game that you start once you achieve interstellar travel. The meta-game is a collection of science fiction story genras, a storytelling game, where the player can surf back down to the lower levels to achieve their higher level goals and act out the stories of the meta level game.
Absolutely not vapor ware. I believe he can deliver, but it might take a while to finish. Spore deserves all the time and resources required to get it right.
He had several slides about the demo scene in Europe, which he discussed to illustrate his point about algorithmic compression.
Games consist of a mix of code and data. Computers use code to compress data. The ratio of code to data has changed over time.
Games used to be mostly code and very little content, so compression was important.
CDROM is the medium that was the death knell for the algorithm. Myst was a very elaborate and beautiful slide show, with a vast amount of data. It looked like they had a great time building this world. Building the world is a fun game in itself.
At the other end of the spectrum from CDROMs: The Demo Scene. Algorithmic compression of graphics and music.
Slashdot Mirror
Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.
OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.
Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.
Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of its overwhelming installed base and consistency across multiple platforms.
The problem with SVG is that it's extremely spotty and inconsistent across the different browsers and plug-ins and cell phones that implement it. So the lowest common denominator is very very low indeed. Dynamic HTML has the same inconsistency problems but with much worse graphics, and it's that horrible inconsistency that forces cross-browser web applications to be so clumsy and hard to use -- because they must restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator. But Flash is consistent across all platforms, and it has high quality graphics.
I've written complex, rich interactive web based applications in both SVG and Laszlo, and I like them both. I've also used Microsoft's VML, which enabled animated vector graphics inline with html many years ago, and Dynamic HTML Behavior Controls, which work pretty well, but only in Explorer, so they're a dead end.
SVG is wonderful, but it's lost its steam: too little, too late. Adobe, once its main proponent, has totally forgotten about it, and they're quite unlikely to put any more effort into it, now that they've bought Macromedia. Batik development has been stalled, and it's slow because it's "100% Pure Java". SVG has some nice advantages over Flash, but it will never beat Flash's 98% penetration.
I'd love to see SVG get its shit together, but it's going to be a long time the way the companies that were once sponsoring it like Adobe, Canon and Kodak, have appearently given up and gone on to other things. I'd love for somebody to prove that I'm wrong, but Flash has kicked SVG's ass in the market.
Once there's a fast, stable, full featured, ubiquitious SVG renderer (like Firefox may someday support), it will make a lot of sense to target it with the Laszlo compiler. But SVG is a huge complex standard, and it will take a lot of work to completely implement it in Firefox.
But there's a much more interesting and efficient route than building everything including SVG and the kitchen sink into a web browser, and that's to factor out and develop a reusable open source Flash-compatible SWF player,
(Win? 'Gnu) => T
-Don
I wonder if this scene ever happened: Scott McNealy struts down the hall toward Gosling's office, with an entourage of Fast Company and Wired Magazine writers in tow, hoping for them to hear pearls of object oriented wisdom rolling forth, but only to walk into the middle of yet another round in the eternal argument: Emacs! VI! Emacs! VI! No, Emacs!!! No, VI!!! -Don
You're quoting out of context, unlike Softpanorama, which is quite meticulous about revealing their sources and labeling their commentary as opinion. You're trying to do a hatchet job on Softpanorama, but if you provided links to your sources and put the quotes in context, that would undermine your argument.
The quote about hijacking the Minix community is clearly labeled as an opinion about a comment written by ESR in The Cathedral and the Bazar. The first person to accuse anyone of trying to hijack Minix was Andrew Tanenbaum himself in 1992. That opinion has been around a long time, and many people agree with it. If it's news to you, then you're wet behind the ears.
Andrew Tanenbaum:
ESR's Cathedral and Bazar:
Softpanorama's commentary:
As you can see from the quotes in context, Softpanorama is actually criticizing ESR, and complementing Linus.
Now we get to the part where you accuse Softpanorama of "bringing up his fathers membership of the communist party". Get your attributions straight. That was a straight-up, attributed quote from Wired Magazine, which you're quoting out of context in order to imply it's something that originated from Softpanorama, when it's not:
Wired Magazine 1.11 Leader of the Free World :
Softpanorama also quotes another source of this information:
Encyclopedia article about Nikke Torvalds. Free Online Encyclopedia:
This article should be required reading for Linus Torvalds fan-boys.
-Don
A Slightly Skeptical View on Linux
"I also think that Linus' cult of personality is one of the most significant negative moments of the movement for various reasons propagated by such different people/groups including but not limited to Eric Raymonds, Slashdot founders, Slate's Andrew Leonard, Linux distributors, etc. That's why this chapter can be considered as a modest attempt to address "Linux mythology" issue. All-in-all in this chapter I will try to paint a vivid picture of a talented, colorful and sharply individualistic Linux dictator: one of the most fascinating figures among open source pioneers. It's important to understand that this chapter was written as an antidote to publications emulating North Korean party newspapers articles that depict achievement of the party leaders with just substitution of Linux and Linus Torvalds in several places ;-)."
-Don
"See Chief? It's working fine!"
"We're supposed to be sitting, Max!"
"We are sitting, Chief."
"I'm telling you Max, this isn't a good idea!"
"You see? Stuck!!"
"No Max! Not THAT way!!"
"AAAAAAAAAaaaaaagh!"
"censored"
-Don
Glottal Enterprises EG2- PC electroglottograph
Summary
Using both an electronically controlled resistance simulating the variations in neck resistance caused by vocal fold vibratory patterns and live measurements of vocal fold contact area, it is shown that the Glottal Enterprises EG series electroglottograph (EGG) has an inherent background noise that is less than that of the Laryngograph/Kay Elemetrics EGG units by roughly 15 to 20 dB, and less than the noise in a F-J Electronics EGG unit by at least 11 dB. The measurements presented support the claim that the lower noise in the Glottal Enterprises units make them usable with almost all men, women, and children over the age of four.
Introduction
An electroglottograph is a device that transduces the small variations of transverse electrical resistance of the neck at the level of the larynx that are caused by the variations in vocal fold contact as the folds vibrate during voice production. To make this measurement, a small AC voltage of about one volt rms or less, and usually at two to three megahertz, is applied to the surface of the neck via a pair of gold-plated electrodes.
In the early 1970s, interest in the use of the electroglottographs a non-invasive means for monitoring vocal fold vibratory patterns increased when the Laryngograph company introduced a form of the EGG that produced usable waveforms with most adult subjects and older children. Their EGG (also known variously as an 'laryngograph' or 'electrolaryngograph') featured circular electrodes having concentric rings that were believed to focus the field of sensitivity of the unit within the neck, to reduce the level of noise artifacts. Proper electrode position was determined by moving the electrodes on the neck during a prolonged vowel or voiced sonorant consonant articulation until a maximum EGG signal level was obtained. This, of course, assumed a relatively stationary larynx position during the testing procedure, though some laryngeal movement could be tolerated once the nominally optimal electrode position was located, and also assumed a larynx height low enough with respect to the mandible that the electrodes can be moved above the larynx during the positioning maneuver (which may be problematic with some women and children). Since the Laryngograph EGG has been marketed for over a decade in the U.S. by Kay Elemetrics, sometimes under Kay's brand name, we refer to it here as the Laryngograph/Kay electroglottograph.
However, the Laryngograph/Kay EGG, though a significant technological advance for its time, still did not give usable waveforms for many subjects, most noticeably women (and some men) with a considerable amount of fatty and/or muscular tissue covering the larynx, and younger children. Another EGG introduced more recently by F-J Electronics appeared to present similar problems, namely, excessive noise for some subjects and difficulty in monitoring the correct placement of the electrodes on the neck.
During the 1990s, Glottal Enterprises developed a new EGG that employed a dual-channel configuration that allows the user to continuously monitor the location of the larynx with respect to the electrodes and provides to the user an unambiguous front panel indication of the proper electrode location. [M. Rothenberg, A Multichannel Electroglottograph, Journal of Voice, Vol. 6., No. 1, pp. 36-43] For subjects with a high larynx position, this feature also meant that positioning of the electrodes did not require the user to move the electrodes above the level of the larynx. When made available on the front or rear panel, the value of the display could also be recorded along with the EGG signal.
In addition to its unique ability to indicate the position of the glottis with respect to the electrodes, the new Glottal Enterprises EGG was designed with a high si
-Don
"Advice: If you have a weird idea that's so outside of the box, don't forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to." -Will Wright
-Don
Extremely well put. I hate the term "Podcast". It seems like people who use it are trying to hitch their stars to Apple's fortune and the popularity of the iPod, because they have doubts what they're doing can't make it on its own merits. Ok, it rhymes with "broadcast", which is worth about a half chuckle (but not as funny as Fen Lebalm's term "Broadcatch"). But it turns off people who aren't iPod fanatics, even though there's nothing about it that requires an iPod. It's like the "CDROM" industry focusing on the medium instead of the message. But the fact that Apple's so anti-free-speech is an even better reason not to use the term.
Are you going to change your ways and start calling it "Blogcasting", or are you going to continue to be a shill for Apple and Sony?
-Don
-Don
-Don
As long as we're counting Z buffers, what about texture map coordinate buffers (UV), or object identity buffers (ID), or transparency buffers (Alpha), or any of the other millions of buffers you could theoretically overlay on a 2D image? Photoshop supports arbitrary numbers of layers and channels.
Oh, we were discussing DIMENSIONS of video, not LAYERS of PSD files? Never mind.
-Emily Litella
-Don
That feels better now.
-Don
-Don
-Don
-Don
-Don
-Don
Wired asked Will for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn't tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It's in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)
-Don
-Don
The evolutionary ladder from bacteria to galactic god is not a bunch of "mini games", it's actually a goal-oriented TUTORIAL and SANDBOX that trains you to play the real game that you start once you achieve interstellar travel. The meta-game is a collection of science fiction story genras, a storytelling game, where the player can surf back down to the lower levels to achieve their higher level goals and act out the stories of the meta level game.
From my notes:
Meta Games
Meta games around different genras of science fiction.
Invasion (war of the worlds). Adult supervision (Day the earth stood still. Uplift (2001). First contact (Close Encounters). Abduction cross breeding (X-Files). Diplomacy (Star Trek).
Most of the narritive will come into the game through the space game.
Broad variety of different worlds to visit.
Cross-pollination of content created by different players.
Going to another player's planet.
You can abduct creatures, and go back to populate zoo planet.
T shaped game.
The base of the T is a goal oriented gaming.
The player first goes through a tutorial and sandbox to learn editing tools and game play at each level.
Player can eventually surf down to the lower levels.
Goal oriented game trains you to use all the editors and teaches you the simulation dynamics at every level, from bottom to top.
Once you get to the top you can surf vertically down into the other games, that you've learned to use on the way up.
At the top of the T is a collection of science fiction story genras, that take place on top of all of the lower levels.
Once you make your way all the way up from unicellular life to intergalactic civilization, the storytelling begins.
-Don
He had several slides about the demo scene in Europe, which he discussed to illustrate his point about algorithmic compression.
From my notes:
Algorithmic compression.
Games consist of a mix of code and data. Computers use code to compress data. The ratio of code to data has changed over time.
Games used to be mostly code and very little content, so compression was important.
CDROM is the medium that was the death knell for the algorithm. Myst was a very elaborate and beautiful slide show, with a vast amount of data. It looked like they had a great time building this world. Building the world is a fun game in itself.
At the other end of the spectrum from CDROMs: The Demo Scene. Algorithmic compression of graphics and music.
-Don