...and it needs to be treated as such. Everything goes through test phases and everything takes time to figure out. It's a feedback loop - we try to figure out how the machines work, while the supermarkets try to figure out how to make them work. Sure, they aren't perfect at launch, but that's because they made mistakes and also, nobody knows how to use these things at the speed a regular cashier does anymore. Five years from now, I reckon
1) There will be an extremely obvious and intuitive *standardised* interface at these devices (or maybe two or three) 2) Everybody who ever does any grocery shopping will know instinctively how to use said interfaces, the same way we can all use ATMs 3) People will have got over the novelty of self-checkouts, and gone back to using regular cashiers when they have enough items that this is faster.
Clearly the whole system has advantages and disadvantages, and at least one of those disadvantages - nobody knows how they work - will disappear with time. I, for one, have confidence.
The sheer variety and efficiency of the ecosystem virtually guarantees that most any way you can think to survive has been done somewhere, somehow, by some living creature.
Well, what about the wheel?
There are no creatures anywhere in nature which use wheels. Nor, as far as I know, plants. The wheel, as a mechanism, only ever came about as a result of human intelligence. And yet it is so astoundingly useful. Using wheels and engines, we can go to places unimaginably faster than any quadruped can run or bird can fly. I think this is encouraging. I think this implies that human intelligence can trump random mutation in certain respects - that we can, if we devote ourselves to it, build a better ecosystem than chance has.
I agree with your point about imitating nature being a good direction to go in. But I don't think we should embrace nature as the answer to all life's questions.
Actually, it's the Time Lords which fight the Daleks in the Time War. It's established in The Unquiet Dead that "lower species" such as humans go largely unaffected by the Time War.
DRM will end once it's proved that it hurts sales. The first step to proving this is to sell non-DRMed music alongside DRMed music - Yahoo have made this step now, so we're off to a good good start.
The next step is to wait and see how the sales compare. Hopefully, the statistics will turn out the way we want them to, and the record companies will drop DRM in the interests of making as much money as is technically possible. But I really think this could go either way. Cross your fingers, folks.
Re:I read it - sounds interesting - but come on...
on
What Spore May Spawn
·
· Score: 1
It's passive. It imports data from other people's games into universe. But that's all. Yes, they can download your species and wipe them out - in THEIR GAME. You, meanwhile, can download their species and wipe them out in YOUR game. There's no real multiplayer going on here. It's just a cheap and imaginative way to generate content.
And they wonder why consumers want to block all ads. Its because of illegal virus ads like this.
Not at all. I imagine that most of us around here who install AdBlock and FlashBlock do so because of the bandwidth and processor power that ad-laden pages take.
I, for one, run Adblock because I don't want to look at ads. From what you two are saying, it's probably just me, though.
You don't understand. This whole thread, here, is us modding Dvorak down. Much less impersonal than a simple -1: Troll, right?
Re:Standard versus Proprietary?
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The main issue I have with Flash is the fact that - by definition - every single Flash interface is non-standard, which means it takes a nonzero amount of time to figure out how to use, which means I don't get my content as fast as possible. A regular web page typically has about five different ways of scrolling: in Flash, you get as many as the designer could be bothered to program, i.e., one or two. And so on.
Flash is good for one thing and one thing only: looking cool. To be sure, this is a noble goal, but shopping websites etc. need FUNCTIONALITY, and that means standard HTML.
He's also Justice League's Lex Luthor! In that episode where Flash and Lex Luthor switch brains by accident. Good episode. "You gonna wash your hands?" "No... 'cause I'm EVIL."
E2 is great for getting perspective on things, because it has the same high standards as Wikipedia but offers the things that Wikipedia doesn't:
You keep the rights to your work
You are encouraged to voice your opinions and take a stand on things
Original research is thoroughly welcomed
You can put up information you'd never find in a Wikipedia article, such as advice
And that's just the factual stuff. The fact that E2 allows fiction, poetry etc. takes it another quantum leap away from Wikipedia. They are completely different sites and they're good for different things. A balanced diet, I suggest, would contain a healthy mix of both.
The thing is, if you denounce your opponent in an advert - you're still giving them screen time. Your opponent still gets free publicity, and we all know that line about publicity.
I'm reminded of Elite II, which contained an entire galaxy of 100,000,000,000 stars on a single floppy disk which didn't contain that many bits. Of course, most of the galaxy was completely uninhabited, but it was still cool.
I think it's preposterous to argue whether games should be art or not or storytelling or not or have good graphics or not or what level of interaction there should be in a videogame. Games should be worth playing, that's the beginning and the end of it. YOU, parent poster, don't want storytelling in your game if it means you don't get enough interaction. You want immediate rewards, and you feel your needs are poorly met. That's fine: I agree with you. But other people DO actually play games because they want heavy story, even if that means lots of cutscenes. Or because they want more of the same stuff they've been playing for the last four years. Or because they want a 100-hour quest they can invest a lot of time and effort into. And, even if this isn't the largest demographic, it's certainly the safest to market to.
Actually, we as geeks care. We care because we put lots of effort into making our code work elegantly and our websites look good, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. We care, because we're really great at this stuff, but marketing trumps usability every time. We care because Myspace sucks, but there are millions of people using it, and it's like a big slap in the face for every one of us who put any effort into our work.
I don't think thirtysomethings in general go for "crazes" in the same way that 15-25-year-olds do. It may be impossible to get a reaction on the same scale from that demographic.
I really, really do not want to live in the kind of world where every flat surface is paved with an ad, every movie is a sales vehicle, every TV show is a survey, every newspaper article is corporate public relations. But is it avoidable, given the direction our society is going?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it is. The impossible part is making it do so objectively. The REALLY impossible part is doing so while keeping everybody happy.
You mean like eggs? Delicious!
...and it needs to be treated as such. Everything goes through test phases and everything takes time to figure out. It's a feedback loop - we try to figure out how the machines work, while the supermarkets try to figure out how to make them work. Sure, they aren't perfect at launch, but that's because they made mistakes and also, nobody knows how to use these things at the speed a regular cashier does anymore. Five years from now, I reckon
1) There will be an extremely obvious and intuitive *standardised* interface at these devices (or maybe two or three)
2) Everybody who ever does any grocery shopping will know instinctively how to use said interfaces, the same way we can all use ATMs
3) People will have got over the novelty of self-checkouts, and gone back to using regular cashiers when they have enough items that this is faster.
Clearly the whole system has advantages and disadvantages, and at least one of those disadvantages - nobody knows how they work - will disappear with time. I, for one, have confidence.
That's rolling, which is a tad different. A wheel generally has an axle.
I suspect the full sequence is:
Well, what about the wheel?
There are no creatures anywhere in nature which use wheels. Nor, as far as I know, plants. The wheel, as a mechanism, only ever came about as a result of human intelligence. And yet it is so astoundingly useful. Using wheels and engines, we can go to places unimaginably faster than any quadruped can run or bird can fly. I think this is encouraging. I think this implies that human intelligence can trump random mutation in certain respects - that we can, if we devote ourselves to it, build a better ecosystem than chance has.
I agree with your point about imitating nature being a good direction to go in. But I don't think we should embrace nature as the answer to all life's questions.
Actually, it's the Time Lords which fight the Daleks in the Time War. It's established in The Unquiet Dead that "lower species" such as humans go largely unaffected by the Time War.
*cough* I mean, hooray for transhumanism?
I would've waited an eternity for this!
DRM will end once it's proved that it hurts sales. The first step to proving this is to sell non-DRMed music alongside DRMed music - Yahoo have made this step now, so we're off to a good good start.
The next step is to wait and see how the sales compare. Hopefully, the statistics will turn out the way we want them to, and the record companies will drop DRM in the interests of making as much money as is technically possible. But I really think this could go either way. Cross your fingers, folks.
It's passive. It imports data from other people's games into universe. But that's all. Yes, they can download your species and wipe them out - in THEIR GAME. You, meanwhile, can download their species and wipe them out in YOUR game. There's no real multiplayer going on here. It's just a cheap and imaginative way to generate content.
I, for one, run Adblock because I don't want to look at ads. From what you two are saying, it's probably just me, though.
You don't understand. This whole thread, here, is us modding Dvorak down. Much less impersonal than a simple -1: Troll, right?
The main issue I have with Flash is the fact that - by definition - every single Flash interface is non-standard, which means it takes a nonzero amount of time to figure out how to use, which means I don't get my content as fast as possible. A regular web page typically has about five different ways of scrolling: in Flash, you get as many as the designer could be bothered to program, i.e., one or two. And so on.
Flash is good for one thing and one thing only: looking cool. To be sure, this is a noble goal, but shopping websites etc. need FUNCTIONALITY, and that means standard HTML.
I quite like this experiment: think of a song. Any song. Now turn on the radio. Is it playing?
He's also Justice League's Lex Luthor! In that episode where Flash and Lex Luthor switch brains by accident. Good episode. "You gonna wash your hands?" "No... 'cause I'm EVIL."
E2 is great for getting perspective on things, because it has the same high standards as Wikipedia but offers the things that Wikipedia doesn't:
And that's just the factual stuff. The fact that E2 allows fiction, poetry etc. takes it another quantum leap away from Wikipedia. They are completely different sites and they're good for different things. A balanced diet, I suggest, would contain a healthy mix of both.
The thing is, if you denounce your opponent in an advert - you're still giving them screen time. Your opponent still gets free publicity, and we all know that line about publicity.
I'm reminded of Elite II, which contained an entire galaxy of 100,000,000,000 stars on a single floppy disk which didn't contain that many bits. Of course, most of the galaxy was completely uninhabited, but it was still cool.
I think it's preposterous to argue whether games should be art or not or storytelling or not or have good graphics or not or what level of interaction there should be in a videogame. Games should be worth playing, that's the beginning and the end of it. YOU, parent poster, don't want storytelling in your game if it means you don't get enough interaction. You want immediate rewards, and you feel your needs are poorly met. That's fine: I agree with you. But other people DO actually play games because they want heavy story, even if that means lots of cutscenes. Or because they want more of the same stuff they've been playing for the last four years. Or because they want a 100-hour quest they can invest a lot of time and effort into. And, even if this isn't the largest demographic, it's certainly the safest to market to.
I can see people buying that. I'd wait for the Astronauts/Cowboys expansion, myself.
Actually, we as geeks care. We care because we put lots of effort into making our code work elegantly and our websites look good, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. We care, because we're really great at this stuff, but marketing trumps usability every time. We care because Myspace sucks, but there are millions of people using it, and it's like a big slap in the face for every one of us who put any effort into our work.
I don't think thirtysomethings in general go for "crazes" in the same way that 15-25-year-olds do. It may be impossible to get a reaction on the same scale from that demographic.
Three words: British Broadcasting Corporation.
On the contrary, I think it's a good sign. Because it means there are now lots and lots of gadgets, equally many of which must be good.
You gotta be careful about that. I bought a fake fake Rolex once, set me back £1500 and all it did was tell the time.