I call it an interactive movie because 90% of it's appeal comes from visual content, 10% from gameplay. There is a game in Rez, but it's only something to do while you watch the visuals. You watch the video, and you shoot enemies that are on the video. it's just that in rez's case, the video is generated in realtime.
Hey, hey, I didn't say I didn't like FFX. But it IS an interactive movie.
I call Ico somewhat of an interactive movie because (from what I could see) there was generally one path to take, and it emphasized visuals over gameplay. (Really damn amazing visuals) Every one who plays through ico is going to have about the same experience--solve the same puzzles, seeing the same scenary, etc. Ico is an awesome game, but on the spectrum between interactive movie and platfrom puzzle game, it's closer to the former than to the latter.
Justify it however you want, you've chosen to take the site's content without paying the cost.
Label it however you want, all I'm doing is viewing responses to http requests as I see fit. You can call one part "content" and one part "cost", but it's all bytes to my computer, and it is MY computer, no one has any right to force me to see something under any circumstances.
The capitalist argument works both ways: You don't want me to see your content without seeing your ads? Then don't respond to my http requests.
If ads were JUST banner ads, I probably wouldn't bother filtering--and I'd probably feel the same way you do about it. But once I need to install the filter to maintain a reasonable browsing experience, I use all the features I can without remorse.
I used to look for plots in games too. But then it occured to me--why aren't I just reading a book/watching a movie instead? Computers are really good at making interactive things LOOK good, but making a truly interactive story seems to have been proven near impossible--the best approximation we can make are games in which you can choose the order of plot events, or branching paths (like choose your own adventure.)
The best games, the ones I find in my closet then clean out the dust inside my old nintendo to play, had lousy graphics and lousy/no stories. Video games aren't supposed to be like a movie or a book you watch or read--they're supposed to be like a toy you play with. When you play them, you make your own story.
Story isn't going to be any more important to me then attractive texture maps UNTIL they are truly interactive--when they're written by computer simulations of characters responding to my actions.
Personally, I've never liked Nintendo that much.. They just never had enough of the games I wanted to play. But, they have stuck true to the idea of gaming over 'oooh, pretty flashing lights'.
Play Super Mario 64. Then play Sonic Adventure. Now which company says 'oooh, pretty flashing lights'?
For the record, if the first five hours of a game are an interactive movie, the game is an interactive movie!
After all, only the first 90 minutes of many real movies are just movies.
Really, Final Fantasy 2(US) and later is probably best described as an interactive movie--FFX's first however many hours just made it ridiculously uninteractive. No, that a game gets good 10 hours later does not justify the idiocy of the first 10 hours.
I'd call Ico and Rez interactive movies too, for that matter. (You must not have played Rez if you think otherwise--it's an incredible interactive movie, but you're stuck on a rail shooting at enemies...) I haven't played most of the games on your list--but if I remove the games that aren't sequels or ports of games on earlier systems, it's seems like what you have left is innovation in Graphic Design, rather than Game Play.
I'm not sure what you've got against Dreamcast--it's games are on par with any system out today and it came out way before. Sega lost a marketing war, not a technology war. It's all about network effects--everyone just figured DC wasn't worth getting because PS2 would win, and everyone thought PS2 would win because everyone else was buying PS2. The same network effects that bring us Windows.
The list of stuff they want in this detachable pane sounds long enough that they might as well have e-mail in it too;). It's not a horrible idea, but I'd like the option of having this stuff in a seperate screen anyway. The one thing I love abou pine versus all gui e-mail clients is how well it works just viewing ONE thing at a time--the list of folders, or a specific message, not a screen divided into a thousand different split panes for every calender, mail folder, mail message, reminder...
2. Split-view in-box
You have work e-mail and personal e-mail, and it behooves you to keep them separate, right? Well, we don't agree. Instead, we propose an optional split-view in-box, wherein you can view your primary in-box alongside another e-mail folder; in this case, they'd be labeled In-box and Personal.
They just state it, without giving me any reason to think that I'd want it. I have no idea whatsoever why they think this would be useful--as opposed to one view for the messages in current folder, one view for the list of folders--you know, like most other e-mail clients? I knew this last was going to be crap after I read this idea.
Built-in instant messaging
We want instant messaging to be standard in e-mail clients. ICQ plugs into Outlook, and Microsoft approximates the feature in Office XP using MSN Messenger, but the integration is clunky and fussy. We'd like a streamlined, built-in option within an e-mail client that displays an Online or Offline icon next to a sender's name, assuming that the sender also uses your e-mailer (it's not interoperability, but we'll take it), and a messaging pane along the bottom of your in-box. Type a user's name and start chatting.
3. No, you won't take it. No interoperability means only people who use your bizarro mail client can send you messages, and since your other ideas aren't that good, you shouldn't expect that to happen. It seems like they want a one-to-one correspondance between e-mail addresses and IM addresses--which could actually work pretty well for a corporate intranet, but probably not on the whole internet, certainly not if it forced everyone to use your e-mail program.
Good ideas, 4 is already implemented in many systems, everyone already knows they want 5. (it's not an e-mail client feature per se, because their complaint is that it's not built into EVERY e-mail client, not that there is none available with integrated pgp).
6. Spam autoreporting... We'd like to click a Spam Complaint button to have our e-mailer send off a report to the spammer's ISP.
Cute idea, but won't forged headers spoil this? I'm not sure. Not too mention the trouble caused by accidentally pushing that button...
7. Mouseover contact information
Sometimes you just want to grab a person's phone number without clicking to your address book and sifting through names. Here's what we'd like: When you mouse over a sender's name in your in-box, the person's contact information (whatever you've entered in the address book) pops up for easy access. Move the mouse away, and the information disappears. It's just that easy. Of course, this tool should be strictly optional.
This COULD work...but it's worth noting that I can't copy (for pasting) information from mouseover things, which could be really annoying in some contexts. Most of the time, though, mouseovers annoy me not because they get in my way, but because they're invoked too indetermisitically. When I actually want to see one, I have to move my mouse there and WAIT--sometimes stuff shows up, sometimes not. I'd rather right click and see "show contact information". In fact, If I could write click and select that option, why they heck would I want this mouseover crap?
The rest of the ideas aren't so bad, actually, so I'm going to stop now.
YES! You've hit the nail straight on the head there! Every Windows user ever has gone "THIS SUCKS" the first time they used it, and that's why it's been so successful!
Um, that's a pretty dumb thing to be sarcastic about. Internet Explorer pre-4.0? Windows pre-3.1? Or most relevantly to the current discussion, early WinCE? Microsoft has a well-known history of the first couple versions really sucking, and that's why this guy is refering to.
That may or may not reflect badly on Microsoft, but it is most certainly true--Microsoft has enough cash that it can afford to make a good second, third, or fourth impression, no matter how many times it fails before that. And once network effects and the extreme economics of scale of software take over, they crush everyone.
I'm not saying anything about whether it's good or bad, but it is certainly the way things are.
So some OOG guy also wanted to stop solar eclipses? Is that why some moderator around here is really, really sensitive about solar eclipse jokes?
No, don't know the guy, sorry.
PS I WILL BEAT ALL DRAGON!
Oddly enough, I think your concern would be more addressed by reading Frankenstein, rather than any SF. I just hope our ethics are capable of at least keeping up with science before the ability to shunt in becomes a reality.
Yeah, I suspected I wasn't being original...but these days it's no longer isolated to fiction--now it's in the news, maybe soon it will happen to someone you care about. I mean, it does to a lesser extent all the time--kids playing video games when they should be outside. I do that all the time. But leading to suicide so dramatically...
But yes, ethics may need to change--too many people here are just saying "well, it's the kid's fault for being a nutso evercrack head", which it may or may not be, but regardless of who's to blame, such temptations to cut oneself off from reality may be bad for society at large.
No. Sash uses Mozilla but is a separate executable. Even if SashXB's security model were completely broken, there is no way for Sash to screw up your browser security.
Perhaps I'm just confused by this definition of 'browser security'. If I install this SashXB, and I go to some page in Mozilla that takes over my computer by using Sash, would this count as "screwing up my browser's security?" Because it sure counts under any concept of security that anyone about.
That's assuming no IE-style bugs whatsoever in it's integration with a browser, isn't it? It seems highly probably that while the SPECIFICATION does not compromise security, the specification is complicated enough that most implementations will compromise you, at least at first.
I should be able to save when I want because I paid for the game and it's mine;). If I want to go eat dinner or walk the dog when I'm playing, I shouldn't have a choice of losing progress or fighting to the end of the level to do it.
A better solution to the problem you describe would be to give the option of SUSPEND--save the state of the game to play later, but destroy the suspended state as soon as they start to play. Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask would let you do this at "owl statue" landmarks--but I suspect it confused and pissed off a lot of users who didn't understand where their saves disappeared when they reloaded their games a second time. (The game had a normal save, but you could only save when...eh, never mind, that game was too complicated, that's why it failed.)
Save and restore can be fun. A friend of mine loved to load up Deus Ex, kill civilians to watch their reactions, then reload to avoid consequences. It was a common joke that he might get confused and do that in real life.
That's all very true, but something I think Apple needs to keep in mind is how many average users have a tech friend or family member to whom they defer all computer issues. Arts/animation people know they need a mac, but how many people is that really? Probably about just as many as the hardcore tech people like me or the guy who wrote this article. But hardcore tech people (I suspect) have more influence in their family and friends over computer purchasing decisions.
And when I consider what computer to get for my family 100 miles away, there are two issues.
1. Cost.
2. Reliability.
Apple obviously isn't and probably shouldn't be interested in the first. So they really need to push the second. They need to convince me that I'm not going to hear grief about system instability, or about how all my family's friends can do X, but they can't because I forced Operating System Y down their throat.
The last computer I bought for my family ran Windows 2000. Mac OS X was out, but 10.1 was not released, and I knew from running my iBook that all the kinks were not yet worked out. The next computer I buy (probably this september, as one of my siblings is going off to school) could very well be a mac, even though I'm a tech head like the guy who wrote this, depending on my faith in the likelihood of how often Mac OS X vs. Windows 2000 (no, i won't touch XP) will make my parents/siblings curse my name.
If you want families like mine to run Apple, Mr. Jobs, you're going to have to go through us hardware nerds.
The real story IMHO isn't how sensible or ridiculous this lawsuit is.
The real story is only partly that some kid loved an online virtual world so much that he no longer wanted to experience the real world.
The REAL STORY that I see here is that the particular online virtual world this kid got lost in was EVERQUEST! I mean, I'm not trying to say it's a bad game--it sounds like a lot of fun. But all it's just chatting with your friends while you kill monsters repetitively for hours on end with crappy graphics. Granted, there isn't too much better competition right now...that's why I don't knock anyone who plays it.
What frightens me is that these online worlds are only going to become vastly more compelling, interesting, and addictive in the future. The Sims Online and A Tale in the Desert come to mind in the short term. Decades from now, the Real World is going to be a really sad, boring, complicated in all the wrong ways place compared to the virtual world.
Which means that more and more people are going to cut themselves off from the real world. At least until they run out paychecks or something. Then they'll kill themselves for being trapped in horrible, horrible reality.
Then again, maybe in the future you can just get a software development job in virtual reality... maybe if interactive worlds aren't as simple and repetitive as everquest and it's kind are, people like this Shawn kid will actually become MORE healthy and mature, rather than more socially fearful and inept and depressed.
I propose a New Acronym(TM);
QYFB - Quit Your Fucking Bitching
It sounds like a good idea--but the problem is that anyone who uses it becomes a meta-bitch! Whoever asks all to QYFB is in fact in the act bitching fuckily.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, I meta-bitch all the time. And I even meta-meta-bitch. Taken the wrong way, this post can be construed as a meta-meta-bitch. And the danger is that as much as everyone hates whiners, everyone hates a meta-whiner a whole lot more. And meta-meta-whinters are usually hanged. I guess that's my cue to get out of here--gotta go, see ya!!!!!
Oh, sorry, I guess I was just smoking crack when hideous white on black console text overwrote the nice pretty quartz display with lots of hexadecimal numbers and lovely words like "PANIC"
Maybe when OS XI comes out I'll think "Apple" and "stability" without getting the giggles. I love my iBook, but it is defintely the least stable machine I currently own.
Because even a bug still exists even if you never see it on your machine, no matter how many asterisks you add to your post...
Slashdot Mirror
I call it an interactive movie because 90% of it's appeal comes from visual content, 10% from gameplay. There is a game in Rez, but it's only something to do while you watch the visuals. You watch the video, and you shoot enemies that are on the video. it's just that in rez's case, the video is generated in realtime.
Hey, hey, I didn't say I didn't like FFX. But it IS an interactive movie. I call Ico somewhat of an interactive movie because (from what I could see) there was generally one path to take, and it emphasized visuals over gameplay. (Really damn amazing visuals) Every one who plays through ico is going to have about the same experience--solve the same puzzles, seeing the same scenary, etc. Ico is an awesome game, but on the spectrum between interactive movie and platfrom puzzle game, it's closer to the former than to the latter.
Anything's better than stupid Mainstream World!!!! boring
Justify it however you want, you've chosen to take the site's content without paying the cost.
Label it however you want, all I'm doing is viewing responses to http requests as I see fit. You can call one part "content" and one part "cost", but it's all bytes to my computer, and it is MY computer, no one has any right to force me to see something under any circumstances.
The capitalist argument works both ways: You don't want me to see your content without seeing your ads? Then don't respond to my http requests.
If ads were JUST banner ads, I probably wouldn't bother filtering--and I'd probably feel the same way you do about it. But once I need to install the filter to maintain a reasonable browsing experience, I use all the features I can without remorse.
The best games, the ones I find in my closet then clean out the dust inside my old nintendo to play, had lousy graphics and lousy/no stories. Video games aren't supposed to be like a movie or a book you watch or read--they're supposed to be like a toy you play with. When you play them, you make your own story.
Story isn't going to be any more important to me then attractive texture maps UNTIL they are truly interactive--when they're written by computer simulations of characters responding to my actions.
Play Super Mario 64. Then play Sonic Adventure. Now which company says 'oooh, pretty flashing lights'?
After all, only the first 90 minutes of many real movies are just movies.
Really, Final Fantasy 2(US) and later is probably best described as an interactive movie--FFX's first however many hours just made it ridiculously uninteractive. No, that a game gets good 10 hours later does not justify the idiocy of the first 10 hours.
I'd call Ico and Rez interactive movies too, for that matter. (You must not have played Rez if you think otherwise--it's an incredible interactive movie, but you're stuck on a rail shooting at enemies...) I haven't played most of the games on your list--but if I remove the games that aren't sequels or ports of games on earlier systems, it's seems like what you have left is innovation in Graphic Design, rather than Game Play.
I'm not sure what you've got against Dreamcast--it's games are on par with any system out today and it came out way before. Sega lost a marketing war, not a technology war. It's all about network effects--everyone just figured DC wasn't worth getting because PS2 would win, and everyone thought PS2 would win because everyone else was buying PS2. The same network effects that bring us Windows.
The list of stuff they want in this detachable pane sounds long enough that they might as well have e-mail in it too ;). It's not a horrible idea, but I'd like the option of having this stuff in a seperate screen anyway. The one thing I love abou pine versus all gui e-mail clients is how well it works just viewing ONE thing at a time--the list of folders, or a specific message, not a screen divided into a thousand different split panes for every calender, mail folder, mail message, reminder...
2. Split-view in-box You have work e-mail and personal e-mail, and it behooves you to keep them separate, right? Well, we don't agree. Instead, we propose an optional split-view in-box, wherein you can view your primary in-box alongside another e-mail folder; in this case, they'd be labeled In-box and Personal.
They just state it, without giving me any reason to think that I'd want it. I have no idea whatsoever why they think this would be useful--as opposed to one view for the messages in current folder, one view for the list of folders--you know, like most other e-mail clients? I knew this last was going to be crap after I read this idea.
Built-in instant messaging We want instant messaging to be standard in e-mail clients. ICQ plugs into Outlook, and Microsoft approximates the feature in Office XP using MSN Messenger, but the integration is clunky and fussy. We'd like a streamlined, built-in option within an e-mail client that displays an Online or Offline icon next to a sender's name, assuming that the sender also uses your e-mailer (it's not interoperability, but we'll take it), and a messaging pane along the bottom of your in-box. Type a user's name and start chatting.
3. No, you won't take it. No interoperability means only people who use your bizarro mail client can send you messages, and since your other ideas aren't that good, you shouldn't expect that to happen. It seems like they want a one-to-one correspondance between e-mail addresses and IM addresses--which could actually work pretty well for a corporate intranet, but probably not on the whole internet, certainly not if it forced everyone to use your e-mail program.
4. Calendar-linked autoresponse 5. Integrated PGP encryption
Good ideas, 4 is already implemented in many systems, everyone already knows they want 5. (it's not an e-mail client feature per se, because their complaint is that it's not built into EVERY e-mail client, not that there is none available with integrated pgp).
6. Spam autoreporting ... We'd like to click a Spam Complaint button to have our e-mailer send off a report to the spammer's ISP.
Cute idea, but won't forged headers spoil this? I'm not sure. Not too mention the trouble caused by accidentally pushing that button...
7. Mouseover contact information Sometimes you just want to grab a person's phone number without clicking to your address book and sifting through names. Here's what we'd like: When you mouse over a sender's name in your in-box, the person's contact information (whatever you've entered in the address book) pops up for easy access. Move the mouse away, and the information disappears. It's just that easy. Of course, this tool should be strictly optional.
This COULD work...but it's worth noting that I can't copy (for pasting) information from mouseover things, which could be really annoying in some contexts. Most of the time, though, mouseovers annoy me not because they get in my way, but because they're invoked too indetermisitically. When I actually want to see one, I have to move my mouse there and WAIT--sometimes stuff shows up, sometimes not. I'd rather right click and see "show contact information". In fact, If I could write click and select that option, why they heck would I want this mouseover crap?
The rest of the ideas aren't so bad, actually, so I'm going to stop now.
Um, that's a pretty dumb thing to be sarcastic about. Internet Explorer pre-4.0? Windows pre-3.1? Or most relevantly to the current discussion, early WinCE? Microsoft has a well-known history of the first couple versions really sucking, and that's why this guy is refering to.
That may or may not reflect badly on Microsoft, but it is most certainly true--Microsoft has enough cash that it can afford to make a good second, third, or fourth impression, no matter how many times it fails before that. And once network effects and the extreme economics of scale of software take over, they crush everyone.
I'm not saying anything about whether it's good or bad, but it is certainly the way things are.
You mean a sleep gun? Well, he does want to sleep, but if he uses it on himself why does it have to be in gun form?
And where can I get a sleep gun for three digits?
Guys, you just need to follow these seven steps to secure your windoze machine!!!
I think we should call it "Naziware", because it hides in free_as_in_beer software, then it leeches your system resources. Just like the Nazis.
So some OOG guy also wanted to stop solar eclipses? Is that why some moderator around here is really, really sensitive about solar eclipse jokes? No, don't know the guy, sorry. PS I WILL BEAT ALL DRAGON!
Yeah, I suspected I wasn't being original...but these days it's no longer isolated to fiction--now it's in the news, maybe soon it will happen to someone you care about. I mean, it does to a lesser extent all the time--kids playing video games when they should be outside. I do that all the time. But leading to suicide so dramatically...
But yes, ethics may need to change--too many people here are just saying "well, it's the kid's fault for being a nutso evercrack head", which it may or may not be, but regardless of who's to blame, such temptations to cut oneself off from reality may be bad for society at large.
Perhaps I'm just confused by this definition of 'browser security'. If I install this SashXB, and I go to some page in Mozilla that takes over my computer by using Sash, would this count as "screwing up my browser's security?" Because it sure counts under any concept of security that anyone about.
That's assuming no IE-style bugs whatsoever in it's integration with a browser, isn't it? It seems highly probably that while the SPECIFICATION does not compromise security, the specification is complicated enough that most implementations will compromise you, at least at first.
yah, but the weak will drive up your health insurance premiums before they go. My post-SSSCA escape will probably be a thing called "Europe" or "Asia"
I should be able to save when I want because I paid for the game and it's mine ;). If I want to go eat dinner or walk the dog when I'm playing, I shouldn't have a choice of losing progress or fighting to the end of the level to do it.
A better solution to the problem you describe would be to give the option of SUSPEND--save the state of the game to play later, but destroy the suspended state as soon as they start to play. Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask would let you do this at "owl statue" landmarks--but I suspect it confused and pissed off a lot of users who didn't understand where their saves disappeared when they reloaded their games a second time. (The game had a normal save, but you could only save when...eh, never mind, that game was too complicated, that's why it failed.)
Save and restore can be fun. A friend of mine loved to load up Deus Ex, kill civilians to watch their reactions, then reload to avoid consequences. It was a common joke that he might get confused and do that in real life.
And when I consider what computer to get for my family 100 miles away, there are two issues.
1. Cost. 2. Reliability.
Apple obviously isn't and probably shouldn't be interested in the first. So they really need to push the second. They need to convince me that I'm not going to hear grief about system instability, or about how all my family's friends can do X, but they can't because I forced Operating System Y down their throat.
The last computer I bought for my family ran Windows 2000. Mac OS X was out, but 10.1 was not released, and I knew from running my iBook that all the kinks were not yet worked out. The next computer I buy (probably this september, as one of my siblings is going off to school) could very well be a mac, even though I'm a tech head like the guy who wrote this, depending on my faith in the likelihood of how often Mac OS X vs. Windows 2000 (no, i won't touch XP) will make my parents/siblings curse my name.
If you want families like mine to run Apple, Mr. Jobs, you're going to have to go through us hardware nerds.
Just curious, but why can't they run OS X?
The real story is only partly that some kid loved an online virtual world so much that he no longer wanted to experience the real world.
The REAL STORY that I see here is that the particular online virtual world this kid got lost in was EVERQUEST! I mean, I'm not trying to say it's a bad game--it sounds like a lot of fun. But all it's just chatting with your friends while you kill monsters repetitively for hours on end with crappy graphics. Granted, there isn't too much better competition right now...that's why I don't knock anyone who plays it.
What frightens me is that these online worlds are only going to become vastly more compelling, interesting, and addictive in the future. The Sims Online and A Tale in the Desert come to mind in the short term. Decades from now, the Real World is going to be a really sad, boring, complicated in all the wrong ways place compared to the virtual world.
Which means that more and more people are going to cut themselves off from the real world. At least until they run out paychecks or something. Then they'll kill themselves for being trapped in horrible, horrible reality.
Then again, maybe in the future you can just get a software development job in virtual reality ... maybe if interactive worlds aren't as simple and repetitive as everquest and it's kind are, people like this Shawn kid will actually become MORE healthy and mature, rather than more socially fearful and inept and depressed.
It sounds like a good idea--but the problem is that anyone who uses it becomes a meta-bitch! Whoever asks all to QYFB is in fact in the act bitching fuckily.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, I meta-bitch all the time. And I even meta-meta-bitch. Taken the wrong way, this post can be construed as a meta-meta-bitch. And the danger is that as much as everyone hates whiners, everyone hates a meta-whiner a whole lot more. And meta-meta-whinters are usually hanged. I guess that's my cue to get out of here--gotta go, see ya!!!!!
[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION] escapes!!!
Maybe when OS XI comes out I'll think "Apple" and "stability" without getting the giggles. I love my iBook, but it is defintely the least stable machine I currently own.
Because even a bug still exists even if you never see it on your machine, no matter how many asterisks you add to your post...
The sun will always shine! ALWAYS! I KILL WHOEVER MAKES THE SUN DISAPPEAR!!!!
geez guyz everyone knows only the moon is ever eclipsed never the sun!!!!!!