The paper talks about things like "repeat" being more intuitive than "for"... I wonder if the authors considered testing languages like Hypertalk or AppleScript that are purposely designed for novice use. It would be interesting to see if they work. However, my gut (very unscientific) tells me that most professionals learn to think in the syntax they adopt, and other factors come into play than this intuitiveness. These might include efficiency (or density) of the language and ease of debugging (the whitespace issue). A test like this does not say much about the usefulness of a language to someone who devotes themselves to it.
It actually appears to me that this is a significant challenge to Google, and any of the rest of us who depend on web analytics. Silk not only renders on the cloud, but fetches content (even whole pages) predictively for the user. In other words, Silk will hit my website even if the user has not "clicked" on my link. How can I (or Google) tell whether the "GET" is predictive or actual? Furthermore, since Silk is doing much of the rendering in the cloud, how can I be sure that my content is actually getting through (ads, for example, could be modified or replaced).
None of this is new, others have been able to do this to varying degrees for years. But the scale is new. Amazon will sell millions of Fire readers, and who is to say that Silk will remain limited to just Fire and its descendants? What if Amazon eventually releases Silk as desktop technology. I actually think Fire is the first trial of a technology that Amazon intends for much wider distribution. Why not? It can already claim great success in bringing significant web properties into the Amazon cloud, promising Silk integration will only strengthen that position. Imagine: your user can get to your website without even using the internet! The whole interaction can be in the Amazon cloud. The net is only used to cover the "last mile" to the browser.
Silk is a major play for Amazon. Possibly bigger than Kindle itself.
From the article: "The reliquary has been declared a treasure trove at an inquest, meaning the proceeds of its sale will be shared between James's family and the landowner." Sounds fair enough.
I am not a Windows user, so I can't comment on Gruman's take on Windows 7, but he seems to be missing a lot about the Mac. Ever since the iPhone and the advent of CocoaTouch, Apple has been migrating touch elements into the desktop Cocoa framework and the laptop trackpad hardware. Today's MacBooks have trackpads that are, essentially, as sensitive as the iPhone. Two-finger scrolling has been joined by other gestures, most recently four-finger strokes to invoke Expose and the like. Application in Cocoa can (and many do) take advantage of two finger "spread" and "squeeze" gestures to zoom in and out, or "twist" gestures to rotate.
Gruman identifies the chicken and egg problem correctly enough, but misses the fact that Apple has a great advantage in the way Cocoa is architected. Many of these features can be implemented by Apple in such a way that Cocoa apps inherit these behaviors "for free." At this point the Mac OS is quite "touchy" and this drives some of the tablet rumors we hear. There is very little to prevent Apple from making the Mac screen itself an input device with gestures that many (if not most) Mac apps would have no trouble interpreting.
The other advantage for Apple in all this is CocoaTouch itself. Apple has a touch interface already widely deployed and is on its third generation of the framework that drives it. The iPhone/iPodTouch has many more users than MS Surface and Apple is learning from every one of them. Just because a casual user of the Mac OS does not get confronted by a host of touch options does not mean the potential is not present, after all, this is the company that ships a five button mouse configured to act like a one button mouse!
Actually, it's been years since I signed my name on any credit card slip. I sign "R U Checking" instead. Literally two years and I have yet to be challenged. I never thought of this as a security move, I just figured I'm trying to learn whether people ever check the sig. In my experience, even when they look at it, they don't see it.
Larry Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons, made a very cogent endorsement of Obama last fall. It makes for a good read. "Clearly on the big issues -- the war and corruption. Obama has made his career fighting both. But also on the issues closest to me. As the technology document released today reveals, to anyone who reads it closely, Obama has committed himself to important and importantly balanced positions."
Yes, I found that interesting too. This article makes it even clearer that the tiger had to _work_ to get to these individuals. It's trajectory over the fence would have landed it well behind the victims of the attack. I'm sure there were other people around, but the tiger had to turn around and go for these three. Very clever tiger.
One other point the article makes is that designing a high-quality world for a raster engine is a PITA. You have to take the time to not only "draw" the world, but to develop hints for the raster engine so that it can perform its job reasonably well. And even then, certain effects like the portals and reflections-in-reflections cited by the article will be showstoppers.
The benefit of ray-tracing is as much a benefit to world and game designers as to players. As RT makes new worlds and effects possible and old notions easier to implement it will open doors. It will open doors to new gameplay, which players will like. And it will open doors to new designers, by lowering the complexity to game design.
I first saw RT demonstrated on Crays in the Ohio Supercomputing Center in the 1980s. It was a elegant solution then, today the power of our processors and innovative shortcuts of some clever coders is bringing that elegance to the masses. I think we will love what this makes possible.
True, a default Mac install gives users admin privileges and the/Applications folder requires admin rights. So most Mac users have the rights they need to modify the/Applications folder. Note: "admin" on a Mac is not "root" for Unix purposes. From the Unix perspective "admin" is just a group with rights on a lot of privileged items in the system.
However, it is _highly_ advisable for any reasonably security conscious Mac user to create a second admin account (let's call it "apple") and then _remove_ admin privileges from their regular user account. Day to day life in MacOS X does not require any admin privileges. This is how I've run all my systems for at least three years now. I do not have admin rights from my user account. MacOS X is very graceful about this. For example, when I do need to add something to the/Applications folder it will put up a window informing me that I don't have the right to take that action and offering me a chance to authenticate. If I choose to authenticate, it lets me type in the username of an admin account (say "apple") and the password. It then uses that account's authority to take the action. This is very similar to a Unix sudo. Since daily use of the OS requires so little admin access, this really presents no problem.
What is the benefit? While the user can know the admin username/password, rouge software won't know that. There is no way for software using my user privileges to even add anything to the/Applications directory or any other special location without forcing an authentication request that should, at the least, make me suspicious.
So, yes, while the default behavior is as stated, it is very easy (and I would even go as far as saying recommended) for users to remove admin privileges from their regular user account.
That is exactly right. We are afraid to say that the price of free society is that some of us will die. We are cowards.
The earlier post of statistics comparing death by accident or health to death by terrorism was something to build on. We should build a society that is much more tolerant of death by "terrorism" (or maybe it is death by "ideology" since the whole point is not to be terrorized).
3,000 people killed in the USA? That is virtually nothing! They should be honored as martyrs to freedom and open society. What good does revenge do for an open society? Are we better off for killing 100,000 in Iraq as retribution? No. We have to learn to absorb these blows while modeling free society. The price of being such a beacon will be that we are also a target. The reward for patience and courage in the face of attack will be, I believe, a real change in the world, a respect that leads other societies to wanting to be more like us. In any event, it is unlikely to that this course would lead to the kind of carnage that revenge has lead to, much less its echos through coming decades.
We have been cowards in the face of attack. And we suffer the fate of cowards: we cower. We remove our shoes. We speak in whispers as we wait in line. We hope we won't be singled out. Our freedom fades away.
If you want a glimpse of an earlier Slashdot, take a look at the WayBackMachine. The earliest copy of Slashdot's front page there is dated 13 Jan 1998. The Slashdot poll of the day? "Netscape should GPL Mozilla".
The thing that most US evaluations of the Toyota Prius miss is that it is an exceptionally clean car. It emits 90% fewer "greenhouse" gasses than the typical car, even than other hybrids such as Honda. This clean technology is at least as much an attraction as the fuel efficiency to some buyers. I am currently in Austria where the billboards and ads for the Prius are all about this clean aspect, none emphasize milage. My guess is this is because in Europe (A) most cars get great milage simply because they are small and diesel and (B) cars get an emissions/kg of fuel rating on the showroom stickers. Odd how we don't pay attention to this in the US.
Also, as others have stated, the "intelligent" technology could certainly be wedded to the "hybrid" technology. Every little bit helps.
http://www.speakeasy.net/ has allowed this for a long time. Their terms of use actually encourage sharing, and long before FON showed up, Speakeasy facilitated such sharing by finding ways for customers to earn revenue for it. One of the few surviving independent ISPs out there, I think Speakeasy deserves a lot of kudos for their policies. Of course, now that they are Best Buy we'll see how long it all lasts.
FON is interesting for it's dual network access point. I'm running one right now (in Austria) and it does a fine job. It does seem to suffer a bit when both public and private networks are in use, though. It also "phones home" for regular updates that are outside my control. A few weeks ago one such update killed our ability to pick up Google Mail via SSL/POP. The fixed the bug within a couple weeks, but it is still odd to be running my network with an access point so totally out of my control.
You can easily fill up an iPod or iPhone with non-DRM music. Just rip it yourself.
Are you sure about that? I have a brand new RAZR from Sprint and while it has the capabilities to play mp3s you download from their store, it has no ability to copy your own to the phone...
I'm as sure about that as I can be without an iPhone in hand. Jobs called it the "widescreen iPod". We can move ripped mp3's to the iPod today, I'm sure we will be able to move ripped mp3's to the iPhone tomorrow.
The clue this would be the case during Jobs' keynote was the repeated use of Beatles albums and songs. None are on the iTunes Music Store today, all represent ripped CD contents on an iPhone.
You can easily fill up an iPod or iPhone with non-DRM music. Just rip it yourself. In fact, throughout the keynote Jobs used Beatles music (rubbing their nose in it, I guess) and those albums he showed are not available on iTunes. Apple has improved the ripping experience by providing album art for ripped tunes. Granted, FairPlay is hardly fair to Apple competitors. I wish that if Apple continues using it they would at least make it an open standard so we could have a level DRM field, but I don't expect Apple to support other DRM schemes, even when their own creators (MS anyone?) seem to abandon them, for sure.
The article does make a good point, though. If a label is willing to let its music out on eMusic without DRM, and even willing to let Apple have it for iTunes without DRM, then why does Apple not post it on iTunes without FairPlay? I'd guess this is (A) more of Jobs consistency bug, don't get people expecting different behavior from different objects in the store, and (B) Apple has begun to feel proprietary about this music and wants to sell more and maybe feels a wee bit fearful that an open tune will suffer sales decline. Who knows.
I wouldn't say the Mii are like Sims. Sims are more autonomous than Mii, they make their own decisions and are affected by their genes. Mii are more constructed, more like puppets or Second Live avatars. In fact, constructing a Mii is a lot like creating an avatar for SL, though the interface is much better than SL for the task. In a way the whole Mii thing feels like avatar training. The unused Mii just wander around a dance floor waiting to be picked for some action, occasionally falling asleep of boredom.
When you pick a Mii for a game, then it becomes your puppet, your onscreen avatar. Here the Wiimote offers a degree of control that SL can't match, but over a very selected set of motions. For example, swinging the racket in tennis feels very natural, but you soon realize that the game makes no distinction between backhand and forehand, nor does it care where you move laterally. All those motions are being handled by the game, you just choose the timing of the swing and some attributes (strength, spin, etc.) through the gesture of the swing. In bowling your motion only controls the release of the ball (again with associated attributes, like strength and spin). Even so, it is nearly impossible not to participate more fully in the whole action. You step forward in bowling even though this makes no difference to the game, simply because it "feels" right. You dance back and forth in tennis or dodge the punch by bobbing in boxing even though these are not "measured" motions, because the motions which are measured are well chosen to entice you into the experience. Your Mii draws you into the dance by serving as you representative in the environment. You start imitating the Mii. Now who is the puppeteer? It is a fascinating and remarkably immersive experience.
I think the old-style games (I've only seen Tony Hawk) probably don't quite "get" what the Wii can do yet. In Tony Hawk the tilting sensor of the Wiimote is used effectively enough, but it becomes a kind of steering wheel which does not create nearly the sympathetic response of the Wii Sports controls and characters. Wii Sports is a kind of grammar lesson that I hope game developers learn from and pick up. The graphics are nothing special, but that just demonstrates that good environmental design is about much more than photoreal graphics. As designers learn the new grammar of the Wiimote, we may see even more effective use made of this "light immersion."
I also hope game designers pick up on the data mining the Wii makes possible. Users will sink time and energy encoding some of their likes and self image into the Mii. Games should pick up on this. Use the favorite color. Modify a character's looks with the characteristics of the Mii (I imagine this could even be done in a photoreal environment by reinterpreting the Mii character controls, mapping them onto the photoreal character is subtle ways). I wonder if other elements of the Wii can be mined for inclusion in gameplay. What if some of the photo collection starts appearing in the fake advertising inside a game, for example? Or names from the address book become characters you meet in the game? Why not draw on this sense of the console owner to nudge games into a more personal relationship with the player?
Anyway, I've seen no other console with this potential. Mii thinks Wii has a lot of room to grow.
My 9 year old son had been saving up for over six months to buy the Wii, so we just _had_ to get on on Wiiday this Wiikend. Of course, he's cursed with a dad that can't do anything as sensible as preorder! We planned our early AM assault on two Target locations in the Twin Cities, one in town with 39 consoles, a backup just-opened suburban with 70. At 7:45 when we hit the first Target (7:45 for an 8am opening, I tell you, the poor little guy is cursed), we found a line much deeper than 39 people long. We just kept driving out to the second and got there at about 8:05. No luck, all 70 were spoken for. Very sad moment for poor cursed son. The story had a happy ending, though, since we realized Best Buy opened at 9am and we found one by 8:20 and got ticket #75 of the 84 they handed out. Best Buy was terrific, very organized and helpful. Linemates, some of whom had waited from 11pm Wiiday Eve till 8am when Best Buy handed out the first round of tickets, were a friendly and talkative crowd. We waited the 40 minutes and got the Wii.
I have been _very_ impressed. I'm a long-time Mac and Apple fan and the Wii shows signs of thoughtful design. Very easy packaging, simple setup, soothing interface, usable without reading any instructions. We started setting up by 10:20 Central time and the Wii asked to go through two rounds of "update" (about 10 minutes each) after we got the console up on our home wireless. My son picked up Tony Hawk, but has mostly played Wii sports with his father, his brother, and four friends.
A few highlights...
- the little "bump" the controller gives you as you pass over a button in the interface - the spacial effect of sounds from the controller - the fun every kid (and I) had designing our own Mii - the wonderfully smooth action of the control, even allowing a physically challenged brother get into the action - the soothing music of the interface - the clever (and appropriate) animation during disk insertion (9 year old _loves_ that one) - the appearance of all the Miis we'd created on our baseball team (a riot watching kids thank each other for "their" hits) - the messaging and calendar system with the automatic log (poor cursed son) of play time spent on each game each day - the ability to email into and out from the console
A few issues...
- neither news nor weather are working (later found the press releases about these being delayed for a few months, but Nintendo really should have updated the Wii Menu to either say that or remove the buttons until they work) - the lengthy update cycle before we could play (would have been nice to have had some piece of paper or warning that it would happen, or an option to skip until later) - the Wii froze once during baseball and had to be unplugged, luckily it started up again just fine
Bottom Line...
I think Nintendo has a real hit on its hands. The Wii is just a blast.
One thing I had heard very little about was the integration of Miis into the Wii experience. Each Mii is an avatar of sorts, designed and named by a player. A Mii looks a certain way (maybe a bit like you? maybe not?) and has certain attributes (favorite color, birthday). When you play certain games (Wii Sports, for now) you choose which Mii is playing the game, stats and skills accrue to that Mii. Baseball was especially clever in its use of Miis: your team wears the favorite color of the Mii you picked to play, other Miis from your console populate the home team, etc. Miis can "mingle" and go on "parade" to other consoles (we'll have to wait for a few more Wii's in the hood to test this feature). Miis can also be downloaded to the controller (the Wii Remote) and taken on the road to other Wii consoles where they can be uploaded and used (this is a much more natural process than I just made it sound like). The Miis represent a kind of social gaming trainer that will change how people interact with their gaming environment. It will be really exciting when other game authors come to learn and use the whole Wii ec
This is probably way too much to hope for, still... I hope that Disney recognized that part of the reason they atrophied creatively is that they lean too heavily on their legacy. It is one thing for all of us to moan and groan about Disney's zealous defense of their aging intellectual "property". It is quite another for them to realize that all that old stuff really does not do them all that much good. Future success derives from having great new ideas. Now they have had to buy the minds of Pixar, the driving force behind not just a bunch of terrific new movies, but the developer of new characters, new methods (new McDonalds happy meal toys). Their own creativity hit a wall, I hope this may be a sign that they have to change their priorities to succeed long-term. Maybe they will loosen up a bit on the IP side. Like I say, probably too much to hope for.
Instrumental solo guitar version of the theme is the last bit of music that plays at the very tail end of the credits. I've heard that Fox owns the rights to the lyric and would not allow it to be used in the movie. Can anyone confirm that?
The University of Minnesota-Duluth Library uses Sun Ray thin clients for many (though not all) of its public workstations. Look at their basic access hours for some evidence. I believe that while the Sun Rays are in the Libraries, they are run by the campus IT folks. I imagine either Library or campus IT staff could give you an idea of how they are used and how well they perform. I'm not sure who you would contact there for information, but I bet their directory might give you an idea.
Can anyone comment on the impact this may have on JPEG2000? This, rather than PNG, seems like a real competitor for JPEG. JP2 seems to be out there in the world in a real enough way to maybe pick up steam if there is a patent cloud over JPG.
Of course, maybe this same patent cloud hangs over JP2. I don't have a clue. Does anyone else?
Just curiosity driving me to ask an ignorant question... If the shuttle could not go to ISS and if we had known the seven would likely die upon reentry, could ISS have been brought down to the shuttle and hosted the crew long enough to get shuttle and/or Soyuz rescue up? Many problems with this scenario (not the least is how to get from shuttle to ISS even if they are near one another), and it would likely sacrifice the station... but I wonder if the station could have moved.
Slashdot Mirror
The paper talks about things like "repeat" being more intuitive than "for"... I wonder if the authors considered testing languages like Hypertalk or AppleScript that are purposely designed for novice use. It would be interesting to see if they work. However, my gut (very unscientific) tells me that most professionals learn to think in the syntax they adopt, and other factors come into play than this intuitiveness. These might include efficiency (or density) of the language and ease of debugging (the whitespace issue). A test like this does not say much about the usefulness of a language to someone who devotes themselves to it.
It actually appears to me that this is a significant challenge to Google, and any of the rest of us who depend on web analytics. Silk not only renders on the cloud, but fetches content (even whole pages) predictively for the user. In other words, Silk will hit my website even if the user has not "clicked" on my link. How can I (or Google) tell whether the "GET" is predictive or actual? Furthermore, since Silk is doing much of the rendering in the cloud, how can I be sure that my content is actually getting through (ads, for example, could be modified or replaced).
None of this is new, others have been able to do this to varying degrees for years. But the scale is new. Amazon will sell millions of Fire readers, and who is to say that Silk will remain limited to just Fire and its descendants? What if Amazon eventually releases Silk as desktop technology. I actually think Fire is the first trial of a technology that Amazon intends for much wider distribution. Why not? It can already claim great success in bringing significant web properties into the Amazon cloud, promising Silk integration will only strengthen that position. Imagine: your user can get to your website without even using the internet! The whole interaction can be in the Amazon cloud. The net is only used to cover the "last mile" to the browser.
Silk is a major play for Amazon. Possibly bigger than Kindle itself.
From the article: "The reliquary has been declared a treasure trove at an inquest, meaning the proceeds of its sale will be shared between James's family and the landowner." Sounds fair enough.
I am not a Windows user, so I can't comment on Gruman's take on Windows 7, but he seems to be missing a lot about the Mac. Ever since the iPhone and the advent of CocoaTouch, Apple has been migrating touch elements into the desktop Cocoa framework and the laptop trackpad hardware. Today's MacBooks have trackpads that are, essentially, as sensitive as the iPhone. Two-finger scrolling has been joined by other gestures, most recently four-finger strokes to invoke Expose and the like. Application in Cocoa can (and many do) take advantage of two finger "spread" and "squeeze" gestures to zoom in and out, or "twist" gestures to rotate.
Gruman identifies the chicken and egg problem correctly enough, but misses the fact that Apple has a great advantage in the way Cocoa is architected. Many of these features can be implemented by Apple in such a way that Cocoa apps inherit these behaviors "for free." At this point the Mac OS is quite "touchy" and this drives some of the tablet rumors we hear. There is very little to prevent Apple from making the Mac screen itself an input device with gestures that many (if not most) Mac apps would have no trouble interpreting.
The other advantage for Apple in all this is CocoaTouch itself. Apple has a touch interface already widely deployed and is on its third generation of the framework that drives it. The iPhone/iPodTouch has many more users than MS Surface and Apple is learning from every one of them. Just because a casual user of the Mac OS does not get confronted by a host of touch options does not mean the potential is not present, after all, this is the company that ships a five button mouse configured to act like a one button mouse!
Actually, it's been years since I signed my name on any credit card slip. I sign "R U Checking" instead. Literally two years and I have yet to be challenged. I never thought of this as a security move, I just figured I'm trying to learn whether people ever check the sig. In my experience, even when they look at it, they don't see it.
A video of the blind man walking down the corridor accompanies this story at National Public Radio.
Larry Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons, made a very cogent endorsement of Obama last fall. It makes for a good read. "Clearly on the big issues -- the war and corruption. Obama has made his career fighting both. But also on the issues closest to me. As the technology document released today reveals, to anyone who reads it closely, Obama has committed himself to important and importantly balanced positions."
Yes, I found that interesting too. This article makes it even clearer that the tiger had to _work_ to get to these individuals. It's trajectory over the fence would have landed it well behind the victims of the attack. I'm sure there were other people around, but the tiger had to turn around and go for these three. Very clever tiger.
One other point the article makes is that designing a high-quality world for a raster engine is a PITA. You have to take the time to not only "draw" the world, but to develop hints for the raster engine so that it can perform its job reasonably well. And even then, certain effects like the portals and reflections-in-reflections cited by the article will be showstoppers.
The benefit of ray-tracing is as much a benefit to world and game designers as to players. As RT makes new worlds and effects possible and old notions easier to implement it will open doors. It will open doors to new gameplay, which players will like. And it will open doors to new designers, by lowering the complexity to game design.
I first saw RT demonstrated on Crays in the Ohio Supercomputing Center in the 1980s. It was a elegant solution then, today the power of our processors and innovative shortcuts of some clever coders is bringing that elegance to the masses. I think we will love what this makes possible.
True, a default Mac install gives users admin privileges and the /Applications folder requires admin rights. So most Mac users have the rights they need to modify the /Applications folder. Note: "admin" on a Mac is not "root" for Unix purposes. From the Unix perspective "admin" is just a group with rights on a lot of privileged items in the system.
/Applications folder it will put up a window informing me that I don't have the right to take that action and offering me a chance to authenticate. If I choose to authenticate, it lets me type in the username of an admin account (say "apple") and the password. It then uses that account's authority to take the action. This is very similar to a Unix sudo. Since daily use of the OS requires so little admin access, this really presents no problem.
/Applications directory or any other special location without forcing an authentication request that should, at the least, make me suspicious.
However, it is _highly_ advisable for any reasonably security conscious Mac user to create a second admin account (let's call it "apple") and then _remove_ admin privileges from their regular user account. Day to day life in MacOS X does not require any admin privileges. This is how I've run all my systems for at least three years now. I do not have admin rights from my user account. MacOS X is very graceful about this. For example, when I do need to add something to the
What is the benefit? While the user can know the admin username/password, rouge software won't know that. There is no way for software using my user privileges to even add anything to the
So, yes, while the default behavior is as stated, it is very easy (and I would even go as far as saying recommended) for users to remove admin privileges from their regular user account.
That is exactly right. We are afraid to say that the price of free society is that some of us will die. We are cowards.
The earlier post of statistics comparing death by accident or health to death by terrorism was something to build on. We should build a society that is much more tolerant of death by "terrorism" (or maybe it is death by "ideology" since the whole point is not to be terrorized).
3,000 people killed in the USA? That is virtually nothing! They should be honored as martyrs to freedom and open society. What good does revenge do for an open society? Are we better off for killing 100,000 in Iraq as retribution? No. We have to learn to absorb these blows while modeling free society. The price of being such a beacon will be that we are also a target. The reward for patience and courage in the face of attack will be, I believe, a real change in the world, a respect that leads other societies to wanting to be more like us. In any event, it is unlikely to that this course would lead to the kind of carnage that revenge has lead to, much less its echos through coming decades.
We have been cowards in the face of attack. And we suffer the fate of cowards: we cower. We remove our shoes. We speak in whispers as we wait in line. We hope we won't be singled out. Our freedom fades away.
If you want a glimpse of an earlier Slashdot, take a look at the WayBackMachine. The earliest copy of Slashdot's front page there is dated 13 Jan 1998. The Slashdot poll of the day? "Netscape should GPL Mozilla".
Wireless versions of the new keyboard (without USB ports) and the mighty mouse are available for about $150 total. See the Apple Store for details.
Also, as others have stated, the "intelligent" technology could certainly be wedded to the "hybrid" technology. Every little bit helps.
http://www.speakeasy.net/ has allowed this for a long time. Their terms of use actually encourage sharing, and long before FON showed up, Speakeasy facilitated such sharing by finding ways for customers to earn revenue for it. One of the few surviving independent ISPs out there, I think Speakeasy deserves a lot of kudos for their policies. Of course, now that they are Best Buy we'll see how long it all lasts.
FON is interesting for it's dual network access point. I'm running one right now (in Austria) and it does a fine job. It does seem to suffer a bit when both public and private networks are in use, though. It also "phones home" for regular updates that are outside my control. A few weeks ago one such update killed our ability to pick up Google Mail via SSL/POP. The fixed the bug within a couple weeks, but it is still odd to be running my network with an access point so totally out of my control.
Are you sure about that? I have a brand new RAZR from Sprint and while it has the capabilities to play mp3s you download from their store, it has no ability to copy your own to the phone...
I'm as sure about that as I can be without an iPhone in hand. Jobs called it the "widescreen iPod". We can move ripped mp3's to the iPod today, I'm sure we will be able to move ripped mp3's to the iPhone tomorrow.
The clue this would be the case during Jobs' keynote was the repeated use of Beatles albums and songs. None are on the iTunes Music Store today, all represent ripped CD contents on an iPhone.
You can easily fill up an iPod or iPhone with non-DRM music. Just rip it yourself. In fact, throughout the keynote Jobs used Beatles music (rubbing their nose in it, I guess) and those albums he showed are not available on iTunes. Apple has improved the ripping experience by providing album art for ripped tunes. Granted, FairPlay is hardly fair to Apple competitors. I wish that if Apple continues using it they would at least make it an open standard so we could have a level DRM field, but I don't expect Apple to support other DRM schemes, even when their own creators (MS anyone?) seem to abandon them, for sure.
The article does make a good point, though. If a label is willing to let its music out on eMusic without DRM, and even willing to let Apple have it for iTunes without DRM, then why does Apple not post it on iTunes without FairPlay? I'd guess this is (A) more of Jobs consistency bug, don't get people expecting different behavior from different objects in the store, and (B) Apple has begun to feel proprietary about this music and wants to sell more and maybe feels a wee bit fearful that an open tune will suffer sales decline. Who knows.
I wouldn't say the Mii are like Sims. Sims are more autonomous than Mii, they make their own decisions and are affected by their genes. Mii are more constructed, more like puppets or Second Live avatars. In fact, constructing a Mii is a lot like creating an avatar for SL, though the interface is much better than SL for the task. In a way the whole Mii thing feels like avatar training. The unused Mii just wander around a dance floor waiting to be picked for some action, occasionally falling asleep of boredom.
When you pick a Mii for a game, then it becomes your puppet, your onscreen avatar. Here the Wiimote offers a degree of control that SL can't match, but over a very selected set of motions. For example, swinging the racket in tennis feels very natural, but you soon realize that the game makes no distinction between backhand and forehand, nor does it care where you move laterally. All those motions are being handled by the game, you just choose the timing of the swing and some attributes (strength, spin, etc.) through the gesture of the swing. In bowling your motion only controls the release of the ball (again with associated attributes, like strength and spin). Even so, it is nearly impossible not to participate more fully in the whole action. You step forward in bowling even though this makes no difference to the game, simply because it "feels" right. You dance back and forth in tennis or dodge the punch by bobbing in boxing even though these are not "measured" motions, because the motions which are measured are well chosen to entice you into the experience. Your Mii draws you into the dance by serving as you representative in the environment. You start imitating the Mii. Now who is the puppeteer? It is a fascinating and remarkably immersive experience.
I think the old-style games (I've only seen Tony Hawk) probably don't quite "get" what the Wii can do yet. In Tony Hawk the tilting sensor of the Wiimote is used effectively enough, but it becomes a kind of steering wheel which does not create nearly the sympathetic response of the Wii Sports controls and characters. Wii Sports is a kind of grammar lesson that I hope game developers learn from and pick up. The graphics are nothing special, but that just demonstrates that good environmental design is about much more than photoreal graphics. As designers learn the new grammar of the Wiimote, we may see even more effective use made of this "light immersion."
I also hope game designers pick up on the data mining the Wii makes possible. Users will sink time and energy encoding some of their likes and self image into the Mii. Games should pick up on this. Use the favorite color. Modify a character's looks with the characteristics of the Mii (I imagine this could even be done in a photoreal environment by reinterpreting the Mii character controls, mapping them onto the photoreal character is subtle ways). I wonder if other elements of the Wii can be mined for inclusion in gameplay. What if some of the photo collection starts appearing in the fake advertising inside a game, for example? Or names from the address book become characters you meet in the game? Why not draw on this sense of the console owner to nudge games into a more personal relationship with the player?
Anyway, I've seen no other console with this potential. Mii thinks Wii has a lot of room to grow.
My 9 year old son had been saving up for over six months to buy the Wii, so we just _had_ to get on on Wiiday this Wiikend. Of course, he's cursed with a dad that can't do anything as sensible as preorder! We planned our early AM assault on two Target locations in the Twin Cities, one in town with 39 consoles, a backup just-opened suburban with 70. At 7:45 when we hit the first Target (7:45 for an 8am opening, I tell you, the poor little guy is cursed), we found a line much deeper than 39 people long. We just kept driving out to the second and got there at about 8:05. No luck, all 70 were spoken for. Very sad moment for poor cursed son. The story had a happy ending, though, since we realized Best Buy opened at 9am and we found one by 8:20 and got ticket #75 of the 84 they handed out. Best Buy was terrific, very organized and helpful. Linemates, some of whom had waited from 11pm Wiiday Eve till 8am when Best Buy handed out the first round of tickets, were a friendly and talkative crowd. We waited the 40 minutes and got the Wii.
I have been _very_ impressed. I'm a long-time Mac and Apple fan and the Wii shows signs of thoughtful design. Very easy packaging, simple setup, soothing interface, usable without reading any instructions. We started setting up by 10:20 Central time and the Wii asked to go through two rounds of "update" (about 10 minutes each) after we got the console up on our home wireless. My son picked up Tony Hawk, but has mostly played Wii sports with his father, his brother, and four friends.
A few highlights...
- the little "bump" the controller gives you as you pass over a button in the interface
- the spacial effect of sounds from the controller
- the fun every kid (and I) had designing our own Mii
- the wonderfully smooth action of the control, even allowing a physically challenged brother get into the action
- the soothing music of the interface
- the clever (and appropriate) animation during disk insertion (9 year old _loves_ that one)
- the appearance of all the Miis we'd created on our baseball team (a riot watching kids thank each other for "their" hits)
- the messaging and calendar system with the automatic log (poor cursed son) of play time spent on each game each day
- the ability to email into and out from the console
A few issues...
- neither news nor weather are working (later found the press releases about these being delayed for a few months, but Nintendo really should have updated the Wii Menu to either say that or remove the buttons until they work)
- the lengthy update cycle before we could play (would have been nice to have had some piece of paper or warning that it would happen, or an option to skip until later)
- the Wii froze once during baseball and had to be unplugged, luckily it started up again just fine
Bottom Line...
I think Nintendo has a real hit on its hands. The Wii is just a blast.
One thing I had heard very little about was the integration of Miis into the Wii experience. Each Mii is an avatar of sorts, designed and named by a player. A Mii looks a certain way (maybe a bit like you? maybe not?) and has certain attributes (favorite color, birthday). When you play certain games (Wii Sports, for now) you choose which Mii is playing the game, stats and skills accrue to that Mii. Baseball was especially clever in its use of Miis: your team wears the favorite color of the Mii you picked to play, other Miis from your console populate the home team, etc. Miis can "mingle" and go on "parade" to other consoles (we'll have to wait for a few more Wii's in the hood to test this feature). Miis can also be downloaded to the controller (the Wii Remote) and taken on the road to other Wii consoles where they can be uploaded and used (this is a much more natural process than I just made it sound like). The Miis represent a kind of social gaming trainer that will change how people interact with their gaming environment. It will be really exciting when other game authors come to learn and use the whole Wii ec
This is probably way too much to hope for, still... I hope that Disney recognized that part of the reason they atrophied creatively is that they lean too heavily on their legacy. It is one thing for all of us to moan and groan about Disney's zealous defense of their aging intellectual "property". It is quite another for them to realize that all that old stuff really does not do them all that much good. Future success derives from having great new ideas. Now they have had to buy the minds of Pixar, the driving force behind not just a bunch of terrific new movies, but the developer of new characters, new methods (new McDonalds happy meal toys). Their own creativity hit a wall, I hope this may be a sign that they have to change their priorities to succeed long-term. Maybe they will loosen up a bit on the IP side. Like I say, probably too much to hope for.
Instrumental solo guitar version of the theme is the last bit of music that plays at the very tail end of the credits. I've heard that Fox owns the rights to the lyric and would not allow it to be used in the movie. Can anyone confirm that?
The University of Minnesota-Duluth Library uses Sun Ray thin clients for many (though not all) of its public workstations. Look at their basic access hours for some evidence. I believe that while the Sun Rays are in the Libraries, they are run by the campus IT folks. I imagine either Library or campus IT staff could give you an idea of how they are used and how well they perform. I'm not sure who you would contact there for information, but I bet their directory might give you an idea.
Can anyone comment on the impact this may have on JPEG2000? This, rather than PNG, seems like a real competitor for JPEG. JP2 seems to be out there in the world in a real enough way to maybe pick up steam if there is a patent cloud over JPG.
Of course, maybe this same patent cloud hangs over JP2. I don't have a clue. Does anyone else?
Just curiosity driving me to ask an ignorant question... If the shuttle could not go to ISS and if we had known the seven would likely die upon reentry, could ISS have been brought down to the shuttle and hosted the crew long enough to get shuttle and/or Soyuz rescue up? Many problems with this scenario (not the least is how to get from shuttle to ISS even if they are near one another), and it would likely sacrifice the station... but I wonder if the station could have moved.