Spore has been in development since at least 2000. However the first most people heard about it was in 2005 when he gave a talk at a games conference about fractally generated content (as I remember it). Supporting material for this talk came from his (now five year old) project. It wasn't a product announcement, just game development talk. A proper product announcement didn't come out of EA until quite a bit later. Yes, there has been a lot of hype, but it's pretty small in proportion to the amount of development time for the game.
I said a long time ago that the guy making spore should work on his game instead of attending conferences.
Why? You seem to have some personal grudge against the guy, but you clearly have no idea the development requirements that an A-list game has. One guy's time is pretty negligible when you have a team of 60 in 4 different departments. What he can do better than anyone is keep demand high so that EA continues to fund the project. Would you rather be buried in hype or would you rather have the game canceled?
The energy that he generates at a conference is good for the game business. In an industry where risk has become poison and consolidation is rampant, he's one of the voice out there saying refreshing new things.
He is, for whatever reason, a celebrity and gets called to do interviews. What would you talk about? That project you did 5 years ago on the one you're working on every day? Well, okay. You might very well talk about something old and dull, but I'd talk about that exciting thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.
2) all of the millions of people that don't RTFM or help screens before lifting the phone and calling tech support; yes, the manuals and help screens suck, so did your chemistry book.
In my experience these are called "normal users". If interface designers did their work (or even were ever consulted in the process) 70-90% of these basic calls would go away.*
I met a man once who claimed a more novel approach. In a throwback to 80's manual copy protection he hid the tech support phone number behind a question. You had to read the help to answer correctly. I suspect that just having to do a minute of extra work to get the phone number deterred a large number of annoyance calls.
* I only have one data point to support this. After redesigning a companies software to make it less like a B52 cockpit** and more like an iPhone*** support calls from various offices dropped between 70-90%.
** Applications like this are what give VB developers a bad name.
*** Spiritually. "Dead simple" might be a better description. And we did it despite most of the users wanting "something more like Outlook" which was plain stupid. ****
**** Which is why you should pay attention to user's problems, not their solutions.
***** Yes, I do in fact know there is a special hell for gratuitous footnoters. I'll tell everyone you said "hi".
Except you can print QR codes with any printer and on any surface. You can take photos of them and exchange them. You can display them on any device that can display an image.
And they cost absolutely nothing to make, can be generated dynamically with just a tiny bit of script.
It requires no special reader, just a small bit of image processing software, of which there are free and open implementations.
RFID has none of these advantages, nor will it.
The reason QR codes are popular in Japan is because it's open and it's useful. 2D barcodes have been tried in other countries, but they were proprietary cash-ins, and therefore were never widely adopted. You can create QR Code readers and printers with no license, the technology is widely available and robust and mature. It supports unicode characters and has error correction that supports up to 30% distortion before the information is corrupt. If you have a high enough resolution capture device (say 2mp) you can put dozens of K of information in them. I've seen full web pages, PNGs, MIDI, and full resumes encoded in QR codes.
Sure it isn't wireless (Well it is, just line-of-sight) but I can print QR codes on my business card for free. How would you do it with RFID?
Most people (who haven't owned a Japanese phone in Japan) don't really get why QR codes are great.
Every single Japanese phone made in the last 5 years has this. Which means virtually every Japanese person has a read on them at all times. Sometimes two.
And QR codes are everywhere. Sure, advertising, magazines and whatnot, but there are a lot of other uses. If you could go around and tag anything with a URL or 1-2 K of text, what would you use it for?
You can embed contact information in them, so having one on your business card means it takes about 2 seconds to enter someones info into your phone. And it's always correct, no OCR errors.
At pedestrian level, there are a lot of street signs in Tokyo with QR codes that give you a detailed local map for when you're lost and looking for a business. (Which is often in Tokyo)
They scan 2d bar codes too. So you can scan a product in a store and see Amazon's reviews and price while you're still standing in the store.
Rather than handing out tons of wasteful leaflets that get discarded, people will sometimes just hold signs with a big QR code on it. Typically a booth-babe type girl, so you can get her photo too while you're at it...
Photo stations will print you a QR code so you can share the photos with your friends.
A restauraunt will put one on its outside menu for people to take the menu with them.
A business will put one at its information desk so you can fill out a CS survey on your phone.
I've gotten coupons and special offers printed on receipts as QR codes, but you don't need to cary a ratty piece of paper around to get your 20% off, just your phone.
However, as much as I would love to have them in North America, it won't happen. We don't do nearly enough internet access on our cell phones to make it a compelling feature. In Japan people's mobile email are their primary email addresses. You can't even register for Mixy (their version of facebook) without verifying your Japanese mobile email. Most popular web sites are built for phone users. This is completely different than America. Possibly if Apple puts a reader out in the US they'll start getting printed for the "Look! We like iPhone users!" factor. But I doubt it.
I expect that in a decade or two new social rules will evolve to deal with this, where it will be considered inappropriate to take certain classes of forum comments into account when weighing a person's character.
I'd like to think that. But these are companies who are still using Pascal and Fortran and don't accept email resumes. They don't have the genetics for change, especially disruptive change.
Besides, a few decades is a long time to be without a job.
Personally I would take "Can I find more of your stuff when I google your name?" is a somewhat creepy stalker question.
Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less.
Wrong. This simple misunderstanding is why so many people "slave" away at crappy jobs.
The word "automation" (from the Greek for "self dictated") is all about the individual producing more, not less.
You produce more every day than you did the day before. Every day you have more opportunities than you did the day before. I'm not even going to cite statistics because it would be pretty much every one of them. Hell, just fifteen years ago anyone with a stupid idea had to Xerox their own zine to tell people about it. Now they just post on Slashdot. Doesn't that make you more powerful? Well sure, but when everyone can post on Slashdot... well that hurts don't it.
There has always been this priestly bitching in IT circles. Bitching that they have to hold the keys to heaven, otherwise everyone would learn that it wasn't special, and they'd be out on their ears. How can I be a special little snowflake when everyone else can do what I do?
If you want success you have to keep moving beyond what you've done and you can't be afraid of cutting the dead weight. To me that's what technology has always been about... Doing what can't be done yet. If you're in it to make your live easier, you're going to get run over.
People are afraid of all kinds of stupid crap. Doesn't mean we should feed it. But I guess it's "Irrational Fear Weekend" here with this and the stupid article about dying in an air crash.
I had a (land line) phone once that would only let you dial 11 numbers. Great for making general phone calls. Less great for calling someone with an extension, someone in another country or navigating a voice mail system or phone tree.
My current mobile phone opens in a regular flip phone mode, and a landscape mode with a full keyboard.
But you can't use the web browser in landscape mode (entering urls or forms is murder). Nor can you enter address book information that way. Switching between modes cancels whatever you were doing.
Oh, and if you have the phone open in landscape mode and are receiving a call you can do one of three things: 1) Hit the answer button and talk on speaker phone. 2) Switch to portrait mode which hangs up on the call. 3) Let it go to voice mail.
If you close the phone while it is doing one of its "I'm doing something" animations, it will pause the animiation until you open the phone again. Because man I need to see that flying envelope. Which isn't really that awful, except it also keeps the backlight on. On the screen that's inside the flip. draining your battery for no real reason.
You also can't set it to ring silently without scrolling through all of the available ring volumes. So there's no way to mute the phone without being incredibly annoying. No I keep it on vibrate at all times and keep it in a rocks glass when I want to hear it ring.
Completely aside, I wish American phones had "Manner Mode" buttons that are on virtually all Japanese phone. It's an external dedicated button that switches your phone between two ring profiles. (usually ring and vibe). Though it's likely that no one would use the button here.
When I was about 8 my family bought a complete set of World Book encyclopedias. And sure it didn't cover everything, and nothing after 1978, it did offer good basic information that an 8-year old could read and a 50-year old could appreciate.
Fast forward a few decades. The other day I went to wikipedia looking for some basic information on my new dental crown. While I did (eventually) find the information I was looking for, it's full of sentiences like:
"The alloy used for PFMs is of a different variety for those used for FGCs. "
"Because the sprue former stuck out a little bit from the investment material, there is a communication between the outside and the investment pattern."
"When using a shoulder preparation, the dentist is urged to add a bevel; the shoulder-bevel margin serves to effectively decrease the tooth-to-restoration distance upon final cementation of the restoration."
I'm not a moron, I can do the additional research and figure out what all of the words mean in this context, but damn, I wish I had my old World Book encyclopedias.
If the lottery commission is in violation, then you have trouble since they might well never publish your winning numbers.
On the other hand I think you'd be able to successfully sue any other winners who shared the jackpot with you for their share since they used the winning lottery numbers without your permission.
In fact I suspect, under DMCA, you could (legitimately) sue lottery players for winnings even if you didn't play, but merely if you had a previous claim on the numbers.
Disclaimer:I'm not reading the/. backseat moralising that's undoubtedly in all of the posts above.
If American wanted to really do what's best for the world and its self then it should be spending trillions on things like developing vaccines and then giving the technology away for free.
Seems we have a better chance of creating an aids vaccine for $500 billion, cheap practical and non-polluting energy for two trillion, then spending a trillion on cancer, another trillion on mental health (because when college shooters get access to bio-tech, we've all got trouble.) and have enough left over to fight obesity and heart disease.
Or we could fight a war and go back to the moon. And I would love to go back to the moon, but lets take care of things here first.
Freeing the entire planet from most of its disease, pollution and energy costs would create a much stronger world economy, and more politically stable, not to mention the general good will that would be generated. It's something we can afford to, still have the talent to do, we just need someone to lead us there.
Standard Network latency and timing is not precise enough to reliably sync audio between rooms in such a way that you won't hear an echo. At least that was what I found when I researched this a couple of years ago.
Buy a Sonos and forget about it. It's an amazing set of hardware that's worth twice the price.
I'm amazed that with all of Jack Thompson's very public antics that his personal web site has a higher page rank than all the "evidence" against him.
I think most of us do stuff from time to time that we're embarrassed about, but I wonder if Mr Thompson is or has ever embarrassed by what he does. Sad to think he didn't wake up the next day and think "Damn. Did I really file that? What was I thinking!" Mistakes are fine, but someone without any introspection is someone who will never learn or grow.
Slashdot Mirror
Spore has been in development since at least 2000. However the first most people heard about it was in 2005 when he gave a talk at a games conference about fractally generated content (as I remember it). Supporting material for this talk came from his (now five year old) project. It wasn't a product announcement, just game development talk. A proper product announcement didn't come out of EA until quite a bit later. Yes, there has been a lot of hype, but it's pretty small in proportion to the amount of development time for the game.
I said a long time ago that the guy making spore should work on his game instead of attending conferences.
Why? You seem to have some personal grudge against the guy, but you clearly have no idea the development requirements that an A-list game has. One guy's time is pretty negligible when you have a team of 60 in 4 different departments. What he can do better than anyone is keep demand high so that EA continues to fund the project. Would you rather be buried in hype or would you rather have the game canceled?
The energy that he generates at a conference is good for the game business. In an industry where risk has become poison and consolidation is rampant, he's one of the voice out there saying refreshing new things.
He is, for whatever reason, a celebrity and gets called to do interviews. What would you talk about? That project you did 5 years ago on the one you're working on every day? Well, okay. You might very well talk about something old and dull, but I'd talk about that exciting thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.
In my experience these are called "normal users". If interface designers did their work (or even were ever consulted in the process) 70-90% of these basic calls would go away.*
I met a man once who claimed a more novel approach. In a throwback to 80's manual copy protection he hid the tech support phone number behind a question. You had to read the help to answer correctly. I suspect that just having to do a minute of extra work to get the phone number deterred a large number of annoyance calls.
* I only have one data point to support this. After redesigning a companies software to make it less like a B52 cockpit** and more like an iPhone*** support calls from various offices dropped between 70-90%.
** Applications like this are what give VB developers a bad name.
*** Spiritually. "Dead simple" might be a better description. And we did it despite most of the users wanting "something more like Outlook" which was plain stupid. ****
**** Which is why you should pay attention to user's problems, not their solutions.
***** Yes, I do in fact know there is a special hell for gratuitous footnoters. I'll tell everyone you said "hi".
Adding another set of steps to an already complex procedure... I'm sure that will solve the problem.
Except you can print QR codes with any printer and on any surface. You can take photos of them and exchange them. You can display them on any device that can display an image.
And they cost absolutely nothing to make, can be generated dynamically with just a tiny bit of script.
It requires no special reader, just a small bit of image processing software, of which there are free and open implementations.
RFID has none of these advantages, nor will it.
The reason QR codes are popular in Japan is because it's open and it's useful. 2D barcodes have been tried in other countries, but they were proprietary cash-ins, and therefore were never widely adopted. You can create QR Code readers and printers with no license, the technology is widely available and robust and mature. It supports unicode characters and has error correction that supports up to 30% distortion before the information is corrupt. If you have a high enough resolution capture device (say 2mp) you can put dozens of K of information in them. I've seen full web pages, PNGs, MIDI, and full resumes encoded in QR codes.
Sure it isn't wireless (Well it is, just line-of-sight) but I can print QR codes on my business card for free. How would you do it with RFID?
Most people (who haven't owned a Japanese phone in Japan) don't really get why QR codes are great.
Every single Japanese phone made in the last 5 years has this. Which means virtually every Japanese person has a read on them at all times. Sometimes two.
And QR codes are everywhere. Sure, advertising, magazines and whatnot, but there are a lot of other uses. If you could go around and tag anything with a URL or 1-2 K of text, what would you use it for?
You can embed contact information in them, so having one on your business card means it takes about 2 seconds to enter someones info into your phone. And it's always correct, no OCR errors.
At pedestrian level, there are a lot of street signs in Tokyo with QR codes that give you a detailed local map for when you're lost and looking for a business. (Which is often in Tokyo)
They scan 2d bar codes too. So you can scan a product in a store and see Amazon's reviews and price while you're still standing in the store.
Rather than handing out tons of wasteful leaflets that get discarded, people will sometimes just hold signs with a big QR code on it. Typically a booth-babe type girl, so you can get her photo too while you're at it...
Photo stations will print you a QR code so you can share the photos with your friends.
A restauraunt will put one on its outside menu for people to take the menu with them.
A business will put one at its information desk so you can fill out a CS survey on your phone.
I've gotten coupons and special offers printed on receipts as QR codes, but you don't need to cary a ratty piece of paper around to get your 20% off, just your phone.
However, as much as I would love to have them in North America, it won't happen. We don't do nearly enough internet access on our cell phones to make it a compelling feature. In Japan people's mobile email are their primary email addresses. You can't even register for Mixy (their version of facebook) without verifying your Japanese mobile email. Most popular web sites are built for phone users. This is completely different than America. Possibly if Apple puts a reader out in the US they'll start getting printed for the "Look! We like iPhone users!" factor. But I doubt it.
I'd like to think that. But these are companies who are still using Pascal and Fortran and don't accept email resumes. They don't have the genetics for change, especially disruptive change.
Besides, a few decades is a long time to be without a job.
Personally I would take "Can I find more of your stuff when I google your name?" is a somewhat creepy stalker question.
Maybe where you live. Where I live I don't spend $30 a year on climate control. I only close my windows when it rains.
However I did drop my electric bill by $10-$15 a month when I stopped watching TV. Amazing how it all ads up.
I'll simplify it by one:
You can get it fast, you can get it good, and you can get it cheap. But you only get to choose two.
I've told this to clients in so many words, and it usually leads to a good, quick compromise.
However it sounds like the original poster needs a new client/project manager. Or they just need to fire the client.
Wrong. This simple misunderstanding is why so many people "slave" away at crappy jobs.
The word "automation" (from the Greek for "self dictated") is all about the individual producing more, not less.
You produce more every day than you did the day before. Every day you have more opportunities than you did the day before. I'm not even going to cite statistics because it would be pretty much every one of them. Hell, just fifteen years ago anyone with a stupid idea had to Xerox their own zine to tell people about it. Now they just post on Slashdot. Doesn't that make you more powerful? Well sure, but when everyone can post on Slashdot... well that hurts don't it.
There has always been this priestly bitching in IT circles. Bitching that they have to hold the keys to heaven, otherwise everyone would learn that it wasn't special, and they'd be out on their ears. How can I be a special little snowflake when everyone else can do what I do?
If you want success you have to keep moving beyond what you've done and you can't be afraid of cutting the dead weight. To me that's what technology has always been about... Doing what can't be done yet. If you're in it to make your live easier, you're going to get run over.
Once would be enough.
People are afraid of all kinds of stupid crap. Doesn't mean we should feed it. But I guess it's "Irrational Fear Weekend" here with this and the stupid article about dying in an air crash.
My friend, you lost control of that the moment you were born.
And carrying a remote control is like having a little telekinetic friend.
"Semantic Web" is right up there with old buzzwords like "Push technology" and "Voice over IP".
Over hyped before they had a decent implementation, and now that we use them everywhere we find we still don't have flying cars.
Why don't we ask any of the dozens of countries who have been using these systems for billions of transactions the past decade?
Let's see...
I had a (land line) phone once that would only let you dial 11 numbers.
Great for making general phone calls. Less great for calling someone with an extension, someone in another country or navigating a voice mail system or phone tree.
My current mobile phone opens in a regular flip phone mode, and a landscape mode with a full keyboard.
But you can't use the web browser in landscape mode (entering urls or forms is murder). Nor can you enter address book information that way. Switching between modes cancels whatever you were doing.
Oh, and if you have the phone open in landscape mode and are receiving a call you can do one of three things:
1) Hit the answer button and talk on speaker phone.
2) Switch to portrait mode which hangs up on the call.
3) Let it go to voice mail.
If you close the phone while it is doing one of its "I'm doing something" animations, it will pause the animiation until you open the phone again. Because man I need to see that flying envelope. Which isn't really that awful, except it also keeps the backlight on. On the screen that's inside the flip. draining your battery for no real reason.
You also can't set it to ring silently without scrolling through all of the available ring volumes. So there's no way to mute the phone without being incredibly annoying. No I keep it on vibrate at all times and keep it in a rocks glass when I want to hear it ring.
Completely aside, I wish American phones had "Manner Mode" buttons that are on virtually all Japanese phone. It's an external dedicated button that switches your phone between two ring profiles. (usually ring and vibe). Though it's likely that no one would use the button here.
When I was about 8 my family bought a complete set of World Book encyclopedias. And sure it didn't cover everything, and nothing after 1978, it did offer good basic information that an 8-year old could read and a 50-year old could appreciate.
Fast forward a few decades. The other day I went to wikipedia looking for some basic information on my new dental crown. While I did (eventually) find the information I was looking for, it's full of sentiences like:
"The alloy used for PFMs is of a different variety for those used for FGCs. "
"Because the sprue former stuck out a little bit from the investment material, there is a communication between the outside and the investment pattern."
"When using a shoulder preparation, the dentist is urged to add a bevel; the shoulder-bevel margin serves to effectively decrease the tooth-to-restoration distance upon final cementation of the restoration."
I'm not a moron, I can do the additional research and figure out what all of the words mean in this context, but damn, I wish I had my old World Book encyclopedias.
How does the existence (or not) of Patch Tuesday change the number of patches deployed on your network?
And why are you relying on MS to keep your network secure?
Damn. I was hoping I'd get bonus points for not knowing anything about these guys. I need to try harder to earn my "living under a rock" badge.
If the lottery commission is in violation, then you have trouble since they might well never publish your winning numbers.
On the other hand I think you'd be able to successfully sue any other winners who shared the jackpot with you for their share since they used the winning lottery numbers without your permission.
In fact I suspect, under DMCA, you could (legitimately) sue lottery players for winnings even if you didn't play, but merely if you had a previous claim on the numbers.
In that case a trip to the "emergency services" numbers in the phone book would give a nice list.
And make sure you add the office, home, and mobile numbers of all your political representatives.
Disclaimer:I'm not reading the /. backseat moralising that's undoubtedly in all of the posts above.
If American wanted to really do what's best for the world and its self then it should be spending trillions on things like developing vaccines and then giving the technology away for free.
Seems we have a better chance of creating an aids vaccine for $500 billion, cheap practical and non-polluting energy for two trillion, then spending a trillion on cancer, another trillion on mental health (because when college shooters get access to bio-tech, we've all got trouble.) and have enough left over to fight obesity and heart disease.
Or we could fight a war and go back to the moon. And I would love to go back to the moon, but lets take care of things here first.
Freeing the entire planet from most of its disease, pollution and energy costs would create a much stronger world economy, and more politically stable, not to mention the general good will that would be generated. It's something we can afford to, still have the talent to do, we just need someone to lead us there.
Standard Network latency and timing is not precise enough to reliably sync audio between rooms in such a way that you won't hear an echo. At least that was what I found when I researched this a couple of years ago.
Buy a Sonos and forget about it. It's an amazing set of hardware that's worth twice the price.
I'm amazed that with all of Jack Thompson's very public antics that his personal web site has a higher page rank than all the "evidence" against him.
I think most of us do stuff from time to time that we're embarrassed about, but I wonder if Mr Thompson is or has ever embarrassed by what he does. Sad to think he didn't wake up the next day and think "Damn. Did I really file that? What was I thinking!" Mistakes are fine, but someone without any introspection is someone who will never learn or grow.
So how many points do I get for finding a missing child?
It better be millions because the chance of me finding a real world lost child is near zero.
The creator claims that this is a game because they "use an avatar". That's not a game, that's a UI.