I bet that the graphics advancements of the games on the next gen consoles will not be easily detectable by the common eye on the telly.
Perhaps less dramatic than the difference between a [PS1/Dreamcast/N64] and a [Xbox/PS2/GC] (take your pick, IMO the most dramatic would be PS1->Xbox), but.. there's still a LONG way to go in terms of graphics. Have you ever seen something on your TV and had to ask yourself "Is that a movie/TV show, or is that my games console? I can't tell".. I doubt it. Sooner or later we will hit that point, you can even see it coming in some of the latest PC games (assuming you have a powerful enough PC) - the Tron 2.0 game looks way better than the Tron movie ever did, and Nvidia have been bandying around this term "cinematic computing".. my point though is, we're not there yet, and I doubt we will be by the next generation of consoles.
Also, even if we hit a peak with graphics, physics simulation is really just starting. It wasn't long ago the standard in FPS games was for corpses to lie rigidly on overhangs or stairs in defiance of gravity.. crates would drop off ledges but not roll.. and so on. Now we take ragdoll corpses and rigid body dynamics for granted.. but it's gonna be a while before you see realistic flowing water (I mean proper flowing/pooling with depth, not particle sprays, or UT2003 style pools)
Oh, and of course.. I'm still waiting for the day we hit the tradeoff point where it becomes more efficient to raytrace games:)
For example, Sunflat's superb SFCave (original PalmOS version.. rather poor Java version) - as far as I'm aware it's a completely original game, at least I've not seen it anywhere before.. simple in the extreme (how many games have only ONE control?), and yet fiendishly addictive. There's still a place in the world for the bedroom coder, especially with all these less powerful handheld devices (pda's, phones, etc) around that need this kind of simple but effective game
Don't forget Bangai-o - one of the finest shmups in recent years, and proof positive that games don't always have to be 3D (though don't get me wrong, I'm not about to give up my copy of GTA:VC either)
FWIW on the subject of 2D games, my Dreamcast still sees regular use for it's great library of 2D fighters - Capcom VS Snk, Marvel VS Capcom 2, Guilty Gear X, KoF, etc.. call me strange, but I've just never really got into the 3D fighters as much.. they usually seem to look pretty nice, but they rarely play as well, at least to my mind.
IANALawyer, but it seems to me the whole "good faith" thing is pivotal to these cases..
Now.. this is not the first time that an obviously erroneous letter of this type has been sent out. There was the whole OpenOffice/MsOffice cockup for a start.
My point is the senders of these letters (the ESA) are obviously aware that their system fires off erroneous letters from time to time.. therefore how can they claim to know IN GOOD FAITH that any given letter sent out by their system is accurate and valid?
Perhaps I could see them claiming good faith if the percentage of bad letters was really, really small, though even that is a moot point (given that you can only have good faith if you believe in the reliability of the system), but it seems this system is getting almost as many misses as hits. Does this give us any way to contest the good faith claim, and then use that to open the door to counterclaims, etc?
Good post. My guess is that these individual members aren't so much responsible for this madness, but they are members of the ESA who in turn have 'subscribed' to the DMCA, which is resulting in this insanity. At the end of the day though, it's the ESA members holding it all together. If they fear this is bad for business they're going to drop out pretty quick, or at least get the ESA to review it's policy. I'd suggest firing off an email to each of the above stating that until such time as they either disassociate themselves from the ESA, or the ESA changes it's policy regarding these cases, you will no longer be purchasing any product made by or associated with their company.
The only thing I've heard about it that's even close to good news was John Romero working on a Red Faction port
Uh... so the best it's got to look forward to is the guy who brought us Daikatana porting one of the most disappointing ("Geomod! It's gonna rock! fully deformable maps!") FPS games of recent years?
N-Gage died on level 1 with 0 points. Your attributes: You were cursed. You were doomed. Fate abandoned you.
Shame really. It sounded quite promising.. but you just have to look at the "ergonomics" of the thing to realise what a mess it's going to be. Still, I live in hope that I may be proven wrong, and it'll kick ass. Kick-ass gaming systems are always welcome round these parts. I'm just not getting my expectations up, is all
As for competition for the GBA.. GP32! Or for that matter the NGPC, but that's deader than the dreamcast now. Still a great wee system though
Yes, I do realise that:) But all the same, you raised a point about the tendency of the/. crowd to hack things around, and make electronic devices do things they were never designed to do. The GP32 is especially suited to that kind of thing.
I doubt your checklist is going to be realised any time soon on a handheld device, but give it a whlie. What constitutes a comedically ridiculous list of things to do with a gameboy today may well be standard fare tomorrow.
Finally if all else fails, we can always do an "ask slashdot" on where this technology is headed, and how fast it'll get there;)
But yeah, anyways, I realise it was a somewhat overblown reply to a joke, but overexposure to slashdot forced me a to have a humourectomy. Where my humour glands were, there's now just a beowulf cluster of hot grits being lovingly fondled by Natalie Portman in Soviet Russia. Pity me.
Sounds like you need a GP32.. Much coolness - open source devkit, runs software off flash cards, etc, etc.. there's loads of emulators and stuff for it, ports of Doom, Heretic, MP3/OGG players, even a DivX player.
IMO it whoops the gameboy, and it has a much higher hackish value (yes, I know about the flash linker, etc, for the GBA/SP, but still.. the GP32 is designed for that kind of stuff from the outset)
You have GOT to be joking. You ARE aware of the current "NYT fraud scandal"? Shock, horror, newspaper revealed to be dishonest. Whatever IS the world coming to?
By the time DNF ships civilisation will have long since crumbled, the human race will be a long forgotten memory, the giant ants will have been and gone, and our sun will be getting ready to go supernova...
tend to get my hard info from newspapers, magazines and radio. So I assume if there is any value to it I'll hear about it next week. READing on the INTERNET is fun but you can't believe everything you see there, can you
IANAExpert, but as far as I'm aware, BSE is basically the cow form of Kuru - the brain rotting disease humans get from cannibalism (specifically eating human brains)
Of course, this follows, as most farmed cows until recently were forced into cannibalism, being fed the ground up remains of other cows for cheap efficient feed. Not surprisingly cow-Kuru came about, which we call BSE, and when it transfers to a human from a cow, we call it CJD.
Please correct me if my facts are incorrect (I realise they're almost certainly over-simplified).. as I said, I'm no expert, but that's the understanding I have of the situation.
Please note these are 1998 figures, however, I believe if anything the numbers have actually got WORSE since then.
Re:but it's more humane!
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 1
New worst job: chicken masturbator
You may have been joking, but that's actually a real job. You don't want the exact details, but basically it's basically a way to get them to reproduce at faster than natural rates. Nuff said.
On further investigation scientists have discovered that the tilting and sinking of the British isles is directly related to the movements of John Prescott.
An attempt was made to request that Mr Prescott go on a diet, but unfortunately the delegate picked to make the request was never seen again, presumed eaten. Scientists are now designing a special protective suit, and hope to make another attempt early next year.
(note, nothing against John P personally, I just needed an unpleasant fat person,and he sprung first to mind.. I'm sure with a bit of thought I could've found someone funnier/more suitable, but this is/., since when have posters ever applied thought?:P)
You do not have the mind or education to envision Nature's Time Cube
Sorry, offtopic I know, replying to your sig, but...... WTF?!
I went to the site, and I'm even MORE confused. Please tell me it's a joke?.. whatever it is, it's funny as hell.. "Dumb ass teachers fear Time Cube and will eat dung before debating it" may well become my new sig.
Can you shed any light on this though?.. it's absolutely fascinating.. the test, the layout, everything.. very reminiscent of having an extremely drunk and angry dwarf shouting incessantly into your face about how his ex-best friend ran off with his wife...
I have to say, while I have a large number of eBooks, I haven't actually bought a single one of them, nor would I consider doing so any time soon.
Before I get flamed as some kind of pirate scum, let me explain that they are all either public domain works from Project Gutenberg, or copyrighted works that I have bought in PBF (Physical Book Format;)
Personally I find this by far the simplest way. Generally I buy the real thing first, then download a text of it for my PDA for portability, etc, but I'll admit there have been times when I've downloaded an ebook first, and bought the physical copy after (usually the next day). And no, I don't feel any guilt over this.. it strikes me as an extremely sensible way to do it.
I just download the text/pdf/html/rtf/lit/whatever (my preference being plain text generally), read the first few pages, just as I would if I were browsing in a bookshop to see if I like the book, and if it's a decent OCR/typeup... If I like it, and the quality is high enough, I'll keep it, read it, and be sure to buy the physical version next time I have a chance.
Yes, it takes a little moral work, it's very tempting to think "Well, I already have it now, I don't REALLY have to buy it...", but if you want to see more books from that author, I'd suggest paying up.
As an additional note to this, a while back I bought a paperback of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (superb book, highly recommended,but what do you expect? it's by Douglas Adams:).. anyways, I was quite happily reading my way through it until I got about two thirds of the way in, turned the page, and found.. an illegible mess of text.
Basically, it looked like far too much ink had got on the printer or something.. where each letter should've been there was just a big misshapen black blob. This continued for about the next 15 pages or so. With great care it was just about (slowly) readable, but hardly ideal.. and where I live I couldn't really just pop back into town (35 minute drive) just to get a replacement, especially as the shops were shut at the time.. so instead, I just downloaded a.txt of it, and continued reading from there, then replaced the book next time I was in town.:)
Can somebody tell me why eBooks are better than audio content?
Well, personally, I enjoy things like the BBC's audiobooks.. but I enjoy them alongside the text versions of the same work, not as a replacement to. For a start, I tend to find them extremely slow - I read a hell of a lot faster than most people seem to talk, at least when they're reading books out loud.
Also, it's a similar thing to the book/movie difference. With a book you visualise people/places, etc.. you also build a mental image of characters and how they talk, etc.
As for text-to-speech.. as yet the only character I've found that those can do convincingly is Marvin from the Hitchhiker's Guide
Don't be ridiculous! Who the hell needs scripted rollover buttons and that kind of nonsense in an ebook?.. there's absolutely nothing wrong with uncompressed AVI....
It'd make the "scanning" process a lot easier, too.. just videotape someone flicking through the book real quick, and play back frame by frame...
I reserve the first 32 codes (0-31) for various system function characters
Heyheyhey!
Wait a minute...
Do we really need all 32 of those for ebook texts?.. Sure, I realise some like carriage return are important, but I can't even think what most of the others could be.. surely we could find at least 3 redundant ones to replace with bold toggle, italic toggle, and underline toggle?
Yes, I realise this is absolute heresy, and I must be burned at the stake for my sins.. but.. it's a thought, isn't it?.. create a similar-but-different eBook oriented offshoot of ASCII..?
Okay, before modding this as redundant, I know I already linked to it above, but-...
Everyone seems to be in agreement that plaintext is a good thing on certain counts, mainly that it's a very simple standard, readable on just about anything, isn't dependant on the whims of any commercial entities, etc.
And likewise, most seem to agree that the downside is lack of formatting, and so on.
The suggestion above about using an old version of HTML makes a lot of sense to me - after all, who needs (or wants) animated gifs, cascading stylesheets, and popup adverts in an ebook?
Could I suggest that someone with better programming skills than me take a look at WeaselReader for the Palm, a very nice open source ebook reader that essentially uses zipped.txt files (called ZTXT).. and consider making a similar reader for ZHTML? (perhaps this should be suggested to the weaselreader coder(s))
Surely it makes sense?.. Plaintext covers the majority of people's needs.. adding just the options for font size, bold, italic, underline, l/r/c/full justification, images, tables, and probably bulletted lists... well, that would probably keep just about everyone happy, and it's really not a very big or demanding feature set.
Links would be nice too, mainly for "anchor"* links (y'know, the # ones that link to a different part of the same html file) for chapters etc. (dunno the correct term, I'm no HTML guru)
Anyways, it seems to me this would have all the benefits of plaintext, being open, simple, and useable on just about any system..
Would retain the most essential formatting.. likely there would be some things not covered by this spec, you'll always get that, but I'd guess this would catch almost everything..
Efficient. Yes, I know ZIP isn't as wonderful as RAR, etc, but it's a lot simpler, and can be used in many neat ways.. again I refer you to weaselreader, and the nifty way in which it doesn't need to uncompress the whole book at once. Also with the zipped thing you can have a SINGLE file.. very important. You don't want to have to distribute the text and a bunch of image files seperately.. that gets very messy.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet that the graphics advancements of the games on the next gen consoles will not be easily detectable by the common eye on the telly.
:)
;)
Perhaps less dramatic than the difference between a [PS1/Dreamcast/N64] and a [Xbox/PS2/GC] (take your pick, IMO the most dramatic would be PS1->Xbox), but.. there's still a LONG way to go in terms of graphics. Have you ever seen something on your TV and had to ask yourself "Is that a movie/TV show, or is that my games console? I can't tell".. I doubt it. Sooner or later we will hit that point, you can even see it coming in some of the latest PC games (assuming you have a powerful enough PC) - the Tron 2.0 game looks way better than the Tron movie ever did, and Nvidia have been bandying around this term "cinematic computing".. my point though is, we're not there yet, and I doubt we will be by the next generation of consoles.
Also, even if we hit a peak with graphics, physics simulation is really just starting. It wasn't long ago the standard in FPS games was for corpses to lie rigidly on overhangs or stairs in defiance of gravity.. crates would drop off ledges but not roll.. and so on. Now we take ragdoll corpses and rigid body dynamics for granted.. but it's gonna be a while before you see realistic flowing water (I mean proper flowing/pooling with depth, not particle sprays, or UT2003 style pools)
Oh, and of course.. I'm still waiting for the day we hit the tradeoff point where it becomes more efficient to raytrace games
Quake using the POVRay engine anyone?
For example, Sunflat's superb SFCave (original PalmOS version .. rather poor Java version) - as far as I'm aware it's a completely original game, at least I've not seen it anywhere before.. simple in the extreme (how many games have only ONE control?), and yet fiendishly addictive. There's still a place in the world for the bedroom coder, especially with all these less powerful handheld devices (pda's, phones, etc) around that need this kind of simple but effective game
Don't forget Bangai-o - one of the finest shmups in recent years, and proof positive that games don't always have to be 3D (though don't get me wrong, I'm not about to give up my copy of GTA:VC either)
FWIW on the subject of 2D games, my Dreamcast still sees regular use for it's great library of 2D fighters - Capcom VS Snk, Marvel VS Capcom 2, Guilty Gear X, KoF, etc.. call me strange, but I've just never really got into the 3D fighters as much.. they usually seem to look pretty nice, but they rarely play as well, at least to my mind.
IANALawyer, but it seems to me the whole "good faith" thing is pivotal to these cases..
Now.. this is not the first time that an obviously erroneous letter of this type has been sent out. There was the whole OpenOffice/MsOffice cockup for a start.
My point is the senders of these letters (the ESA) are obviously aware that their system fires off erroneous letters from time to time.. therefore how can they claim to know IN GOOD FAITH that any given letter sent out by their system is accurate and valid?
Perhaps I could see them claiming good faith if the percentage of bad letters was really, really small, though even that is a moot point (given that you can only have good faith if you believe in the reliability of the system), but it seems this system is getting almost as many misses as hits. Does this give us any way to contest the good faith claim, and then use that to open the door to counterclaims, etc?
Good post. My guess is that these individual members aren't so much responsible for this madness, but they are members of the ESA who in turn have 'subscribed' to the DMCA, which is resulting in this insanity. At the end of the day though, it's the ESA members holding it all together. If they fear this is bad for business they're going to drop out pretty quick, or at least get the ESA to review it's policy.
I'd suggest firing off an email to each of the above stating that until such time as they either disassociate themselves from the ESA, or the ESA changes it's policy regarding these cases, you will no longer be purchasing any product made by or associated with their company.
The only thing I've heard about it that's even close to good news was John Romero working on a Red Faction port
Uh... so the best it's got to look forward to is the guy who brought us Daikatana porting one of the most disappointing ("Geomod! It's gonna rock! fully deformable maps!") FPS games of recent years?
N-Gage died on level 1 with 0 points.
Your attributes:
You were cursed.
You were doomed.
Fate abandoned you.
Shame really. It sounded quite promising.. but you just have to look at the "ergonomics" of the thing to realise what a mess it's going to be.
Still, I live in hope that I may be proven wrong, and it'll kick ass. Kick-ass gaming systems are always welcome round these parts. I'm just not getting my expectations up, is all
As for competition for the GBA.. GP32!
Or for that matter the NGPC, but that's deader than the dreamcast now. Still a great wee system though
Yes, I do realise that :) /. crowd to hack things around, and make electronic devices do things they were never designed to do. The GP32 is especially suited to that kind of thing.
;)
But all the same, you raised a point about the tendency of the
I doubt your checklist is going to be realised any time soon on a handheld device, but give it a whlie. What constitutes a comedically ridiculous list of things to do with a gameboy today may well be standard fare tomorrow.
Finally if all else fails, we can always do an "ask slashdot" on where this technology is headed, and how fast it'll get there
But yeah, anyways, I realise it was a somewhat overblown reply to a joke, but overexposure to slashdot forced me a to have a humourectomy. Where my humour glands were, there's now just a beowulf cluster of hot grits being lovingly fondled by Natalie Portman in Soviet Russia. Pity me.
Well that's what you get for browsing the web on your GBA. Damn showoffs. Yeah, I know, you're running Apache on there too :P
Sounds like you need a GP32.. Much coolness - open source devkit, runs software off flash cards, etc, etc.. there's loads of emulators and stuff for it, ports of Doom, Heretic, MP3/OGG players, even a DivX player.
IMO it whoops the gameboy, and it has a much higher hackish value (yes, I know about the flash linker, etc, for the GBA/SP, but still.. the GP32 is designed for that kind of stuff from the outset)
NYT is one of the most valid source of news
You have GOT to be joking. You ARE aware of the current "NYT fraud scandal"? Shock, horror, newspaper revealed to be dishonest. Whatever IS the world coming to?
Ha! Not me! I use pirate legos! ... pirate legos, spaceman legos, army legos..
3y3 4m +h4 m4D l33t!
Here's my hack (in lovely platform independent psuedocode):
:P
1. Empty out sourcecode files*
2. Replace contents with 'print "You Won. Well Done."'
3. Go and do something profitable.
*Don't delete them though. Then it'd be a different program alltogether, wouldn't it?
By the time DNF ships civilisation will have long since crumbled, the human race will be a long forgotten memory, the giant ants will have been and gone, and our sun will be getting ready to go supernova...
tend to get my hard info from newspapers, magazines and radio. So I assume if there is any value to it I'll hear about it next week. READing on the INTERNET is fun but you can't believe everything you see there, can you
What, unlike say, the New York Times, you mean?
There's a very good article about this practice amongst others here
Note, I actually got that link from another post (by MouseR) who linked to it earlier in the discussion - just re-posting it here for convenience.
IANAExpert, but as far as I'm aware, BSE is basically the cow form of Kuru - the brain rotting disease humans get from cannibalism (specifically eating human brains)
Of course, this follows, as most farmed cows until recently were forced into cannibalism, being fed the ground up remains of other cows for cheap efficient feed. Not surprisingly cow-Kuru came about, which we call BSE, and when it transfers to a human from a cow, we call it CJD.
Please correct me if my facts are incorrect (I realise they're almost certainly over-simplified).. as I said, I'm no expert, but that's the understanding I have of the situation.
Of course, you'd damn well better trust your butcher.
Well.. your butcher, and the USDA inspector who has on average 30 seconds to inspect an entire cow carcass, and 2 seconds to inspect a chicken (#41 on the linked-to page)
Please note these are 1998 figures, however, I believe if anything the numbers have actually got WORSE since then.
New worst job: chicken masturbator
You may have been joking, but that's actually a real job. You don't want the exact details, but basically it's basically a way to get them to reproduce at faster than natural rates. Nuff said.
On further investigation scientists have discovered that the tilting and sinking of the British isles is directly related to the movements of John Prescott.
,and he sprung first to mind.. I'm sure with a bit of thought I could've found someone funnier/more suitable, but this is /., since when have posters ever applied thought? :P)
An attempt was made to request that Mr Prescott go on a diet, but unfortunately the delegate picked to make the request was never seen again, presumed eaten. Scientists are now designing a special protective suit, and hope to make another attempt early next year.
(note, nothing against John P personally, I just needed an unpleasant fat person
You do not have the mind or education to envision Nature's Time Cube
Sorry, offtopic I know, replying to your sig, but...... WTF?!
I went to the site, and I'm even MORE confused. Please tell me it's a joke?.. whatever it is, it's funny as hell.. "Dumb ass teachers fear Time Cube and will eat dung before debating it" may well become my new sig.
Can you shed any light on this though?.. it's absolutely fascinating.. the test, the layout, everything.. very reminiscent of having an extremely drunk and angry dwarf shouting incessantly into your face about how his ex-best friend ran off with his wife...
I have to say, while I have a large number of eBooks, I haven't actually bought a single one of them, nor would I consider doing so any time soon.
;)
,but what do you expect? it's by Douglas Adams :).. anyways, I was quite happily reading my way through it until I got about two thirds of the way in, turned the page, and found.. an illegible mess of text.
.txt of it, and continued reading from there, then replaced the book next time I was in town. :)
Before I get flamed as some kind of pirate scum, let me explain that they are all either public domain works from Project Gutenberg, or copyrighted works that I have bought in PBF (Physical Book Format
Personally I find this by far the simplest way. Generally I buy the real thing first, then download a text of it for my PDA for portability, etc, but I'll admit there have been times when I've downloaded an ebook first, and bought the physical copy after (usually the next day). And no, I don't feel any guilt over this.. it strikes me as an extremely sensible way to do it.
I just download the text/pdf/html/rtf/lit/whatever (my preference being plain text generally), read the first few pages, just as I would if I were browsing in a bookshop to see if I like the book, and if it's a decent OCR/typeup... If I like it, and the quality is high enough, I'll keep it, read it, and be sure to buy the physical version next time I have a chance.
Yes, it takes a little moral work, it's very tempting to think "Well, I already have it now, I don't REALLY have to buy it...", but if you want to see more books from that author, I'd suggest paying up.
As an additional note to this, a while back I bought a paperback of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (superb book, highly recommended
Basically, it looked like far too much ink had got on the printer or something.. where each letter should've been there was just a big misshapen black blob. This continued for about the next 15 pages or so. With great care it was just about (slowly) readable, but hardly ideal.. and where I live I couldn't really just pop back into town (35 minute drive) just to get a replacement, especially as the shops were shut at the time.. so instead, I just downloaded a
Can somebody tell me why eBooks are better than audio content?
Well, personally, I enjoy things like the BBC's audiobooks.. but I enjoy them alongside the text versions of the same work, not as a replacement to. For a start, I tend to find them extremely slow - I read a hell of a lot faster than most people seem to talk, at least when they're reading books out loud.
Also, it's a similar thing to the book/movie difference. With a book you visualise people/places, etc.. you also build a mental image of characters and how they talk, etc.
As for text-to-speech.. as yet the only character I've found that those can do convincingly is Marvin from the Hitchhiker's Guide
I bet someone will propose flash :D
Don't be ridiculous! Who the hell needs scripted rollover buttons and that kind of nonsense in an ebook?.. there's absolutely nothing wrong with uncompressed AVI....
It'd make the "scanning" process a lot easier, too.. just videotape someone flicking through the book real quick, and play back frame by frame...
I reserve the first 32 codes (0-31) for various system function characters
Heyheyhey!
Wait a minute...
Do we really need all 32 of those for ebook texts?.. Sure, I realise some like carriage return are important, but I can't even think what most of the others could be.. surely we could find at least 3 redundant ones to replace with bold toggle, italic toggle, and underline toggle?
Yes, I realise this is absolute heresy, and I must be burned at the stake for my sins.. but.. it's a thought, isn't it?.. create a similar-but-different eBook oriented offshoot of ASCII..?
Okay, before modding this as redundant, I know I already linked to it above, but-...
.txt files (called ZTXT).. and consider making a similar reader for ZHTML? (perhaps this should be suggested to the weaselreader coder(s))
Everyone seems to be in agreement that plaintext is a good thing on certain counts, mainly that it's a very simple standard, readable on just about anything, isn't dependant on the whims of any commercial entities, etc.
And likewise, most seem to agree that the downside is lack of formatting, and so on.
The suggestion above about using an old version of HTML makes a lot of sense to me - after all, who needs (or wants) animated gifs, cascading stylesheets, and popup adverts in an ebook?
Could I suggest that someone with better programming skills than me take a look at WeaselReader for the Palm, a very nice open source ebook reader that essentially uses zipped
Surely it makes sense?.. Plaintext covers the majority of people's needs.. adding just the options for font size, bold, italic, underline, l/r/c/full justification, images, tables, and probably bulletted lists... well, that would probably keep just about everyone happy, and it's really not a very big or demanding feature set.
Links would be nice too, mainly for "anchor"* links (y'know, the # ones that link to a different part of the same html file) for
chapters etc. (dunno the correct term, I'm no HTML guru)
Anyways, it seems to me this would have all the benefits of plaintext, being open, simple, and useable on just about any system..
Would retain the most essential formatting.. likely there would be some things not covered by this spec, you'll always get that, but I'd guess this would catch almost everything..
Efficient. Yes, I know ZIP isn't as wonderful as RAR, etc, but it's a lot simpler, and can be used in many neat ways.. again I refer you to weaselreader, and the nifty way in which it doesn't need to uncompress the whole book at once. Also with the zipped thing you can have a SINGLE file.. very important. You don't want to have to distribute the text and a bunch of image files seperately.. that gets very messy.
Just my 2p's worth, anyways