What the digital tv recorders really need is a storage medium to archive programs. Personally, there are some times I'd like to record something "forever." Like a friend of mine appears in a commercial or an interview on a show. Or whatever; you get the point.
What would be great is a CD-RW drive built in that allows you to "archive to disk." If I can record onto SuperVHS, what's the problem with recording to disk from a digital source? The difference is not that large.
Sure, you can say I can just upgrade my hard drives and keep it forever. That doesn't really work long-term because over the course of 5 years I may want to store dozens of recordings, which means my usable space becomes smaller and smaller.
For legal reasons, there is some buzz that because it's a digital recording, the quality is higher than VHS and thus would be more problematic for the broadcasters who would like to limit the recording and re-recording of their material. I say that's crap. Like I mentioned above, SuperVHS exists (and I personally have a SuperVHS VCR) and it records in a quality superior to VHS. They're legal. Why not make a digital VCR with removable media legal? Same difference. It's going to happen, it's just a matter of who's going to do it first. Imagine burning a VCD of the latest Simpson's Halloween special with your TiVo2 and taking it over a friend's house to pop into their DVD player. Mmmmm.
Disclaimer.. I'm just average Joe User when it comes to documents. They don't get much above 30 pages, and I don't do any fancy layouts either. FrameMaker, of course, is strong in that area. Typical users of Word would be like me. FrameMaker is aimed at a much smaller crowd. (Which reinforces the point that it won't sell a large number of copies.)
A beta is given in good faith that the user will test, give feedback, and discontinue using the program after a certain time period. Usually there are agreements to sign, or at least a pop-up box to click "OK, I accept the TOS." This is all obvious and trivial; you were just trolling anyway.
Call me crazy, but I really like Word, once I turn off the paperclip and set up my defaults the way I like them.
Sure, it's a memory hog. I'd love to have some way to compartmentalize some of the features so I could trim it down for faster loading and prevent resource bloat. Other than that, Word is my word processor of choice, and a damn sight better than Wordperfect or Xywrite.
IANAMZ*, but I use Windows because it has the apps and games I use.
I agree with the original poster. Businesses can't make decisions without a reasonable expectation of return on investment.
If they had spent (pulling numbers out of thin air) $200k in development costs (how many programmers working on it, for how long?) on porting the software and expected to spend $400k more on debugging and then marketing (packaging, etc) but only expected to sell 10 copies (I checked the price -- that freaking program is
$1500! How many Linux users can afford that?
Anyone *that* serious about DTP is going to be using a Mac or Windows where there's a variety of DTP software available) what kind of sense does that make?
The better business decision is to cut bait on this kind of product until the market can profitably bear it.
I'm not some kind of anti-Linux zealot. I've used different forms of Unix for years. For what I do, Windows has the apps I need and games I want.
I've got a P2-450, 128MB RAM and a GeForce DDR. I'm running Windows98SE. The only time I get delays is when I'm loading an application, or Internet Exploder is doing a DNS lookup or thinking about how to display a page. Or another app is trying to do something, like Photoshop trying to Blur a 1600x1200 picture.
I condemn Microsoft's monopolistic practices. I swear at them every time I get an error, just like everyone else. But... if you want a good word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, and games, there's no other alternative.
I protest by not buying the OS. I copy it from someone else (who has usually copied it from someone else...). I already buy Intel processors; I figure that's almost as good as handing money to Microsoft anyway.
For your system (that is much faster and has much more RAM than mine) to veg like that, something is wrong with your configuration. Unless you're recompiling your project in VC6 or you just pasted a web page to Word (notoriously slow for me!) at the same time you are trying to click on something. I don't even optimize my cache or tweak settings. And I only reinstall every few months. But, I do reboot at least once a day at home.
You know, I hate Microsoft... but there's really nothing better out there for the end-user that does as much.
GUI reasons I prefer Windows:
- A taskbar that I can anchor on any edge easily with click-drag
- Task buttons that resize to accomodate the space in my task bar
- Drag and drop shortcuts to my shortcut bar
- Drag and drop "Favorites" (bookmarks) in Explorer to organize them within the program instead of bringing up an alternate editor page
- Control panel has all my settings. Under Gnome, there's several different places to go to edit system properties.
- Drag and drop icons in the Start menu. No, I don't like the way icons and folders get installed in there by default either, but I can move them around realtime without going into some kind of editor.
If someone made a *nix GUI that did all this, I would be more willing to use it on a regular basis. I want to be able to drag things around without jumping through hoops. I don't like Windows 95 pre-IE4 because of this; you can't shuffle around the Favorites or the Start menu items without going into an editor.
All this said, I *love* *nix. I cut my teeth on Sunos 4.1, went on to BSDI and FreeBSD, then Solaris and Linux. I can put 7 years of various Unix *work* experience on my resume. For what they do, they are amazing and powerful. For word processing and game playing, they suck.
The right tool for the right job....and for my own personal use, the right tool is Windows.
Keep working on Linux, guys! Once you get a good 2d/3d graphic toolkit and some productivity software that's at least as stable as Microsoft's, you'll own the world.
The evil backhoe is a common antagonist and joke among ISPs and backbone operators -- people 'in the business' (the internet business, that is).
I worked in a NOC and up into engineering at a minor internet backbone (for those of you up on your history, the first one to use ATM) and whenever something went down, we'd joke "Some drunk ran into a light pole," or "Some stupid backhoe operator took out MAE East again."
It's funny, but it does happen and causes a lot of people to pop Tums until it's over. Train wrecks can be devestating too, since fiber/copper are often run along train tracks for a lot of reasons.
After a brief search, I came up with the following interesting blurbs:
If you do a google search on "fiber cut" and "backhoe", you'll come up with tons of hits. So, you can see, backhoes being the bane of the service provider is a very true statement.
FYI, the NANOG mentioned in some of those articles is the "North American Network Operators' Group" and they have meetings where they discuss cool stuff related to the internet. I went to a meeting once.. boring as hell. But I got some t-shirts and the day off work to go. Wheeee!
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
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Wave Driven Generators
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· Score: 1
Sure, if the plants themselves didn't have to be decommissioned after a comparatively short time. What is the average lifetime of a power plant? 10 years, 15 years, before constant bombardment with radioactive particles weakens the atomic structure of the building materials so much that the place has to be condemned?
As efficient as nuclear power is to produce, can someone quote a recommended plant lifetime, along with cost of a plant versus energy output during the plant's lifetime?
This sounds great on paper, and would work reasonably well (see below) for PvE games (Player vs Environment) but will NOT work for PvP (Player vs Player) situations.
Consider, any multiplayer adventure game. You could use EverQuest or Ultima Online as examples.
Fact; to display the players, the client has to know their positions.
Premise; you can't transmit the location of other players to the client only when they are visible.
Reasoning behind this: The server would have to calculate visibility of every player to every other player constantly, which would cause two problems. Increased server-side processing, and inability for smooth gameplay because of predictive movement to compensate for latency.
Therefore one of two situations must occur: total client blindness, which would suck for the above reasons, or client trust, which means the client knows the position of the other players, and must be trusted. The problem with that is, the client you're so willing to release the source code to will be hacked to show players in glowing neon orange with voodoo spikes and by the way a side helping of autoaim. In an RPG with turn-based mediated combat, this is less of an issue since aiming is very gross (ie, you just need to face your target) and movement is slower, so hiding is more difficult, but it still is an issue.
The same problems apply to PvE issues as well. "Yes, I'd like a HUD overlay of where all the mobs are, and a map, and I'd like to script my client so that I can make money/kills/increase skills automatically. Thanks."
I'm not knocking you guys on the Worldforge project. I think it's an awesome effort and I am looking forward to the technologies you make available to the creative juices but not the programming skills to do these things from scratch.
But, be aware that your client may be hacked to give people an unfair advantage. It's not a "bug" to have predictive player movement to compensate for internet latency, but it does beg the question, how do you prevent cheating, even with the minimal set of information sent to the client?
We've decided that after a point, time is more important than money.
Hear, hear! I would rather make $60k with a 10-minute commute than $80k with an hour commute. Some things are just worth more. What is that $20k if I'm too tired to enjoy my off-time?
Re:Oi, Oi, Stick with the one and true Dunebook
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Dune: House Harkonnen
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True, the original Dune novel is leaps and bounds better than the others in the series. But others have recaptured some of the magic;
The Bashir's (sp? It's been years since I read them) discovery of his ability to move at superhuman speeds. Ghola Duncan's uncanny warrior technique -- unlearned, but intuited. These kinds of things bring back the awe and mystery I felt at Paul's growing awareness of his abilities. Of course none match the original, but they get close.
Re:Silmarillion, Seven Percent Solution, and other
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Dune: House Harkonnen
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· Score: 1
This scares me about the most recent Dune installment, written by Herbert's son (grandson?) I hear it's pretty good, so I will probably break down and get it. Wasn't Chapterhouse finished after Herbert's death as well? I haven't heard any buzz about the Foundation books, but like you intimated, it depends on the skill of the writer to write whether or not you enjoy a book, not how well he can copy another writer's style. I have thoroughly enjoyed the Berserker stories that were written by third parties.
I wonder how much of Zelazny's last works were massaged, touched up, and just plain written by someone else? The quality of his writing had been on a downslide for several years anyway, and the second Amber series was a disappointment overall, so I don't expect much would be lost in that case through the after-editing, but I wonder how many great writers have had works trashed or rewritten beyond their original intent after their death or debilitating illness?
And just for the record, The Silmarillion was one of the most gosh-awful boring books I've read since I tried to read a dictionary. Everyone's different though.
If you make a living at a computer, $130 is cheap for feeling healthy instead of achey, or worse, in severe pain like some people. Of course, the "natural" keyboards are "good enough" and prevent most of the pain from typing.
I have about 3 dozen DVDs, and there have only been a few times where the compression has been noticeable. There were a couple HORRIBLE scenes in the X-Files season 1 collection, especially with scenes with high contrasts. 99% of the problems I've seen have been with large areas of darkness. Most of my DVDs have dealt with it very well; some haven't. These kinds of scenes are brief, however, and I quickly get over the trauma and move on.
The guy who has a film setup in his home theatre is either moderately wealthy or moderately insane.
For the "full theatre experience," I go to the theatre.
I enjoy programming, yet I know that I'll probably never make a living programming because I don't live and breathe languages to their full extent. I just like playing around.
That said, if I can get a copy of the BASIC language for the PS2 and a keyboard, I would love to play around with something like that. I play around with OpenGL on my Windows box, but it's complicated and blows up frequently. I'd love to abstract my environment out to something simple like some sort of BASIC on the PS2 and hack around with some remakes of old games, yes, possibly even in 3D.
"Fun" can't be quantified, printed on the side of the box, put in a press release, standardized across platforms, or written in a business proposal.
Numbers are the job of the console designer and manufacturer. "Fun" is the job of the game designer and programmer to instill into the games. "Fun" is what you have when you sit around the TV with your friends playing Mario Party and you all yell and scream like maniacs because you played a particularly fun game of Mario Ball.
The developers (Sony, Sega) of the consoles determine numbers. These have to be progressive so they can make a business case and compete with other products by saying their specs outperform the competition's. They also have to woo the game developers to sign on and make the expense of purchasing the development license and tools, paying their programmers to learn a new environment instead of possibly putting out another few games on a proven system. They're taking a gamble. The system has to have good potential and incentive for game developers to write for it.
Game developers are the ones responsible for putting in fun, and if people buy games, those games are deemed 'successes' and that level of 'fun' from those successes becomes standard.
If the game's not fun, tell your friends not to buy it, post in public forums that the game sucks and back your point of view up.
We as consumers are the ones ultimately responsible for giving the thumbs up or thumbs down on products. Money talks. Record companies, movie studios, and political engines all run on money... we vote with our money.
I don't insist on being referred to as "Irish-American." I don't bitch about my ancestors being discriminated against when they were poor immigrants. I live *my* life, I don't live in the past, and I don't try to get something that's not my due.
If I were a practicing, faithful Christian, I could, by extension of your philosophy, condemn all women as evil and lead a campaign to sue them for damages back in the Garden of Eden. $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 punitive damages for getting us kicked out of Paradise.
I think a lot of these responses are saying the same thing, but they're slightly wrong.
Yes, nostalgia plays a big role in remembering how 'great' the old games were. However, new games are not lacking 'game play' emphasis; they're just copying off of games that have already been successful with good gameplay. Sure the new graphics are nice, but basically Q3A is Doom. Basically the latest Command and Conquer game is Dune. The latest Civ/Sim game is Empire, or whatever the first one of those was. Playability is there, but we *already played* those games, so we feel the same boredom we did after playing them.
Online games are different because it allows us to do two things at once; we get to leave our stress-filled or boring life and take on the attributes of our avatar. We get to play a role and be someone else, inventing ourselves all over. We also get to interact with new and interesting people (sometimes) that we normally wouldn't meet. With AC, EQ, and all the other MMOG's, we meet literally hundreds of people from the safety and comfort of our chair. We experience that variety without expending the effort of actually doing this in person.
Is this a good thing? I think in limited quantities, virtual socialization can be a good thing. It can be used to find someone who is intellectually compatible without making snap judgments based on appearance, and we can do it wholesale.. meeting hundreds or thousands of people versus 2 or 3 at a singles bar.
I think this comes at the expense of social skills if taken too far, though. People with problems socializing can take the easy way out and build a social circle online, taking them out of the physical social pool. On the other hand, people with severe social handicaps can make friends online and then meet these people IRL after they've come to know them, saving them much anxiety.
This is a common theme in science fiction, telling a tale of a society that retreats into virtual space to live a perfect life made to order... And then the race dies off because nobody wants to deal with the REAL world.
You could probably think of a dozen examples of this, but I have a headache so can't at the moment. Realistically, I can't see this happening until we get neural implants and a virtual environment on the order of sophistication and realism in The Matrix, or that Hogan's
G ent le Giants series (I would highly recommend) wrote of.
By the way, here's a game that is good eye-candy, good gameplay, and kind of unique. "Hitman, Codename 47" or something like that.
Eidos put out a demo recently. You're a hitman, you get an assignment and you have to purchase tools, scout out the victim, and do the deed(s). You can use a garotte, knife, various guns, car bomb, etc. You have to avoid detection as long as possible, change clothing to impersonate people, and behave intelligently rather than just go in guns blazing. The key interface is kind of hard to get used to, but I had loads of fun playing last night.
Basically, the only thing making this impossible right now is the bandwidth of wireless protocols, and the size of wearable PC technology.
That, and the fact that the displays are low resolution -- functional, but not very enjoyable.
As someone else pointed out, though, a wireless linkup could connect you to wire-based connectivity, or a larger mobile unit with more hardware than you care to lug around. Your car could be a relay, or your desk at work. But yes, we need more wireless bandwidth before applications on this scale will work.
Of course, that's just more EMI to bombard our cells and force them to mutate into cancers, but hey, it's progress. Am I right?
Re:A writer's POV && Joe User wants his wearable
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Ready-To-Wear PCs
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· Score: 1
The head-mounted display lets you see what you've written so far. Next step to eliminate a HMD... maybe a synthesized voice that does a decent job of inflection?
For this use, integration into the car itself would make the most sense. There is research already being done (ie, I saw something on the Discovery channel over a year ago) concerning a camera that watches the driver and searches for behavior indicative of sleepiness (ie, closed eyelids) and warns the driver of his impending death.
The cars that include a thermal HUD on the inside of the windshield are also good ideas for assisted driving technology.
Although eventually, we won't be driving. Cars will just go where we want them to, by the most efficient route, based on traffic and scenic preference.
Just a followup... Kudos to BrianHV for posting the link to a manufacturer that has very practical eyewear displays, some of which can clip on to your existing glasses.
It appears that 320x200 is available now, with 640x480 "in development."
The point of my post (which probably didn't even muss your collective 'dos [the ones that criticized my post]) was that in their current state, as bulky as they are, wearable PCs are impractical.
I stated changes (ie, reduction in size, weight) that would probably make wearable computers useful in certain situations, and stated a couple uses for them, while you (collectively, several posters) did not propose anything positive at all. Ergo your resulting mod to 0 for obvious trolling, considering I had the "lack of imagination" to propose the writing-aid. Read the whole post next time.
I still stand on what I thought was a very simple practical point; that the current crop of wearable PCs are impractical for almost ANY use.... for now.
PDA technology will certainly help with the miniaturization of PCs, although displays are still a bulky problem.
I can't see much application for a wearable PC. Sure, it's cool, but beyond sheer geekness, I see little point.
These articles about wearable computers keep coming up, and they're the usual deal, with a Borg-esque monocle/HUD, chorded keyboard, and fanny-pack CPU/etc case.
When I can wear one with as little intrusiveness (weight, bulkiness) as an earbud headset and do something useful, talk to me.
Something I'd like to see is a Writer's setup. I have delusions of grandeur and think I could be a novelist. Set me up with a 99.99% reliable dictation machine, a sensitive microphone so I can speak softly into it and have it transcribe what I'm saying. Recall Heinlein's Jubal in Stranger in a Strange Land. I want to be able to drive home or work while composing the Great American Novel. Recall Lain and the mobile DOOM-like game. If I tried to play that while driving I'd probably kill several people, including myself, to avoid being shot by the guy driving south on I-94. I can see wearable PCs being more of a hazard than cell phones if used irresponsibly.
Any kind of roving salesman or mobile worker of any kind that needs access to some kind of data storage or minimal, but frequent, input, could benefit from a wearable PC, but I can't see the average Joe User needing one. PDA's with appointments and contact listings would probably take up most of the mobile gearhead market, especially as they become faster, better, and more functional.
Slashdot Mirror
What the digital tv recorders really need is a storage medium to archive programs. Personally, there are some times I'd like to record something "forever." Like a friend of mine appears in a commercial or an interview on a show. Or whatever; you get the point.
What would be great is a CD-RW drive built in that allows you to "archive to disk." If I can record onto SuperVHS, what's the problem with recording to disk from a digital source? The difference is not that large.
Sure, you can say I can just upgrade my hard drives and keep it forever. That doesn't really work long-term because over the course of 5 years I may want to store dozens of recordings, which means my usable space becomes smaller and smaller.
For legal reasons, there is some buzz that because it's a digital recording, the quality is higher than VHS and thus would be more problematic for the broadcasters who would like to limit the recording and re-recording of their material. I say that's crap. Like I mentioned above, SuperVHS exists (and I personally have a SuperVHS VCR) and it records in a quality superior to VHS. They're legal. Why not make a digital VCR with removable media legal? Same difference. It's going to happen, it's just a matter of who's going to do it first. Imagine burning a VCD of the latest Simpson's Halloween special with your TiVo2 and taking it over a friend's house to pop into their DVD player. Mmmmm.
Disclaimer.. I'm just average Joe User when it comes to documents. They don't get much above 30 pages, and I don't do any fancy layouts either. FrameMaker, of course, is strong in that area. Typical users of Word would be like me. FrameMaker is aimed at a much smaller crowd. (Which reinforces the point that it won't sell a large number of copies.)
Troll.
A beta is given in good faith that the user will test, give feedback, and discontinue using the program after a certain time period. Usually there are agreements to sign, or at least a pop-up box to click "OK, I accept the TOS." This is all obvious and trivial; you were just trolling anyway.
Call me crazy, but I really like Word, once I turn off the paperclip and set up my defaults the way I like them.
Sure, it's a memory hog. I'd love to have some way to compartmentalize some of the features so I could trim it down for faster loading and prevent resource bloat. Other than that, Word is my word processor of choice, and a damn sight better than Wordperfect or Xywrite.
IANAMZ*, but I use Windows because it has the apps and games I use.
*I am not a Microsoft zealot.
I agree with the original poster. Businesses can't make decisions without a reasonable expectation of return on investment.
If they had spent (pulling numbers out of thin air) $200k in development costs (how many programmers working on it, for how long?) on porting the software and expected to spend $400k more on debugging and then marketing (packaging, etc) but only expected to sell 10 copies (I checked the price -- that freaking program is $1500! How many Linux users can afford that? Anyone *that* serious about DTP is going to be using a Mac or Windows where there's a variety of DTP software available) what kind of sense does that make?
The better business decision is to cut bait on this kind of product until the market can profitably bear it.
I'm not some kind of anti-Linux zealot. I've used different forms of Unix for years. For what I do, Windows has the apps I need and games I want.
a great writer sells
his soul is on ebay now
it is full of stars
Odd...
I've got a P2-450, 128MB RAM and a GeForce DDR. I'm running Windows98SE. The only time I get delays is when I'm loading an application, or Internet Exploder is doing a DNS lookup or thinking about how to display a page. Or another app is trying to do something, like Photoshop trying to Blur a 1600x1200 picture.
I condemn Microsoft's monopolistic practices. I swear at them every time I get an error, just like everyone else. But... if you want a good word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, and games, there's no other alternative.
I protest by not buying the OS. I copy it from someone else (who has usually copied it from someone else...). I already buy Intel processors; I figure that's almost as good as handing money to Microsoft anyway.
For your system (that is much faster and has much more RAM than mine) to veg like that, something is wrong with your configuration. Unless you're recompiling your project in VC6 or you just pasted a web page to Word (notoriously slow for me!) at the same time you are trying to click on something. I don't even optimize my cache or tweak settings. And I only reinstall every few months. But, I do reboot at least once a day at home.
You know, I hate Microsoft... but there's really nothing better out there for the end-user that does as much.
GUI reasons I prefer Windows:
- A taskbar that I can anchor on any edge easily with click-drag
- Task buttons that resize to accomodate the space in my task bar
- Drag and drop shortcuts to my shortcut bar
- Drag and drop "Favorites" (bookmarks) in Explorer to organize them within the program instead of bringing up an alternate editor page
- Control panel has all my settings. Under Gnome, there's several different places to go to edit system properties.
- Drag and drop icons in the Start menu. No, I don't like the way icons and folders get installed in there by default either, but I can move them around realtime without going into some kind of editor.
If someone made a *nix GUI that did all this, I would be more willing to use it on a regular basis. I want to be able to drag things around without jumping through hoops. I don't like Windows 95 pre-IE4 because of this; you can't shuffle around the Favorites or the Start menu items without going into an editor.
All this said, I *love* *nix. I cut my teeth on Sunos 4.1, went on to BSDI and FreeBSD, then Solaris and Linux. I can put 7 years of various Unix *work* experience on my resume. For what they do, they are amazing and powerful. For word processing and game playing, they suck.
The right tool for the right job....and for my own personal use, the right tool is Windows.
Keep working on Linux, guys! Once you get a good 2d/3d graphic toolkit and some productivity software that's at least as stable as Microsoft's, you'll own the world.
The evil backhoe is a common antagonist and joke among ISPs and backbone operators -- people 'in the business' (the internet business, that is).
I worked in a NOC and up into engineering at a minor internet backbone (for those of you up on your history, the first one to use ATM) and whenever something went down, we'd joke "Some drunk ran into a light pole," or "Some stupid backhoe operator took out MAE East again."
It's funny, but it does happen and causes a lot of people to pop Tums until it's over. Train wrecks can be devestating too, since fiber/copper are often run along train tracks for a lot of reasons.
After a brief search, I came up with the following interesting blurbs:
A fiber cut from 1999
One from 1998
An article about a fiber cut on Slashdot itself
Sprint has "fiber repair" rodeos, heh.
If you do a google search on "fiber cut" and "backhoe", you'll come up with tons of hits. So, you can see, backhoes being the bane of the service provider is a very true statement.
FYI, the NANOG mentioned in some of those articles is the "North American Network Operators' Group" and they have meetings where they discuss cool stuff related to the internet. I went to a meeting once.. boring as hell. But I got some t-shirts and the day off work to go. Wheeee!
Sure, if the plants themselves didn't have to be decommissioned after a comparatively short time. What is the average lifetime of a power plant? 10 years, 15 years, before constant bombardment with radioactive particles weakens the atomic structure of the building materials so much that the place has to be condemned?
As efficient as nuclear power is to produce, can someone quote a recommended plant lifetime, along with cost of a plant versus energy output during the plant's lifetime?
This sounds great on paper, and would work reasonably well (see below) for PvE games (Player vs Environment) but will NOT work for PvP (Player vs Player) situations.
Consider, any multiplayer adventure game. You could use EverQuest or Ultima Online as examples.
Fact; to display the players, the client has to know their positions.
Premise; you can't transmit the location of other players to the client only when they are visible.
Reasoning behind this: The server would have to calculate visibility of every player to every other player constantly, which would cause two problems. Increased server-side processing, and inability for smooth gameplay because of predictive movement to compensate for latency.
Therefore one of two situations must occur: total client blindness, which would suck for the above reasons, or client trust, which means the client knows the position of the other players, and must be trusted. The problem with that is, the client you're so willing to release the source code to will be hacked to show players in glowing neon orange with voodoo spikes and by the way a side helping of autoaim. In an RPG with turn-based mediated combat, this is less of an issue since aiming is very gross (ie, you just need to face your target) and movement is slower, so hiding is more difficult, but it still is an issue.
The same problems apply to PvE issues as well. "Yes, I'd like a HUD overlay of where all the mobs are, and a map, and I'd like to script my client so that I can make money/kills/increase skills automatically. Thanks."
I'm not knocking you guys on the Worldforge project. I think it's an awesome effort and I am looking forward to the technologies you make available to the creative juices but not the programming skills to do these things from scratch.
But, be aware that your client may be hacked to give people an unfair advantage. It's not a "bug" to have predictive player movement to compensate for internet latency, but it does beg the question, how do you prevent cheating, even with the minimal set of information sent to the client?
We've decided that after a point, time is more important than money.
Hear, hear! I would rather make $60k with a 10-minute commute than $80k with an hour commute. Some things are just worth more. What is that $20k if I'm too tired to enjoy my off-time?
True, the original Dune novel is leaps and bounds better than the others in the series. But others have recaptured some of the magic;
The Bashir's (sp? It's been years since I read them) discovery of his ability to move at superhuman speeds. Ghola Duncan's uncanny warrior technique -- unlearned, but intuited. These kinds of things bring back the awe and mystery I felt at Paul's growing awareness of his abilities. Of course none match the original, but they get close.
This scares me about the most recent Dune installment, written by Herbert's son (grandson?) I hear it's pretty good, so I will probably break down and get it. Wasn't Chapterhouse finished after Herbert's death as well? I haven't heard any buzz about the Foundation books, but like you intimated, it depends on the skill of the writer to write whether or not you enjoy a book, not how well he can copy another writer's style. I have thoroughly enjoyed the Berserker stories that were written by third parties.
I wonder how much of Zelazny's last works were massaged, touched up, and just plain written by someone else? The quality of his writing had been on a downslide for several years anyway, and the second Amber series was a disappointment overall, so I don't expect much would be lost in that case through the after-editing, but I wonder how many great writers have had works trashed or rewritten beyond their original intent after their death or debilitating illness?
And just for the record, The Silmarillion was one of the most gosh-awful boring books I've read since I tried to read a dictionary. Everyone's different though.
If you make a living at a computer, $130 is cheap for feeling healthy instead of achey, or worse, in severe pain like some people. Of course, the "natural" keyboards are "good enough" and prevent most of the pain from typing.
I have about 3 dozen DVDs, and there have only been a few times where the compression has been noticeable. There were a couple HORRIBLE scenes in the X-Files season 1 collection, especially with scenes with high contrasts. 99% of the problems I've seen have been with large areas of darkness. Most of my DVDs have dealt with it very well; some haven't. These kinds of scenes are brief, however, and I quickly get over the trauma and move on.
The guy who has a film setup in his home theatre is either moderately wealthy or moderately insane.
For the "full theatre experience," I go to the theatre.
I enjoy programming, yet I know that I'll probably never make a living programming because I don't live and breathe languages to their full extent. I just like playing around.
That said, if I can get a copy of the BASIC language for the PS2 and a keyboard, I would love to play around with something like that. I play around with OpenGL on my Windows box, but it's complicated and blows up frequently. I'd love to abstract my environment out to something simple like some sort of BASIC on the PS2 and hack around with some remakes of old games, yes, possibly even in 3D.
"Fun" can't be quantified, printed on the side of the box, put in a press release, standardized across platforms, or written in a business proposal.
Numbers are the job of the console designer and manufacturer. "Fun" is the job of the game designer and programmer to instill into the games. "Fun" is what you have when you sit around the TV with your friends playing Mario Party and you all yell and scream like maniacs because you played a particularly fun game of Mario Ball.
The developers (Sony, Sega) of the consoles determine numbers. These have to be progressive so they can make a business case and compete with other products by saying their specs outperform the competition's. They also have to woo the game developers to sign on and make the expense of purchasing the development license and tools, paying their programmers to learn a new environment instead of possibly putting out another few games on a proven system. They're taking a gamble. The system has to have good potential and incentive for game developers to write for it.
Game developers are the ones responsible for putting in fun, and if people buy games, those games are deemed 'successes' and that level of 'fun' from those successes becomes standard.
If the game's not fun, tell your friends not to buy it, post in public forums that the game sucks and back your point of view up.
We as consumers are the ones ultimately responsible for giving the thumbs up or thumbs down on products. Money talks. Record companies, movie studios, and political engines all run on money... we vote with our money.
I don't insist on being referred to as "Irish-American." I don't bitch about my ancestors being discriminated against when they were poor immigrants. I live *my* life, I don't live in the past, and I don't try to get something that's not my due.
If I were a practicing, faithful Christian, I could, by extension of your philosophy, condemn all women as evil and lead a campaign to sue them for damages back in the Garden of Eden. $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 punitive damages for getting us kicked out of Paradise.
Duh. Is anyone swallowing his tripe?
I think a lot of these responses are saying the same thing, but they're slightly wrong.
Yes, nostalgia plays a big role in remembering how 'great' the old games were. However, new games are not lacking 'game play' emphasis; they're just copying off of games that have already been successful with good gameplay. Sure the new graphics are nice, but basically Q3A is Doom. Basically the latest Command and Conquer game is Dune. The latest Civ/Sim game is Empire, or whatever the first one of those was. Playability is there, but we *already played* those games, so we feel the same boredom we did after playing them.
Online games are different because it allows us to do two things at once; we get to leave our stress-filled or boring life and take on the attributes of our avatar. We get to play a role and be someone else, inventing ourselves all over. We also get to interact with new and interesting people (sometimes) that we normally wouldn't meet. With AC, EQ, and all the other MMOG's, we meet literally hundreds of people from the safety and comfort of our chair. We experience that variety without expending the effort of actually doing this in person.
Is this a good thing? I think in limited quantities, virtual socialization can be a good thing. It can be used to find someone who is intellectually compatible without making snap judgments based on appearance, and we can do it wholesale.. meeting hundreds or thousands of people versus 2 or 3 at a singles bar.
I think this comes at the expense of social skills if taken too far, though. People with problems socializing can take the easy way out and build a social circle online, taking them out of the physical social pool. On the other hand, people with severe social handicaps can make friends online and then meet these people IRL after they've come to know them, saving them much anxiety.
This is a common theme in science fiction, telling a tale of a society that retreats into virtual space to live a perfect life made to order... And then the race dies off because nobody wants to deal with the REAL world. You could probably think of a dozen examples of this, but I have a headache so can't at the moment. Realistically, I can't see this happening until we get neural implants and a virtual environment on the order of sophistication and realism in The Matrix, or that Hogan's G ent le Giants series (I would highly recommend) wrote of.
By the way, here's a game that is good eye-candy, good gameplay, and kind of unique. "Hitman, Codename 47" or something like that. Eidos put out a demo recently. You're a hitman, you get an assignment and you have to purchase tools, scout out the victim, and do the deed(s). You can use a garotte, knife, various guns, car bomb, etc. You have to avoid detection as long as possible, change clothing to impersonate people, and behave intelligently rather than just go in guns blazing. The key interface is kind of hard to get used to, but I had loads of fun playing last night.
That, and the fact that the displays are low resolution -- functional, but not very enjoyable.
As someone else pointed out, though, a wireless linkup could connect you to wire-based connectivity, or a larger mobile unit with more hardware than you care to lug around. Your car could be a relay, or your desk at work. But yes, we need more wireless bandwidth before applications on this scale will work.
Of course, that's just more EMI to bombard our cells and force them to mutate into cancers, but hey, it's progress. Am I right?
The head-mounted display lets you see what you've written so far. Next step to eliminate a HMD... maybe a synthesized voice that does a decent job of inflection?
paRcat,
For this use, integration into the car itself would make the most sense. There is research already being done (ie, I saw something on the Discovery channel over a year ago) concerning a camera that watches the driver and searches for behavior indicative of sleepiness (ie, closed eyelids) and warns the driver of his impending death.
The cars that include a thermal HUD on the inside of the windshield are also good ideas for assisted driving technology.
Although eventually, we won't be driving. Cars will just go where we want them to, by the most efficient route, based on traffic and scenic preference.
Just a followup... Kudos to BrianHV for posting the link to a manufacturer that has very practical eyewear displays, some of which can clip on to your existing glasses.
It appears that 320x200 is available now, with 640x480 "in development."
The point of my post (which probably didn't even muss your collective 'dos [the ones that criticized my post]) was that in their current state, as bulky as they are, wearable PCs are impractical.
I stated changes (ie, reduction in size, weight) that would probably make wearable computers useful in certain situations, and stated a couple uses for them, while you (collectively, several posters) did not propose anything positive at all. Ergo your resulting mod to 0 for obvious trolling, considering I had the "lack of imagination" to propose the writing-aid. Read the whole post next time.
I still stand on what I thought was a very simple practical point; that the current crop of wearable PCs are impractical for almost ANY use.... for now. PDA technology will certainly help with the miniaturization of PCs, although displays are still a bulky problem.
I can't see much application for a wearable PC. Sure, it's cool, but beyond sheer geekness, I see little point.
These articles about wearable computers keep coming up, and they're the usual deal, with a Borg-esque monocle/HUD, chorded keyboard, and fanny-pack CPU/etc case.
When I can wear one with as little intrusiveness (weight, bulkiness) as an earbud headset and do something useful, talk to me.
Something I'd like to see is a Writer's setup. I have delusions of grandeur and think I could be a novelist. Set me up with a 99.99% reliable dictation machine, a sensitive microphone so I can speak softly into it and have it transcribe what I'm saying. Recall Heinlein's Jubal in Stranger in a Strange Land. I want to be able to drive home or work while composing the Great American Novel. Recall Lain and the mobile DOOM-like game. If I tried to play that while driving I'd probably kill several people, including myself, to avoid being shot by the guy driving south on I-94. I can see wearable PCs being more of a hazard than cell phones if used irresponsibly.
Any kind of roving salesman or mobile worker of any kind that needs access to some kind of data storage or minimal, but frequent, input, could benefit from a wearable PC, but I can't see the average Joe User needing one. PDA's with appointments and contact listings would probably take up most of the mobile gearhead market, especially as they become faster, better, and more functional.