Notes for a sci-fi story.
Inspired by If I Am Ever Head Of An Alien Monitoring Agency.
In the deep of night, what can only be described as a crystalline starship appears in orbit around Earth. A task force is assembled; these are our protagonists. Possible archetypes: the spunky leader, the hot-librarian scientist, the head of the rich defense contractor company, the military hothead.
The crystalline ship seems intelligent, but all attempts to discern how it communicates fail. Suddenly, it enters geostationary orbit over a town. It extends a “crystalline arm” (the crystal growing like an extremely accelerated version of coral), then covers the entire town. When emergency response arrives, they find people crushed and/or partially/fully embedded in crystal lumps spread everywhere on the town, houses and infrastructure in ruins. Everyone is dead. The military hothead needs a reason to hate the aliens; possible story:
- the town had a military base near it. Emergency response was from the base; the commander of the same saw his family destroyed by the crystal invasion. The military hothead gets wind of this, promises to “get the bastards”.
As the world starts an arms race, suddenly: most of the dead people embedded in crystal are suddenly released. They flail around, move like marionettes. Some twist horribly, but some manage to get upright. The crystal embedded deeply inside them, they are dead, but came back, “possessed” by the embedding — an individual alien, as far as individuals go in their midst. The whole thing was only their attempt to communicate: they tried to do so directly with the people of the town, the way they know best, by physically intermingling with their “listener” and exchanging electrical impulses directly. That, uh, didn’t fly so well with the locals. But now, they have found out they can basically “keep the brain and body running” on the corpses by stimulating it with those same impulses, providing a way for them to finally communicate with the humans…
Conflicts:
• Communication. Lack of common ground. (However, possessed humans – though driven by the aliens — retain some of their in-life personalities, since it’s essentially their brain doing all the walking and the talking and all. Are they different people? Are they the same? Do the aliens even have the concept of ‘people’? How much can they ‘read’ and ‘understand’ of their host’s mind — is it just stimulation, keeping the original personality running by preserving the brain? Do they understand what the ‘feel’, the thoughts? Are the former corpses even intelligible at first?)
• Subconflict: Integration. (Do the possessed humans go back into society? How? How much do they fit?)
• Mistrust. (What is the larger ship still doing above the city? The rich dude from the defense contractor may examine some of the ‘inert’ crystal in the town and find out it’s basically a natural, reproducing, ultra-efficient microprocessor — and may convince the military hothead to attack them in order to harvest the bodies of the enemy as riches…)
• Agreement. (How do the protagonists affect human-alien relationships? Do they agree? Do they keep secrets from one another? How much power do they have? Who do they report to?)
Posted via email from ∞: whispers
Have I ever mentioned I love webOS?
Don’t hold your breath — this is going to take a while.
Leave the first comment ▶ – Sent from my Palm Pre
The essence of good experiences.
I’m not a UI expert, but I kinda play one on TV, so I feel compelled to share a thing I found while pursing one of my other hobbies (comic books! ♥). I think you’ll find a number of interesting parallels with the job of the user experience designer.
Context: our impulsive, foolish protagonist wants to become a chef in a very fancy Italian restaurant, but he’s told he has to work as a waiter for a year before he’s let into the kitchen. He’s awful at it, so he asks a colleague to show him places where he can learn about serving tables just right. They’ve just been at a place with awful service, and now they’re trying another place she knows…
http://www.mangafox.com/manga/bambino/v04/c036/7.html
Read it all.
Leave the first comment ▶ On Cory Doctorow’s latest iPad tirade.
A few thoughts on Cory Doctorow’s piece on Publisher’s Weekly.
Point one: Apple never said anything about the aims of its FairPlay DRM. Saying that:
If the idea of adding this DRM to the iPad is to protect the copyrights of the software authors, we can already declare the system an abject failure—independent developers cracked the system within 24 hours after the first iPad shipped, a very poor showing even in the technically absurd realm of DRM. Code-signing has also completely failed for iPhones, by the way, on which anyone who wants to run an unauthorized app can pretty easily “jailbreak” the phone and load one up.
assumes that somebody ever said it was to protect purchases, which nobody did (in point of fact, Apple as far as I know said nothing publicly about the FairPlay DRM except when it was introduced and when it was removed from music — a quick search of apple.com reveals that other than the Store de-DRMifying announce, there’s no other archived official statement from Apple on the subject). Of freaking course it’s there to protect Apple’s business, a thing it does remarkably well. Additionally:
- The “DRM-breaking” on iPad and jailbreaking are one and the same thing.
- Anecdotal numbers say that jailbreakers are less than ten percent of the installed base (I can’t find the relevant Mobclix/Flurry newsletter link with numbers they observed).
That means that no one can truly compete with Apple to offer better iStores, or apps, with better terms that are more publisher- and reader-friendly.
Legally, yes. This hasn’t stopped Cydia Store, though.
Some early reviews have compared the iPad to a TV, a more passive medium in contrast to the interactive PC.
Most good reviews compared it to a game console, which is what it is, at least architecturally.
You know, those good, simple-user-oriented devices with crippling DRM where no one but the publisher can run software. Sounds familiar?
Just like a game console, so long as the iPad works like it does, it cannot replace a computer. In fact you need a real computer to use it: until activated by one, an iPad is a useless kilogram of metal, glass, chips and a battery. Additionally, many things — such as transferring previously owned music and videos, off-Store podcasts, device backup — require a computer. So acting like this thing will replace computers — even a minority of them — is pretty much laughable at the moment. (It becomes much more scary if this becomes the prevalent model of computing, but I don’t think it will, and I will fight such an evolution with all I have at my disposal, tooth and nail.)
But imagine how much more precarious things would be if Wal-Mart sold bookcases that were programmed to do what the iPad and Kindle do—refuse to hold books bought in other stores
Factually incorrect. iPad can import ePub books in its built-in reader, and supports third-party readers. I concede neither is as elegant as iBookstore (the first one requires a computer to sync books from, and the second one either requires Apple to get a 30% cut via In-App Purchase or you to operate a web-based store).
Having too much of your business subject to the whim of a single retailer who is out for its own interests is a scary and precarious thing
That publisher may choose to not do business with Apple. Doesn’t seem like a bad deal at the moment, since Apple only seems to have a sliver of the e-book distribution market at the moment.
Apple has also announced a ban on the use of “middleware” programming environments that let you develop simultaneously for multiple platforms, like Google’s Android OS, the Nintendo WiiWare marketplace, and so on.
Apple did not announce it; developers broke their non-disclosure agreements to protest against it. The contract NASA produced is not the one we’re all currently subject to.
Apple will tell you that it needs its DRM lock-in to preserve the iPad’s “elegance.”
Again, Apple has released no statement on what it intends to do with FairPlay in the last years. Pundits will say that. But pundits are not Apple.
That may be true, but not if developers want their app to access the iPad’s sensors that allow you to control it by moving it around and making noises
It’s true that not all sensors are available to HTML5 apps. But again this statement is at least partially incorrect: iPhone OS 3.2 (for iPad) introduces support for playing media items without leaving the page, allowing apps that use the <audio> tag — the preferred non-Flash way to do so — to play sounds. So again not entirely correct.
or to the payment system that allows apps to be bought and sold with a single click
OMG! Apple won’t let you use their payment infrastructure if you don’t sell through them. SHOCK!
write an app and stick a “buy in one click with Google Checkout” button on the screen. Watch how long it takes for Apple to reject it.
Apple has their own infrastructure for use in apps. Additionally, apps are allowed in the store that take payments, if the payment is done outside the app (like the eBay and — oh! — Kindle apps. OMG A RIVAL BOOKSTORE!). Not 100% good, of course.
There’s an easy way to change this, of course. Just tell Apple it can’t license your copyrights—that is, your books—unless the company gives you the freedom to give your readers the freedom to take their products with them to any vendor’s system
Historically, Apple has responded to ultimatums with resounding “eh”s and shrugs. Asking a publisher to do so is the same as asking them not to do business with Apple, effectively.
This is exactly what I’ve done. I won’t sell my e-books in any store that locks my users into a vendor’s platform.
That is commendable; it’s putting his money where his mouth is. Note that however it’s not true that no one will be able to read Cory’s books on iPad, since a quick drag of their .epub version in iTunes and a sync will be more than enough to fix that. And an e-book is one of the things HTML5 will do commendably well.
But finally, the title:
“Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship?”
Yes, if you do not live there. And thankfully Apple does not force anyone to stay.
One comment so far, add another ▶A plan? Where we’re going, we don’t need plans!
Since the ∞labs business tactic seems to have solidified somehow, I think it’d be nice to spell it out so that everyone can see it in one place and/or I can refer people to it.
So.
- As soon as humanly possible: Afloat 2.2.1. Still no support for saving per-window/per-app preferences! Just small bugfixes.
- Within the first half of April: Mover Connect for Mac and Mover updates to support it. Mover Store.
- Within the second half of April: pilot program for ∞labs’s Softcover. I think you will like what you’ll see.
- Within May, hopefully: Mover for iPad. And an iPad. I refuse to ship it before I can test it thoroughly on actual hardware. Since I live in the slightly less fortunate part of the world—
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
WHY, STEVE, WHY DID YOU HAVE TO LEAVE US HANGING? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I WANT ONE I WANT ONE I WANT ONE
- —ahem, since I live in Italy, we’re not getting us some ‘Pads ’til the end of April, so the EU launch is the absolute minimum date for Mover for iPad. Just so that you know.
- After that, explicitly no plans until the end of the summer. Because I have a master’s degree to get.
That’s it. That’s the plan. They say no plan ever survives the battlefield; I hope this one doesn’t get too disfigured before it bears fruit.
Thoughts on Mover.
Things you might not like, which we get outta the way first.
– Most of you are mighty fine with paying for moving stuff to/from a computer. Phew! That’s what I was planning (see below).
- Mover+’s price is NOT going down. No no. Things you might like:
- Mover Lite is not losing on ounce of functionality. All it does it will continue to do for free; and more.
- New features will percolate down from + to Lite as time goes on. Not all of them will be free (but some will).
- Mover+ as I see it is a lifetime subscription to Mover 3.0 updates (and possibly even 4.0; we’ll see). The current plan is as follows:
APRIL
- Mover Connect for Mac, free
- Mover+ 3.2, free to Mover+ 3 customers, $1.99 to new users, contains Connect support, documents and SwapKit 1.2.
- Mover Lite 3.2, free, gets video transfer.
- A new Extras pane in Mover Lite will allow you to get Connect and docs support for just $0.99.
(“Documents” means support for all formats viewable in Mail and Safari: PDF, RTF, Office and iWork documents.) You can preview them straight from Mover.
Pros: Sustainable income!
Cons: Customer bewilderment at paid feature in Lite, Lite-to-+ users not getting a discount (Apple won’t let me
), confusion on Connect.
PLAN SUBJECT TO CHANGE. JUNE
- iPad. Free for + and Lite.
- Mover+ price might raise.
- iPad support may be paid to Lite customers ($0.99).
PLAN SUBJECT TO CHANGE. ∞
2 comments so far, add yours ▶ - Mover+’s price is NOT going down. No no. Things you might like:
- Mover Lite is not losing on ounce of functionality. All it does it will continue to do for free; and more.
- New features will percolate down from + to Lite as time goes on. Not all of them will be free (but some will).
- Mover+ as I see it is a lifetime subscription to Mover 3.0 updates (and possibly even 4.0; we’ll see). The current plan is as follows:
APRIL
- Mover Connect for Mac, free
- Mover+ 3.2, free to Mover+ 3 customers, $1.99 to new users, contains Connect support, documents and SwapKit 1.2.
- Mover Lite 3.2, free, gets video transfer.
- A new Extras pane in Mover Lite will allow you to get Connect and docs support for just $0.99.
(“Documents” means support for all formats viewable in Mail and Safari: PDF, RTF, Office and iWork documents.) You can preview them straight from Mover.
Pros: Sustainable income!
Cons: Customer bewilderment at paid feature in Lite, Lite-to-+ users not getting a discount (Apple won’t let me
), confusion on Connect. PLAN SUBJECT TO CHANGE. JUNE
- iPad. Free for + and Lite.
- Mover+ price might raise.
- iPad support may be paid to Lite customers ($0.99).
PLAN SUBJECT TO CHANGE. ∞
Hey, looks like you liked it!
Runner-up for the “Best Use of Bluetooth” category: http://bestappever.com/awards/2009/winner/btap.
Thanks to everyone who voted us!
SwapKit now shipping in an App Store app.
I want SwapKit to succeed.
I’m ready to put my money where my mouth is. Today, Mover 3.1 has hit the App Store; this has a few nice effects:• Show that SwapKit passes review;
• Give a SwapKit-enabled app to potentially millions of users (the Lite version of Mover has more than 1.8 million users, and more than five thousand daily uses on average).
• Give all developers a SwapKit application to test against, both for sending and receiving.
• The Lite version avows its item kind limits for the benefit of SwapKit apps. This means that you can send stuff to the Lite version just as you do for the Plus version, without having to worry. Want it? There, free: http://infinite-labs.net/mover/download — and for some notes on Mover+SwapKit use, see also http://infinite-labs.net/swapkit/mover.html. ∞
