Let's do some research on this opinion piece and see how deep it actually goes.
Americans love rockets, and their interest focuses on the two ends: the front end where the astronauts sit and the tail end where the rocket engines are bolted. For decades, NASA has kept the focus on the front end through an unrelenting public relations campaign touting the astronauts' importance. While this is understandable, it has unfortunately resulted in a skewed program where the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station--both based on old technology--get most of NASA's budget.
1. Human space flight gets slightly less than half of NASA's budget. Read the budget yourself at
ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/budget/2002/budget_s ummary.pdf (Note: Slashdot malforms the url. Remove the space in "summary")
It's time to seriously work on the tail end again and build advanced propulsion systems. If we don't, space endeavors will be stuck forever in low-Earth orbit, doing no better than struggling to bolt together the space station.
2. When the Voyager spacecraft made it to Neptune in 1989, was that in low earth orbit, or was that not a space endeavor?
The station is supposed to provide information needed before sending humans on long space voyages, but we already know that living in space is essentially bad for people. It is debilitating to bones and muscles, and radiation from the solar wind and cosmic rays can cause cancer.
3. I doubt that cancer will stop a two-year mission to mars. I *think* he's trying to bash on the space station, but it's not clear how. If I were the author, I would bring up actual, logistical problems like food and psychological stress - which would bolster the argument for a faster trip.
Zubrin writes:
"...more propulsive DV is added....at a significant cost to the mission in terms of reduced delivered payload. Such payload reductions do not merely reduce mission capability, they are a source of risk to the crew, as they imply the thinning out of redundancy of backups to various mission-critical propulsion, control, and life-support systems. The failure of any one of these systems would represent a much more deadly threat to the crew than the roughly 1% statistical incidence of cancer caused by a year of exposure to interplanetary levels of cosmic radiation. Thus if crew safety is the objective, attempts to accelerate conjunction trajectories beyond certain limits must be seen to be misconceived."
http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/nearterm.txt
To go to Mars or back to the moon with slow, low-powered chemical rocket systems is asking for trouble. The best a chemical rocket can do is get up to speed (burning up all its propellant in the process) and then drift to its destination, like a car coasting down the highway with its engine off. What's needed are space drives that will provide a constant velocity.
4. As already mentioned, he means "constant acceleration," not "constant velocity." Pretty big typo for an article on rockets.
5. It's not clear why going to Mars, and especially the moon, is asking for trouble with chemical rockets. A chemical rocket manned mission was accomplished in 1969 - over 30 years ago. In fact, if I recall, they made several trips and nobody died.
6. Zubrin examines nuclear rockets for Mars travel, and while he envisions using them for certain legs of the journey, the argument is expressed in terms of cargo capacity - not time savings. In fact,
"...It can be seen that the use of NTR [nuclear rockets] for TMI [Earth-orbit launch] is highly advantageous, increasing the delivered payload by 77% for cargo and 100% for piloted flights. However, it can also be seen that NTR offers no significant advantage over chemical propulsion for Mars orbital capture. This is because the large dry mass of the NTR stage combined with the large amounts of hydrogen propellant boiloff during trans-Mars cruise (even a H2/O2 chemical stage is only 14% hydrogen, NTR propellant is 100% hydrogen) destroys any performance advantage resulting from the high specific impulse of NTR when applied to a modest DV. This logic holds even more forcefully for the trans-Earth injection burn, which occurs 2 years into the mission and is much more conveniently accomplished by a space storable CH4/O2 stage."
I think what he's saying is that by the time you got to Mars and wanted to brake, a lot of your hydrogen propellant will have evaporated during the trip. Zubrin is favorable towards nuclear rockets in general, but his conclusions with regards to Mars are to use NTR only for post-launch acceleration towards Mars.
In short, the engineering of a Mars mission is so complex that the choice of propulsion system is but one of myriad factors involved in its success.
After Norway's Roald Amundsen and Britain's Robert Scott both reached the Pole in 1911 (with Scott's party all perishing on the way back), interest waned in duplicating their feats; it was far too expensive in both money and blood to do something that had already been done. Four decades went by before the next explorers arrived at the pole. They were Americans, and they simply flew there in an airplane.
6. Actually, Scott made it to the South Pole in January of 1912, and Americans flew over the pole in 1928. Just factual errors, nothing to worry about.
A fission rocket is a simple and safe system that uses a nuclear reactor to heat up a liquid such as hydrogen to create thrust. Unfortunately, "nuclear" and "fission" have been dirty words in this country for the last three decades. Despite the fact that nuclear propulsion is the best and safest way to fly major missions beyond Earth orbit, NASA stopped its development back in 1972 to put nearly every penny it had into the development of the shuttle. That was a terrible decision. At that point we had successfully tested nuclear rockets in the open air in Nevada, engines that could be operated with high thrusts for long durations--the key to entering the solar system.
7. It's not clear that nuclear rockets have been simple, safe, or successful at all. The Federation of American Scientists has this to say about NASA's nuclear test program:
"No fuel element geometry or fuel material ever totally solved the NERVA fuel element degredation problem. Mass loss of both uranium and carbon continued to limit service life by causing significant perturbation to core neutronics during the tests. Crack development in the fuel element coating was never compleatly eliminated.... Non-nuclear testing of coated fuel elements revealed an Arrhenius relationship between diffusion and temperature. For every 205 K increase in temperature (in the range 2400 to 2700 K), the mass loss increased by a factor of ten... resulting in loss of 20% of total uranium in approximately 5 hours of testing at 2870 K."
As for testing in the open air over Nevada,
"The major obstacle to testing at NTS will be the reduced levels of radioactive debris which are allowed to transport into the public domain. The levels are more stringent than those present during the NERVA program. The current exposure limits of 150 m Rem to civilian personnel may restrict the tests of the NTR to low power levels and mass flows in the reactor... A simple solution to this problem may be to utilize one of the Pacific Ocean Islands owned by the United States -- namely Johnston Island... (an) ecological desert of ocean surrounds the area due to the stagnation of the return of the Japanese current..."
So it seems we terminated the program because we decided to stop releasing radiation into the atmosphere - hardly a radical environmental concept.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/c04rover.htm
It's time to resurrect the nuclear rocket and confront the critics of nuclear energy, one of the cleanest forms of energy known. Hundreds of nuclear reactors are tooling around in the world's oceans right now, propelling submarines and aircraft carriers. Newer designs, including SAFE--the Safe, Affordable Fission Engine--are now being developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL.
8. Clean? Let's start with safety, which is, IMHO, a prerequisite for cleanliness. At Brown's Ferry, Alabama in 1975, workers caused a fire and near-meltdown by using a candle as part of routine maintenance. Workers caused a fission chain-reaction at Tokaimura, Japan in 1999 by pouring the wrong amount of uranium into a purification vessel. Chernobyl caused the relocation of 326,000 people.
http://power.about.com/cs/accidents/index.htm
To conclude, nuclear reactors are delicate systems with multiple single-points-of-failure and represent ecological SPOF's themselves. As for explicit cleanliness,
"At least 50 nuclear weapons lie on the ocean bottom due to U.S. and Soviet accidents....The U.S. Department of Energy spends over $4 billion each year for the restoration and management of sites contaminated by nuclear materials....Much of this is largely maintained, decommissioned, managed, and remediated by the EM program, which is sometimes referred to as the "cleanup program." EM's responsibilities include facilities and sites in 30 states and one territory, and occupy an area equal to that of Rhode Island and Delaware combined - or about 2.1 million acres."
http://lutins.org/nukes.html
But why send humans beyond low-Earth orbit at all? One word: energy. The low energy costs Americans currently enjoy are due to the abundant supply of fossil fuels. When those eventually go away--and they will--our advanced society may well collapse, unless we take the steps to prepare alternative energy sources. Wind, geothermal, tidal and solar energy resources can be added to the mix, but they will never supplant fossil fuel energy. For that we need something big. Only a combination of nuclear and space-based energy resources can ever take the place of fossil fuels.
9. Solar energy has been powering the earth for 5 billion years. I don't see any reason why our civilization should let itself outgrow that supply. As for fossil fuels, an article (not opinion piece) in the same magazine indicates that natural gas in the deep ocean may last hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/voss0102.asp
The solar system is filled with energy in a variety of forms, including solar energy, which could be microwaved back to Earth, and the isotope known as helium-3, which happens to cover the moon. Helium-3 may be the key to fusion energy; many energy researchers believe that fusing helium-3 with deuterium is the cleanest and cheapest approach to commercial fusion power.
10. Yes, and in order to acquire more solar energy, we need advanced propulsion systems to set up collectors further out in the solar system.
Hmmm...someone thinks that Salon is "the real deal...the only true purveyors of internet journalism" and they get a Score 5 Insightful.
Someone else thinks that Salon is an unrespecting low-wattage publication that promotes unsafe sexual practices, and they get a Score 0 Troll.
Granted, one of the two mentioned "your mom" but somehow I still think I detect a slight bias in the moderation system.
Personally, I think the first post is a troll. He might as well sing the praises of the New York Times, or CNN. That kind of clueless nonsense throws me into a frenzy.
>I spent two years playing with human-computer interfaces
I didn't and I still thought this was an obvious hoax. I mean, let's be honest here. There's a photo of a guy with wrist straps and a fifty-word blurb indicating that the straps perform some sort of magic.
What makes me sad is that the best score is 2 of anyone calling this a hoax. That leads me to believe that in the 12 hours since the original posting, not a single mod point was devoted to the TRUTH.
Well, it looks like there's already a flourishing discussion on the parallels to nuclear weapons, but perhaps this simple exercise sums it up better than a long-winded debate.
Code (pseudo-Tcl):
regsub -all them "nuclear weapons"
regsub -all "new technolog[y|ies]" "nuclear weapons"
Program output:
There's an argument that perhaps we could simply close our eyes to nuclear weapons," Dr. Merkle said. "Occasionally, people argue that if nuclear weapons pose new risks we should tell people they should not develop nuclear weapons." But then, he said, society would be worse off. "Not only do we lose the benefits of the nuclear weapons, but we also - and more importantly - fail to understand what the nuclear weapons means," Dr. Merkle said. "Then how can we defend ourselves if someone else develops nuclear weapons?"
I haven't seen the movie, but I saw a half-hour promo show called Reel Comedy, with clips from the movie and interviews with Kevin, Jay, and the other cast members. It was very revealing.
The first time I watched it, I thought something really weird was going on. They were openly admitting that the movie was complete trash. Why would they do that? Why would a cast of 50 recognizeable names agree to appear in such a bomb? Why would they make the movie at all?
The movie is clearly a public celebration of something, and at first I thought maybe it was Kevin's coming out as an actor. It's not. It's his coming out as a gay man.
Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes are gay lovers. They were hanging all over each other in the interview, being cutesy, and cracking jokes about their relationship that were...well, they didn't seem like jokes.
I think I was lucky to have seen the promo show, with Kevin talking and pretending to joke about which one of them takes it in the rear. It must have been less obvious in the movie itself, because only one commenter pointed out that the movie has an openly gay theme. I think we are right...it's the only explanation for what I saw.
Big deal. I saw a discovery channel show about turbine powered cars developed in the 1950's. Basically, the concept was to put a jet engine down the length of the car (!)
Not only did they build them, they started handing out the prototypes to random families. People liked driving them. The acceleration was poor, but they were working on that. The exhaust wasn't even hot. And of course, with almost no moving parts, they had no good reason to break down.
The kicker is that they would run on *any* flammable liquid. They had video of the president of south africa incredulously pouring cognac into the gas tank.
I saw this on tv three years ago, and my jaw was on the floor for the duration of the program.
Why didn't they go into mass production? Good question. From what I remember, the car companies simply lost interest in the project.
Man, I could wax nostalgic for hours about these games. I still love the music...there's something to be said for a 60-second loop that didn't get old after months of pounding repetition.
(I replayed several 8-bit games recently and mpegged the music, sans sound effects...if u r lucky, u can download them some nite on napster or gnutella:)
The flood of ideas that we witnessed during the birth of video games was incredible. I think that there are many good ideas still to be implemented, but the market has grown younger and more reflex-oriented, and the really good programmers are working on other things. In the years between Dune II and Age of Empires, what did we get? Unit-building pipelines. Whoopee. Compare that to the conceptual difference between Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. I mean, christ.
Instead of listing all the really sweet games for all the different platforms, I tried to compile a list of novel game concepts along with games that really showed them off:
automapping and multiple game paths in d&d for intellivision plot and character building in wasteland monster and level design in blaster master bionic arm (no jumping!) in bionic commando fancy weapon system in space megaforce interaction with the environment in ultima 6 secrets and tricks in super mario brothers atmosphere in metroid music in megaman 2 length and challenge in gauntlet sensory overload in contra 3 attention to detail in Castlevania:sotn simulation and responsiveness (control) in gran turismo sheer audio-visual experience in darius coin-op (3 screens wide, hi-res, stereo sound) depth of gameplay in civilization (until you realize the computer is cheating:) on-line multiplayer character building in tradewars2002 (bbs) navigating a 3d environment with ease in mario64 (magic carpet deserves a nod, too) multipliers and multiball in any pinball game (the first powerups...)
You think paying $500 for a castle in Ultima Online is a big deal? I would have died to keep my character alive in The Pit for more than a week at a time.
So who has the time or the energy these days to give us intelligent soldiers in the next incarnation of *-craft, or RPG character-building that involves more than just killing monsters? I wish it was me, but alas, the video game industry has been MTV-ized.
I would like to see a fully 3D (or 4D) interface in my lifetime. I read an article in Discover several years ago about a researcher who was building a time-dimensional filesystem. You could scroll back to the state of your file at any time in the past, just like you would scroll to the top. I thought it was ludicrous, but disks have gotten awfully cheap since then, and the idea, strangely, has remained prominent in my mind.
That said, there is an awful lot left to be done with 2D interfaces. 2D interfaces have not changed since the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, and as we all know, those ideas were pioneered at Xerox even earlier.
Those ideas, like hierarchical menus, were strong ones, which is why they have persisted...but they are getting unbearably stale.
If I want to perform a command in a windowed application, I have to visually navigate to the command's unique spatial location in a tree structure where no more than two of the leaves are visible at any one time.
This over-organization is why so many savvy users have stuck to the command line after all these years.
Consider these questions:
* Why do most commands exist in one spatial location in a fixed 2D map? (example: File--> Print Setup--> Page Orientation)
Ideally, all commands would be available in all situations where they might apply.
* Why is the interface the same regardless of the task being performed?
* Why is the interface density the same regardless of my skill level?
If I know all the hotkeys, why must I stare at icons while I'm working?
If I need to recover those icons, why aren't *all* of them recoverable with just few mouse clicks?
(The only current analogy is 'Full Screen Mode', but this is an absolute, and I've seen no examples of modes in between.)
* Why do I have to navigate to help text that is in a different spatial location than the command for which it applies?
Pop-up context is great. How come I never get more than three words of explanation, though?
To some extent, these questions are being slowly addressed. For example, the interface to edit a Word document is different from the interface to Preview it. However, I've seen no evidence that anyone has identified these issues and is working to address them in a systematic manner.
2D interfaces for the past fifteen years have just been big.BMP files, except organized in such a way that you can never view more than a small piece of the image at a time.
Interfaces should be *programs* that dynamically (and dare I say) intelligently respond to your implicit needs and explicit requests.
Death to the Macintosh. Death to the command line!
Slashdot Mirror
(Note: Slashdot malforms the url. Remove the space in "summary") 2. When the Voyager spacecraft made it to Neptune in 1989, was that in low earth orbit, or was that not a space endeavor? 3. I doubt that cancer will stop a two-year mission to mars. I *think* he's trying to bash on the space station, but it's not clear how. If I were the author, I would bring up actual, logistical problems like food and psychological stress - which would bolster the argument for a faster trip.
Zubrin writes:
"...more propulsive DV is added....at a significant cost to the mission in terms of reduced delivered payload. Such payload reductions do not merely reduce mission capability, they are a source of risk to the crew, as they imply the thinning out of redundancy of backups to various mission-critical propulsion, control, and life-support systems. The failure of any one of these systems would represent a much more deadly threat to the crew than the roughly 1% statistical incidence of cancer caused by a year of exposure to interplanetary levels of cosmic radiation. Thus if crew safety is the objective, attempts to accelerate conjunction trajectories beyond certain limits must be seen to be misconceived."
http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/nearterm.txt 4. As already mentioned, he means "constant acceleration," not "constant velocity." Pretty big typo for an article on rockets.
5. It's not clear why going to Mars, and especially the moon, is asking for trouble with chemical rockets. A chemical rocket manned mission was accomplished in 1969 - over 30 years ago. In fact, if I recall, they made several trips and nobody died.
6. Zubrin examines nuclear rockets for Mars travel, and while he envisions using them for certain legs of the journey, the argument is expressed in terms of cargo capacity - not time savings. In fact,
"...It can be seen that the use of NTR [nuclear rockets] for TMI [Earth-orbit launch] is highly advantageous, increasing the delivered payload by 77% for cargo and 100% for piloted flights. However, it can also be seen that NTR offers no significant advantage over chemical propulsion for Mars orbital capture. This is because the large dry mass of the NTR stage combined with the large amounts of hydrogen propellant boiloff during trans-Mars cruise (even a H2/O2 chemical stage is only 14% hydrogen, NTR propellant is 100% hydrogen) destroys any performance advantage resulting from the high specific impulse of NTR when applied to a modest DV. This logic holds even more forcefully for the trans-Earth injection burn, which occurs 2 years into the mission and is much more conveniently accomplished by a space storable CH4/O2 stage."
I think what he's saying is that by the time you got to Mars and wanted to brake, a lot of your hydrogen propellant will have evaporated during the trip. Zubrin is favorable towards nuclear rockets in general, but his conclusions with regards to Mars are to use NTR only for post-launch acceleration towards Mars.
In short, the engineering of a Mars mission is so complex that the choice of propulsion system is but one of myriad factors involved in its success. 6. Actually, Scott made it to the South Pole in January of 1912, and Americans flew over the pole in 1928. Just factual errors, nothing to worry about. 7. It's not clear that nuclear rockets have been simple, safe, or successful at all. The Federation of American Scientists has this to say about NASA's nuclear test program:
"No fuel element geometry or fuel material ever totally solved the NERVA fuel element degredation problem. Mass loss of both uranium and carbon continued to limit service life by causing significant perturbation to core neutronics during the tests. Crack development in the fuel element coating was never compleatly eliminated.... Non-nuclear testing of coated fuel elements revealed an Arrhenius relationship between diffusion and temperature. For every 205 K increase in temperature (in the range 2400 to 2700 K), the mass loss increased by a factor of ten... resulting in loss of 20% of total uranium in approximately 5 hours of testing at 2870 K."
As for testing in the open air over Nevada,
"The major obstacle to testing at NTS will be the reduced levels of radioactive debris which are allowed to transport into the public domain. The levels are more stringent than those present during the NERVA program. The current exposure limits of 150 m Rem to civilian personnel may restrict the tests of the NTR to low power levels and mass flows in the reactor... A simple solution to this problem may be to utilize one of the Pacific Ocean Islands owned by the United States -- namely Johnston Island... (an) ecological desert of ocean surrounds the area due to the stagnation of the return of the Japanese current..."
So it seems we terminated the program because we decided to stop releasing radiation into the atmosphere - hardly a radical environmental concept.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/c04rover.htm 8. Clean? Let's start with safety, which is, IMHO, a prerequisite for cleanliness. At Brown's Ferry, Alabama in 1975, workers caused a fire and near-meltdown by using a candle as part of routine maintenance. Workers caused a fission chain-reaction at Tokaimura, Japan in 1999 by pouring the wrong amount of uranium into a purification vessel. Chernobyl caused the relocation of 326,000 people.
http://power.about.com/cs/accidents/index.htm
To conclude, nuclear reactors are delicate systems with multiple single-points-of-failure and represent ecological SPOF's themselves. As for explicit cleanliness,
"At least 50 nuclear weapons lie on the ocean bottom due to U.S. and Soviet accidents....The U.S. Department of Energy spends over $4 billion each year for the restoration and management of sites contaminated by nuclear materials....Much of this is largely maintained, decommissioned, managed, and remediated by the EM program, which is sometimes referred to as the "cleanup program." EM's responsibilities include facilities and sites in 30 states and one territory, and occupy an area equal to that of Rhode Island and Delaware combined - or about 2.1 million acres."
http://lutins.org/nukes.html 9. Solar energy has been powering the earth for 5 billion years. I don't see any reason why our civilization should let itself outgrow that supply. As for fossil fuels, an article (not opinion piece) in the same magazine indicates that natural gas in the deep ocean may last hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/voss0102.asp 10. Yes, and in order to acquire more solar energy, we need advanced propulsion systems to set up collectors further out in the solar system.
Nuff said.
Hmmm...someone thinks that Salon is "the real deal...the only true purveyors of internet journalism" and they get a Score 5 Insightful.
Someone else thinks that Salon is an unrespecting low-wattage publication that promotes unsafe sexual practices, and they get a Score 0 Troll.
Granted, one of the two mentioned "your mom" but somehow I still think I detect a slight bias in the moderation system.
Personally, I think the first post is a troll. He might as well sing the praises of the New York Times, or CNN. That kind of clueless nonsense throws me into a frenzy.
Dorks. What will they think of next?
>I spent two years playing with human-computer interfaces
I didn't and I still thought this was an obvious hoax. I mean, let's be honest here. There's a photo of a guy with wrist straps and a fifty-word blurb indicating that the straps perform some sort of magic.
What makes me sad is that the best score is 2 of anyone calling this a hoax. That leads me to believe that in the 12 hours since the original posting, not a single mod point was devoted to the TRUTH.
Go slashdot! Liberate me from marketroid tyranny!
Well, it looks like there's already a flourishing discussion on the parallels to nuclear weapons, but perhaps this simple exercise sums it up better than a long-winded debate.
Code (pseudo-Tcl):
regsub -all them "nuclear weapons"
regsub -all "new technolog[y|ies]" "nuclear weapons"
Program output:
There's an argument that perhaps we could simply close our eyes to nuclear weapons," Dr. Merkle said. "Occasionally, people argue that if nuclear weapons pose new risks we should tell people they should not develop nuclear weapons." But then, he said, society would be worse off. "Not only do we lose the benefits of the nuclear weapons, but we also - and more importantly - fail to understand what the nuclear weapons means," Dr. Merkle said. "Then how can we defend ourselves if someone else develops nuclear weapons?"
I haven't seen the movie, but I saw a half-hour promo show called Reel Comedy, with clips from the movie and interviews with Kevin, Jay, and the other cast members. It was very revealing.
The first time I watched it, I thought something really weird was going on. They were openly admitting that the movie was complete trash. Why would they do that? Why would a cast of 50 recognizeable names agree to appear in such a bomb? Why would they make the movie at all?
The movie is clearly a public celebration of something, and at first I thought maybe it was Kevin's coming out as an actor. It's not. It's his coming out as a gay man.
Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes are gay lovers. They were hanging all over each other in the interview, being cutesy, and cracking jokes about their relationship that were...well, they didn't seem like jokes.
I think I was lucky to have seen the promo show, with Kevin talking and pretending to joke about which one of them takes it in the rear. It must have been less obvious in the movie itself, because only one commenter pointed out that the movie has an openly gay theme. I think we are right...it's the only explanation for what I saw.
Big deal. I saw a discovery channel show about turbine powered cars developed in the 1950's. Basically, the concept was to put a jet engine down the length of the car (!)
Not only did they build them, they started handing out the prototypes to random families. People liked driving them. The acceleration was poor, but they were working on that. The exhaust wasn't even hot. And of course, with almost no moving parts, they had no good reason to break down.
The kicker is that they would run on *any* flammable liquid. They had video of the president of south africa incredulously pouring cognac into the gas tank.
I saw this on tv three years ago, and my jaw was on the floor for the duration of the program.
Why didn't they go into mass production? Good question. From what I remember, the car companies simply lost interest in the project.
Man, I could wax nostalgic for hours about these games. I still love the music...there's something to be said for a 60-second loop that didn't get old after months of pounding repetition.
:)
:)
(I replayed several 8-bit games recently and mpegged the music, sans sound effects...if u r lucky, u can download them some nite on napster or gnutella
The flood of ideas that we witnessed during the birth of video games was incredible. I think that there are many good ideas still to be implemented, but the market has grown younger and more reflex-oriented, and the really good programmers are working on other things. In the years between Dune II and Age of Empires, what did we get? Unit-building pipelines. Whoopee. Compare that to the conceptual difference between Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. I mean, christ.
Instead of listing all the really sweet games for all the different platforms, I tried to compile a list of novel game concepts along with games that really showed them off:
automapping and multiple game paths in d&d for intellivision
plot and character building in wasteland
monster and level design in blaster master
bionic arm (no jumping!) in bionic commando
fancy weapon system in space megaforce
interaction with the environment in ultima 6
secrets and tricks in super mario brothers
atmosphere in metroid
music in megaman 2
length and challenge in gauntlet
sensory overload in contra 3
attention to detail in Castlevania:sotn
simulation and responsiveness (control) in gran turismo
sheer audio-visual experience in darius coin-op (3 screens wide, hi-res, stereo sound)
depth of gameplay in civilization (until you realize the computer is cheating
on-line multiplayer character building in tradewars2002 (bbs)
navigating a 3d environment with ease in mario64 (magic carpet deserves a nod, too)
multipliers and multiball in any pinball game (the first powerups...)
You think paying $500 for a castle in Ultima Online is a big deal? I would have died to keep my character alive in The Pit for more than a week at a time.
So who has the time or the energy these days to give us intelligent soldiers in the next incarnation of *-craft, or RPG character-building that involves more than just killing monsters? I wish it was me, but alas, the video game industry has been MTV-ized.
I would like to see a fully 3D (or 4D) interface in my lifetime. I read an article in Discover several years ago about a researcher who was building a time-dimensional filesystem. You could scroll back to the state of your file at any time in the past, just like you would scroll to the top. I thought it was ludicrous, but disks have gotten awfully cheap since then, and the idea, strangely, has remained prominent in my mind.
.BMP files, except organized in such a way that you can never view more than a small piece of the image at a time.
That said, there is an awful lot left to be done with 2D interfaces. 2D interfaces have not changed since the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, and as we all know, those ideas were pioneered at Xerox even earlier.
Those ideas, like hierarchical menus, were strong ones, which is why they have persisted...but they are getting unbearably stale.
If I want to perform a command in a windowed application, I have to visually navigate to the command's unique spatial location in a tree structure where no more than two of the leaves are visible at any one time.
This over-organization is why so many savvy users have stuck to the command line after all these years.
Consider these questions:
* Why do most commands exist in one spatial location in a fixed 2D map? (example: File--> Print Setup--> Page Orientation)
Ideally, all commands would be available in all situations where they might apply.
* Why is the interface the same regardless of the task being performed?
* Why is the interface density the same regardless of my skill level?
If I know all the hotkeys, why must I stare at icons while I'm working?
If I need to recover those icons, why aren't *all* of them recoverable with just few mouse clicks?
(The only current analogy is 'Full Screen Mode', but this is an absolute, and I've seen no examples of modes in between.)
* Why do I have to navigate to help text that is in a different spatial location than the command for which it applies?
Pop-up context is great. How come I never get more than three words of explanation, though?
To some extent, these questions are being slowly addressed. For example, the interface to edit a Word document is different from the interface to Preview it. However, I've seen no evidence that anyone has identified these issues and is working to address them in a systematic manner.
2D interfaces for the past fifteen years have just been big
Interfaces should be *programs* that dynamically (and dare I say) intelligently respond to your implicit needs and explicit requests.
Death to the Macintosh. Death to the command line!