There's a bit of amusing stuff with Bill at the start, then some stuff on Microsoft Surface, then some stuff about new technologies that don't exist yet like cellphones which can recognize people and places via the camera and tell you things about them, and then an amusing guitar hero thing at the end.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/ces/default.mspx Too bad my firewall don't let mediaplayer access the internet. May be a good thing, since I prefer other players with less vulnerabilities, especially when I have to give a wildcard for web-access.
So what is this guitar hero thing. Are you talking about this game with a plastic toy guitar and some built in sampled guitar riffs? If so:
As a person who is playing rock guitar since 25 years and exercised several thousand hours, with sores, blisters and horny skin on all my fingers, I have to say: this toy guitar hype sucks :)
Yes, that's Guitar Hero. And watch your tongue! My friend, who also worked on System Shock 2 with me, worked on the first one as an artist and his band did the theme song for it as well. :-)
"Real Guitars Are for Old People" --- Eric Cartman
I'm watching the keynote right now. The interesting thing is that they are showing off some many amazing things, but they are not able to get all those "uhs" and "ohs" and "ahs" and "wows" as the Apple folks get when they show off their new toys. The Apple stuff might come with a better design, but I honstly cannot say that their technology is more advanced than the Microsoft stuff. So why is Apple getting the "ohs"? Is it just the presentation or is there a difference in the audience?
Guitar hero's good, but there is a scary amount of people who actually compare it to playing a real guitar. My girlfriend thinks her brother has an advantage on it because he's played a real guitar before, I had to bite my tongue not to say something.
It really is just a rythm action game with no relation to playing a real guitar at all. Just as time crisis is to using a real gun. Infact, much less so than that.
> So why is Apple getting the "ohs"? Is it just the presentation or is there a difference in the audience?
I forget where I read it but "Apple has managed to convince people to express their individuality by standing in line to buy their stuff". (well, paraphrased)
Apple is getting the gasps of wonder because everything they present is a product to be released within a month. Not a fan of their keynotes, since they are all about Apple and tend to have nothing about actually moving things forwardvia integrated standards, but the stuff they show off does tend to look pretty cool.
I like Bill Gates' keynotes. They really inspire a lot of hope and imagination, which is something often lacking. While they make it all look very nice, however, I am not a fan of Microsoft's integration by centralization which they have been touting. For example sharing things with friends via Windows Live. I recoiled in horror when Bill decided to upload the snowboard image to Windows Live (note: the only other choice) instead of putting it directly on his cell phone. Peer-to-peer data transfer has been hugely under-rated. RSS shows us that integration can be done quite nicely without a centralized service. It just takes some imagination.
Not everyone wants to use Windows Live. I know I don't; it's kind of handy having all these services set up with Google so that I can just switch between them via their little menu bar. Unless all web sites suddenly start having proper integration technologies, this centralization will be unavoidable and ugly, and no different from the mess of arbitrary exporters in software today.
DBus in any self-respecting Linux distro is a miracle for integration. People are still getting their heads around it, but it has a lot of potential, and when that potential is met, chairs at Microsoft will start to fly...
This leads me to a thought about web sites. I have been disappointed to see Silverlight used not for full sites, but for small chunks of web sites such as little video players. I have long been obsessed with web standards and accessibility, but those standards have been loudly ignored for a long time now. Clearly, people want rich web sites. No, scratch that: People want rich applications easily accessible within an interconnected web of Internet services.
.Net seems a nice direction to go in here (though I personally would prefer Python...). With the right libraries, we can have that same richness but without the pain associated with tricking web browsers into displaying things nicely. (= More richness). Let's have .Net applications work with information stored in XML aboard a file the browser downloads when the user goes to a page. That XML is a good first stop for accessibility, since it means splitting content and display properly, such that the browser does not try (or know how) to display that content itself unless explicitly told to do so by, for example, a braille display add-on. CSS also tries to split content and display, but it is stuffed full of horrifying assumptions and we still have the browser struggling to figure out how something should look. It would be much easier if web developers could simply tell it "This box must go from 5 pixels to the left, over to the right side of the allowed space minus the size of the side bar". This can't be done, however, because both CSS and HTML work from a completely passive perspective where they control nothing; they only suggest things, and can therefore only go as far as the standards peoples' imaginations. People try to twist this around where CSS is tricking the browser such that it is in control, via all manner of ugly hacks such as to have transparent borders around boxes... or (my favourite) to have a colourful border around the web page implemented by tables (display:table, of course) and the disgustingly arbitrary "border" attribute.
By using a very big piece of software technology (with a real programming language), we can obtain proper desktop integration and solid communication between local and remote (web-based) applications. That communication is vital. Without it, we are stuck in the painful past with arbitrary exporters that contain ugly hacks to talk to certain centralized web services.
For example: Drag and drop an image from F-Spot to Flickr in a web browser. Today, the browser opens the image itself, because the web today is very much centered around web browsers. With a real programming language (plus some desktop integration technologies implemented by the still not quite obsolete web browser), we could have Flickr actually see that dropped image and open up a dialog for importing it into one's library.
These types of web sites are a nice idea because they are not arbitrarily limited in what is possible. That is, we can have interactive desktop-integrated applications spouting from web sites. Like running a remote shell, but considerably faster.
I think that the power of those technologies is extremely tempting, and I think we should accept that hypertext is not suited to handle the entirety of the web in the future. It has its place for storing content, but judging by the steady rise of web sites that simply do not work in text-based browsers anyway, I think it can be safely called obsolete for almost all use cases. (The remainder being hand-made information pages and catalogues, which is not what the web has become).
These two types of applications are coming to be used in the same way, so it is stupid that they are so different. Flickr is an application that just happens to be tied to a centralized web service. Good to have the distinction via a web browser, but it does not have to come at the expense of a crippled user experience.
I used to think it right to fight back this onslaught of non-standard web sites, but those standards are really very ugly anyway. We have some very nice technologies already available on the desktop (D-Bus, GTK... Hell, even Windows Forms), and the web has started to duplicate them needlessly. That web applications and local applications are different is really completely arbitrary. There are just a few little expectations of the web that make it tricky. Most importantly, accessibility.
Web pages are supposed to be visible in text-only mode and should be easily interpreted by text-to-speech engines as well as search engines. Rich, .Net-powered web sites and accessibility should not be mutually exclusive, and in fact could both benefit each other. I think it could be a more accessible choice to create these types of sites with a powerful accessibility library that the developer can control directly. By completely dividing content and display, we could have content actually organized sensibly, as opposed to the current system where the order from top to bottom in HTML tends to be exactly the order the page is displayed in graphically, CSS-laden or not. Often very bad for text to speech, hard to navigate without graphics. If we have an assertive program nicely dictating how to display the web page (rather, displaying the web page itself!), the accessibility ailments of today's web can be cured.
Andy:
Well, if you know how to play guitar... or just about any instrument for that matter, then you should already have the ability to use your fingers to do chords in time with music. And that's not a skill the average person has. It takes practice.
So someone who is a musician who plays any stringed, keyed, brass, or woodwind instrument... it would be reasonable to assume... would indeed have an advantage at Guitar Hero.
Though I don't know if this is actually the case or not.
"So why is Apple getting the "ohs"? Is it just the presentation or is there a difference in the audience?"
Steve's a much better speaker than Bill, and Apple's products are here now, while Microsoft is showing off stuff which is either not aimed at the consumer directly, or is at least ten years away as in the case of their phone gadget.