That's what I thought. I've stopped even bothering to go into Game/Gamestation here in the UK because of the already ridiculous prices of used games (often you only get a couple of quid off the new price, occasionally the used price is more than the new price, and considering the gamble of a used, possibly scratched disk, it's just not worth it anymore) - add another £5-10 onto the price and I don't see how the used market can survive.
Of course, if that were the real reason behind the no Flash rule, it'd apply equally to OSX. The fact that they're happy to let Adobe dictate these things on their desktop and not on their mobile platform would suggest alternative reasons.
You've kind of answered your own question, though. The reason they might want Flash is that it's already used in so many places that if you have a definite requirement for it, and you want to be able to meet that requirement from your phone, you're not going to be buying an iPhone. Of course, at the moment that consideration doesn't outweigh the positives to Apple in not having Flash on their device, but if enough people complained or even started buying alternative devices, I'm sure they wouldn't be beyond rethinking their approach, lousy as Flash is.
Flash is a god-awful piece of software, but the issue for many people is that it's the cheapest option to do cross-platform, dynamic applications. While the iPhone is a nice piece of kit, it doesn't have the levels of market penetration that makes it worthwhile developing your application twice, so developers are left with the choice to either drop iPhone OS support (which they'd rather not do because it's a nice marketing coup at the moment) or spending an extra amount developing an iPhone specific version of your app which probably won't give you the same ROI (of course, the other option is to use something like HTML5, but then you're screwed if you want to also offer your app on older desktop browsers which tend to have a much higher market penetration). Now, having said that, I too hope Flash dies sooner rather than later - but experience tells me this is unlikely to happen (since I'm stuck supporting IE6 on 50% of my projects, I don't see HTML5 saving the day in the near future).
There's only a flaw in their plan if you assume their plan is to find a resolution to the Flash issue as opposed to, say, getting more eyes on their publication by posting preposterous nonsense that people will read more out of incredulity than interest. And here they are with a/. write up, so I'd say their plan is working pretty well.
This is exactly why Apple are trying to get a stranglehold on the Apps market right now. They need a hardware exit strategy - for now they have desirable hardware, but elsewhere prices are decreasing, specs are increasing, and beyond that there's going to come a saturation point for these devices. Apple realise this and they're trying to steal a march on the software side of things because they realise it might one day be their primary business. Of course, the fact that it sells iPhones/iPods/iPads in the meantime is a massive bonus, but that's not the end-game.
In a system of proportional representation you finally get the chance to have a representative that more closely aligns with your views.
You do nothing of the sort. You vote for the party. The more votes a party has, the further down the list they go. The party leadership choose who's on the list, and in what order.
There's nothing to say it has to be this way - it could just as easily be the party members who vote on the candidates (in fact, I thought Labour and Lib Dem already did this, at least to some extent, and only Conservatives left it up to the leadership, but I could be wrong).
what coalitions actually mean is that the lunatic fringe (yes including the one trick pony pirate party who has nothing meaningful to say on things like EU tax rates, monetary policy, Ukraine or georgia membership in NATO/EU, muslim immigration to europe etc) gets a disproportionate share of power in exchange for not toppling the government, or they get a free reign on a collection of their particular issues, which may, on the whole, be disastrous for the country, but in the short term prop up one party.
I think you're exaggerating the influence this gives to minority fringe parties a little. Remember, votes are generally yes/no, and if they're close enough that one or two votes can sway the result, then perhaps they need further consideration in the first place, regardless of the motives of those one or two fringe voters (after all, if 45% of people are against a new law and 55% in favour, that's still a pretty big group of people who don't want the legislation to just ignore their views, which is what a strong majority government would do, and suggests that further consideration would be useful).
How is that any different from the article? The guy isn't running WoW on the iPad, he's running a client which remotes into "the cloud", where a PC somewhere is running WoW. The point still stands that this has already been done so is not really news.
He's only highlighting the other extreme - you're making the assumption that everyone who doesn't buy a lag reducing mousepad will be happy with this solution, but I'd argue if it results in slow, choppy, highly laggy gameplay, the majority of people won't buy into it and you'll have a handful who will play regardless and probably ruin the experience for the rest of their team.
Maybe it is - I don't think they specifically refer to what the "other" OS is (although it's pretty clearly meant to be Windows), but maybe it's the equivalent of "I'm a car", "I'm a Ferrari" - indicating that they realise of course that the Ferrari is also a car, but it's of a higher pedigree than average, in which case there's nothing wrong with their usage of the term (although their interpretation is open to debate).
The round trip to the server is always the issue with these systems and nobody has come up with a solution, in fact it's hard to see how they could (there's only so much you can do on the software side to compensate, and even then the video is likely to be horribly compressed to get around bandwidth constraints, in which case you might be able to just squeeze the juice out of the device to run the game locally at a very low framerate for a better experience). Might be okay for games that don't require quick actions/responses (turn based stuff would work fine), but that's a pretty small field.
You make it sound like either/or. I'm all for more work towards open web standards, but some of us have to sometimes live and interact in the real world, which sometimes requires the use of Flash, painful as it frequently is. For those times, it's nice to know there's a solution and not just a brick wall response. And if these companies can ease the pain of Flash even a little, I'm all for it as an interim solution.
I'm one of the people who dislikes Flash for it's own (de)merits. However, all the people baying for its death need to think through the consequences, even as a Flash hater I realise there are some things that currently can only be done with Flash, and while there are a lot of people stuck on older browsers, this will continue to be the case. We should be using this time to think through and cement a strong replacement, not making knee-jerk decisions which might turn out to be as bad as the technology they're replacing.
I was about to say the same thing - I use a VM of XP with IE6 for testing purposes, and there are huge banners all over Youtube saying "Your browser is not supported", but everything I've tried to do still works. My guess is, although they no longer officially support it, they'll still at least attempt to not break the site in IE6 while there's still a not-insignificant number of people using it. This is on a ten year old browser that even MS have disowned, so all those people who think Google should suddenly switch to HTML5 are dreaming - it's not even a formal standard yet, and we've yet to see how well it will be implemented cross browser, or what the adoption rate will be. Unless the vast majority of users switch to HTML5-supporting browsers, don't expect the change to happen any time soon...
Sounds like I'm in the same boat. For me, the key thing is, if I leave this game for a couple of months, how easy is it to jump back into it. Does it store quest info to remind me what I've already done, does it offer lots of pointers to what I'm meant to be doing next, etc. Quite often I find I'm enjoying a game's openness, real life intrudes for a while and when I go back I have no idea what the hell I'm meant to do, short of wandering around the whole game world speaking to everyone and hoping they have some clue (and quite often, once they've given you the next bit of the quest, they'll only give you standard NPC quotes which are no help at all). If I can figure out what I was doing when I left off, I'm more likely to keep playing when I get back to it (and I left off Dragon Age at the end of last year, I can't remember how helpful it is in this regard so I'll find out when I go back to it and this will determine if I carry on or abandon it).
It doesn't necessarily follow that they want the games to be shorter or simpler, or to cut back on the flash visuals. A well balanced game that's playable and fun can still be lengthy and complex and visually stunning, it just means they can't cut corners, which is probably their real issue.
I think the balance was pretty good on the first ME. There were just enough side quests around to keep you slightly levelled ahead of where you needed to be at most points in the story, so if you were finding a particular section difficult you could usually go find something else to do and come back with a few new skills - you'd rarely be so powerful that you could crush all before you, but it would take the frustration out of some encounters. I haven't played the sequel yet, but I heard they removed this, that there are very few sidequests, which I guess means your skill needs to be pretty much on a par with the people who playtested this for it to feel challenging without being frustrating - what are the chances of that being the case?
Agreed - it seems to me episodic gaming actually increases the temptation to bloat a game with filler to squeeze more episodes out, so you'll end up with more of what you don't like, and you'll pay more to get it.
Maybe what this shows is that games companies should focus more on properly marketing their games. Everyone likes something different from their gaming experience, the problem we often have as gamers is finding games that match what we want, and the main reason for that has to be the fact that they're marketed as widely as possible. That and a shift away from lengthy demos is bound to result in a good portion of your audience being disappointed. If you then make the games simpler and the storylines linear, but continue to market it to everyone, you're going to see the reverse (the people who like linear games will play longer but the people who like sandbox will lose interest), it won't tell you anything meaningful.
To the other point, I just have to say -- what? People can perform tasks flawlessly in movies? It turns out that unless required for dramatic effect (as a somewhat-lazy shorthand to convey nervousness or poorly-concealed deception), characters always speak in clear, perfect setences and never use the word "um". Their shoelaces are always tied, their hair is always perfect, and they never miss the bus unless their character is required to be unlucky or miserable.
People in movies seldom need to visit the washroom, and then only to have private conversations -- never to defecate, except as a route to teen-movie fart jokes.
Movies are a projection of reality, not an exact duplicate. People tend to do non-visually-arresting and plot-irrelevant things faster or behind the scenes. Watching someone make typos for two hours isn't my idea of a good time.
The big difference is, all of the examples you gave are of them removing things extraneous to the plot to help drive the story. Computers are one of the few areas where they don't remove things that might be boring or incidental, they go wacky inventing things to try and make it more interesting, and quite often it comes off as incredibly dumb and breaks all suspension of disbelief. If you can't make 30 seconds of someone typing look interesting, just show us five seconds and let our brains fill in the gaps, don't turn his wordprocessor into an environment that does advanced speech recognition and renders his musings as 3D representations.
The V'ger reference at the end annoyed me. It was given life by other beings, it didn't just become sentient!
Likewise the reference to Skynet - I think we can all assume they were trying to make a self-aware system. It's not like it was the OS in a vending machine and it got bored of counting quarters one day and started wondering if there was more to life. I can't, off the top of my head, think of any examples of an ordinary computer system developing self awareness independent of human interaction.
It's probably a combination of people being more computer aware these days (you can still put the ridiculous GUI in your movie, but don't expect people to take it seriously) combined with generally much better looking real-world GUIs meaning you don't have to bored your audience with a screen of mono-text. There are still plenty of crimes against computing in movies, but expect the real world and movie world experiences to get much closer as these trends continue - let's face it, it's not so long ago that if a movie had shown someone holding a live video conference using a pocket-sized, touch-screen, voice-activated computer, we'd have thought that was pretty unrealistic!
The "glasses" he had in the end sequence were real. It was a led based text display. Steve Mann and Thad Starner both used them for wearable computer research in the 90's
Also they never had a "virtual 3d" anything. those sequences were what he was seeing in the data on the screen.
P.S. buy the script, theres a lot more detail in it than what was shot.
There is, however, a scene in which Plague is using a VR headset and appears to be receiving haptic feedback (multiple shots to the body by the look of it) despite wearing no kit on the body. Detailed script or not, that's pretty unforgivable...
But just like most people require tactile feedback when typing for optimum performance (one of the multitude of reasons Star Trek's LCARS input interface will never truly be embraced in reality), studios insist the audience needs aural feedback when something is happening.
You missed the key part, which is that it's easier (read: cheaper) to fill that void with meaningless computer beeps that it is with witty or thought provoking dialogue. The truth is, we all know using computers isn't, of itself, particularly exciting (it's what you use them for that's exciting, and often that's not something that conveys well to people watching), so why do they insist on using them so much! We don't see the main protagonist sit down and start doing his tax returns at a key point (with or without annoying pencil scratching sound effects overlaid) for much the same reason.
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That's what I thought. I've stopped even bothering to go into Game/Gamestation here in the UK because of the already ridiculous prices of used games (often you only get a couple of quid off the new price, occasionally the used price is more than the new price, and considering the gamble of a used, possibly scratched disk, it's just not worth it anymore) - add another £5-10 onto the price and I don't see how the used market can survive.
Of course, if that were the real reason behind the no Flash rule, it'd apply equally to OSX. The fact that they're happy to let Adobe dictate these things on their desktop and not on their mobile platform would suggest alternative reasons.
You've kind of answered your own question, though. The reason they might want Flash is that it's already used in so many places that if you have a definite requirement for it, and you want to be able to meet that requirement from your phone, you're not going to be buying an iPhone. Of course, at the moment that consideration doesn't outweigh the positives to Apple in not having Flash on their device, but if enough people complained or even started buying alternative devices, I'm sure they wouldn't be beyond rethinking their approach, lousy as Flash is.
Flash is a god-awful piece of software, but the issue for many people is that it's the cheapest option to do cross-platform, dynamic applications. While the iPhone is a nice piece of kit, it doesn't have the levels of market penetration that makes it worthwhile developing your application twice, so developers are left with the choice to either drop iPhone OS support (which they'd rather not do because it's a nice marketing coup at the moment) or spending an extra amount developing an iPhone specific version of your app which probably won't give you the same ROI (of course, the other option is to use something like HTML5, but then you're screwed if you want to also offer your app on older desktop browsers which tend to have a much higher market penetration). Now, having said that, I too hope Flash dies sooner rather than later - but experience tells me this is unlikely to happen (since I'm stuck supporting IE6 on 50% of my projects, I don't see HTML5 saving the day in the near future).
There's only a flaw in their plan if you assume their plan is to find a resolution to the Flash issue as opposed to, say, getting more eyes on their publication by posting preposterous nonsense that people will read more out of incredulity than interest. And here they are with a /. write up, so I'd say their plan is working pretty well.
This is exactly why Apple are trying to get a stranglehold on the Apps market right now. They need a hardware exit strategy - for now they have desirable hardware, but elsewhere prices are decreasing, specs are increasing, and beyond that there's going to come a saturation point for these devices. Apple realise this and they're trying to steal a march on the software side of things because they realise it might one day be their primary business. Of course, the fact that it sells iPhones/iPods/iPads in the meantime is a massive bonus, but that's not the end-game.
You do nothing of the sort. You vote for the party. The more votes a party has, the further down the list they go. The party leadership choose who's on the list, and in what order.
There's nothing to say it has to be this way - it could just as easily be the party members who vote on the candidates (in fact, I thought Labour and Lib Dem already did this, at least to some extent, and only Conservatives left it up to the leadership, but I could be wrong).
what coalitions actually mean is that the lunatic fringe (yes including the one trick pony pirate party who has nothing meaningful to say on things like EU tax rates, monetary policy, Ukraine or georgia membership in NATO/EU, muslim immigration to europe etc) gets a disproportionate share of power in exchange for not toppling the government, or they get a free reign on a collection of their particular issues, which may, on the whole, be disastrous for the country, but in the short term prop up one party.
I think you're exaggerating the influence this gives to minority fringe parties a little. Remember, votes are generally yes/no, and if they're close enough that one or two votes can sway the result, then perhaps they need further consideration in the first place, regardless of the motives of those one or two fringe voters (after all, if 45% of people are against a new law and 55% in favour, that's still a pretty big group of people who don't want the legislation to just ignore their views, which is what a strong majority government would do, and suggests that further consideration would be useful).
How is that any different from the article? The guy isn't running WoW on the iPad, he's running a client which remotes into "the cloud", where a PC somewhere is running WoW. The point still stands that this has already been done so is not really news.
He's only highlighting the other extreme - you're making the assumption that everyone who doesn't buy a lag reducing mousepad will be happy with this solution, but I'd argue if it results in slow, choppy, highly laggy gameplay, the majority of people won't buy into it and you'll have a handful who will play regardless and probably ruin the experience for the rest of their team.
Maybe it is - I don't think they specifically refer to what the "other" OS is (although it's pretty clearly meant to be Windows), but maybe it's the equivalent of "I'm a car", "I'm a Ferrari" - indicating that they realise of course that the Ferrari is also a car, but it's of a higher pedigree than average, in which case there's nothing wrong with their usage of the term (although their interpretation is open to debate).
The round trip to the server is always the issue with these systems and nobody has come up with a solution, in fact it's hard to see how they could (there's only so much you can do on the software side to compensate, and even then the video is likely to be horribly compressed to get around bandwidth constraints, in which case you might be able to just squeeze the juice out of the device to run the game locally at a very low framerate for a better experience). Might be okay for games that don't require quick actions/responses (turn based stuff would work fine), but that's a pretty small field.
You make it sound like either/or. I'm all for more work towards open web standards, but some of us have to sometimes live and interact in the real world, which sometimes requires the use of Flash, painful as it frequently is. For those times, it's nice to know there's a solution and not just a brick wall response. And if these companies can ease the pain of Flash even a little, I'm all for it as an interim solution.
I'm one of the people who dislikes Flash for it's own (de)merits. However, all the people baying for its death need to think through the consequences, even as a Flash hater I realise there are some things that currently can only be done with Flash, and while there are a lot of people stuck on older browsers, this will continue to be the case. We should be using this time to think through and cement a strong replacement, not making knee-jerk decisions which might turn out to be as bad as the technology they're replacing.
I was about to say the same thing - I use a VM of XP with IE6 for testing purposes, and there are huge banners all over Youtube saying "Your browser is not supported", but everything I've tried to do still works. My guess is, although they no longer officially support it, they'll still at least attempt to not break the site in IE6 while there's still a not-insignificant number of people using it. This is on a ten year old browser that even MS have disowned, so all those people who think Google should suddenly switch to HTML5 are dreaming - it's not even a formal standard yet, and we've yet to see how well it will be implemented cross browser, or what the adoption rate will be. Unless the vast majority of users switch to HTML5-supporting browsers, don't expect the change to happen any time soon...
Sounds like I'm in the same boat. For me, the key thing is, if I leave this game for a couple of months, how easy is it to jump back into it. Does it store quest info to remind me what I've already done, does it offer lots of pointers to what I'm meant to be doing next, etc. Quite often I find I'm enjoying a game's openness, real life intrudes for a while and when I go back I have no idea what the hell I'm meant to do, short of wandering around the whole game world speaking to everyone and hoping they have some clue (and quite often, once they've given you the next bit of the quest, they'll only give you standard NPC quotes which are no help at all). If I can figure out what I was doing when I left off, I'm more likely to keep playing when I get back to it (and I left off Dragon Age at the end of last year, I can't remember how helpful it is in this regard so I'll find out when I go back to it and this will determine if I carry on or abandon it).
It doesn't necessarily follow that they want the games to be shorter or simpler, or to cut back on the flash visuals. A well balanced game that's playable and fun can still be lengthy and complex and visually stunning, it just means they can't cut corners, which is probably their real issue.
I think the balance was pretty good on the first ME. There were just enough side quests around to keep you slightly levelled ahead of where you needed to be at most points in the story, so if you were finding a particular section difficult you could usually go find something else to do and come back with a few new skills - you'd rarely be so powerful that you could crush all before you, but it would take the frustration out of some encounters. I haven't played the sequel yet, but I heard they removed this, that there are very few sidequests, which I guess means your skill needs to be pretty much on a par with the people who playtested this for it to feel challenging without being frustrating - what are the chances of that being the case?
Agreed - it seems to me episodic gaming actually increases the temptation to bloat a game with filler to squeeze more episodes out, so you'll end up with more of what you don't like, and you'll pay more to get it.
Maybe what this shows is that games companies should focus more on properly marketing their games. Everyone likes something different from their gaming experience, the problem we often have as gamers is finding games that match what we want, and the main reason for that has to be the fact that they're marketed as widely as possible. That and a shift away from lengthy demos is bound to result in a good portion of your audience being disappointed. If you then make the games simpler and the storylines linear, but continue to market it to everyone, you're going to see the reverse (the people who like linear games will play longer but the people who like sandbox will lose interest), it won't tell you anything meaningful.
To the other point, I just have to say -- what? People can perform tasks flawlessly in movies? It turns out that unless required for dramatic effect (as a somewhat-lazy shorthand to convey nervousness or poorly-concealed deception), characters always speak in clear, perfect setences and never use the word "um". Their shoelaces are always tied, their hair is always perfect, and they never miss the bus unless their character is required to be unlucky or miserable. People in movies seldom need to visit the washroom, and then only to have private conversations -- never to defecate, except as a route to teen-movie fart jokes.
Movies are a projection of reality, not an exact duplicate. People tend to do non-visually-arresting and plot-irrelevant things faster or behind the scenes. Watching someone make typos for two hours isn't my idea of a good time.
The big difference is, all of the examples you gave are of them removing things extraneous to the plot to help drive the story. Computers are one of the few areas where they don't remove things that might be boring or incidental, they go wacky inventing things to try and make it more interesting, and quite often it comes off as incredibly dumb and breaks all suspension of disbelief. If you can't make 30 seconds of someone typing look interesting, just show us five seconds and let our brains fill in the gaps, don't turn his wordprocessor into an environment that does advanced speech recognition and renders his musings as 3D representations.
The V'ger reference at the end annoyed me. It was given life by other beings, it didn't just become sentient!
Likewise the reference to Skynet - I think we can all assume they were trying to make a self-aware system. It's not like it was the OS in a vending machine and it got bored of counting quarters one day and started wondering if there was more to life. I can't, off the top of my head, think of any examples of an ordinary computer system developing self awareness independent of human interaction.
It's probably a combination of people being more computer aware these days (you can still put the ridiculous GUI in your movie, but don't expect people to take it seriously) combined with generally much better looking real-world GUIs meaning you don't have to bored your audience with a screen of mono-text. There are still plenty of crimes against computing in movies, but expect the real world and movie world experiences to get much closer as these trends continue - let's face it, it's not so long ago that if a movie had shown someone holding a live video conference using a pocket-sized, touch-screen, voice-activated computer, we'd have thought that was pretty unrealistic!
The "glasses" he had in the end sequence were real. It was a led based text display. Steve Mann and Thad Starner both used them for wearable computer research in the 90's
Also they never had a "virtual 3d" anything. those sequences were what he was seeing in the data on the screen.
P.S. buy the script, theres a lot more detail in it than what was shot.
There is, however, a scene in which Plague is using a VR headset and appears to be receiving haptic feedback (multiple shots to the body by the look of it) despite wearing no kit on the body. Detailed script or not, that's pretty unforgivable...
But just like most people require tactile feedback when typing for optimum performance (one of the multitude of reasons Star Trek's LCARS input interface will never truly be embraced in reality), studios insist the audience needs aural feedback when something is happening.
You missed the key part, which is that it's easier (read: cheaper) to fill that void with meaningless computer beeps that it is with witty or thought provoking dialogue. The truth is, we all know using computers isn't, of itself, particularly exciting (it's what you use them for that's exciting, and often that's not something that conveys well to people watching), so why do they insist on using them so much! We don't see the main protagonist sit down and start doing his tax returns at a key point (with or without annoying pencil scratching sound effects overlaid) for much the same reason.