New story! Co-op! Make your own hero!

Warner Bros. has excitedly announced a "mature", action-RPG take on The Lord of the Rings for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Subtitled War in the North and due next year, this instalment pursues new storylines and ventures to unseen lands in the company of less familiar characters - although the more well-trodden areas of Middle-Earth are not forgotten.

There will be online co-op for up-to three people, and it seems as though characters will be created from scratch to write their own place in Tolkien's world. You'll get to pick from Dwarves, Elves and Race of Man, judging by the official website. Promised are "extensive" customisation and development, "expansive" co-op options, and upgradeable skills, weapons and abilities.

Read more...

Filed under: Action, RumorMonger, Fandom, Scripts, 20th Century Fox, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Twisted Pixel, the indie studio behind beloved downloadable titles The Maw and 'Splosion Man, revealed its next XBLA game at SXSW yesterday: Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley, a project it will co-publish with Microsoft Game Studios some time this year.

The game stars Captain Smiley, a hero that looks exactly like you'd expect with a name like that, and the talking star on his chest as they jump into different comic books (each with their own visual styles, plots, and settings) beating up and blasting thugs.

Twisted Pixel will demonstrate Comic Jumper at PAX East in Boston next week, according to sister site IndieGames.com, so definitely look for the company's booth to try this out if plan on attending!

Similar to Ashley Browning's video game minimalism images, this set of posters employs simple vector designs and familiar color palettes to create a close-up shot of a game character that almost immediately identifies the hero, all without showing his or her face.

Artist Justin Russo says he envisioned these images as he fell asleep one night, then put them together in Illustrator and Photoshop the next morning. Each poster also includes a quote from the subject character (which reminds me of another simplified video game poster set).

I've included several of Russo's images below, but you can see the full collection, which includes minimalist representations of Uncharted's Nathan Drake, Left 4 Dead's Louis, and several other game characters on his Behance profile.

Universal Music Group has debuted a new Guitar Hero-like music simulation game for the iPhone. Priced at $4.99 and available in the App Store right now, it’s called Six String [iTunes link].

The emphasis is on a more realistic and deeper guitar-playing experience than you get in other music games, though it’s still not quite like the real thing. The game comes with licensed UMG songs by artists like Bon Jovi and Tom Petty. It even includes a song by The Scorpions (“Raised on a Rock”) from an album that won’t hit shelves digital or otherwise until March 23.

There are two game modes: Practice Mode and Studio Mode. Practice mode gives you feedback on how accurate you are in hitting notes. Studio Mode turns off those hints and replaces them with status bars that measure your progress. If you make too many mistakes, you’re kicked out of the song.

We played the game for a while today, and our impressions are that it’s one of the better music games for the iPhone. It won’t be as fun as playing Rock Band on the Nintendo Wii with your entire family, but it’s a worthy distraction, and that’s what mobile games are supposed to be.

I played electric guitar in a Blues band professionally for two years. Thanks to that experience, I can tell you that while Six String is not too much like the real thing, it feels like a closer approximation than Guitar Hero. That’s despite the lack of a guitar peripheral — not that I’m complaining that there’s not one (you wouldn’t want to carry around a peripheral with your phone, obviously!).

Six String feels more like a real guitar because the mistakes you make are similar to the ones you’d make on a real guitar — with one hand, anyway. The game simulates the strumming and picking hand and has you using the touchscreen to either strum, tap, or hold each individual string (or a group if strings) in correct time as the notes come up. It works well and it feels a little bit like you’re actually playing music when you’re getting it right.

The game also prompts you with chord changes on harder difficulty levels, but you perform them by tapping with the same fingers you use to play the strings. If you miss notes or chord changes, the music is digitally altered to sound a bit off. It doesn’t sound very realistic, but you can tell what you’re doing wrong. As with Guitar Hero, the skills of real guitar players won’t translate here or vice versa. But that’s not really the point, because it’s a fun game to play.

When you complete a song, you’re given detailed stats and feedback. You can share them with friends through the online service described below.

The game comes with six songs: Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name,” Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream,” Fall Out Boy’s “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs,” Peter Frampton’s “Show Me The Way” and Orianthi’s “According To You.” If you tire of those, you can buy more in the included music store. Each new track costs $0.99. If you’d like, you can buy the same songs on iTunes from within the app. You can also watch music videos or download ring tones.

Six String connects to a social gaming service called Plus+. You can share your top scores, compete for a spot on the leader boards, and check on any friend’s status. UMG put some Twitter and Facebook integration in the mix, too. It’s similar to the Feint network that’s used by several other iPhone games out there.

Do you have a favorite music game for the iPhone? Head down to the comments below to fill us and the other readers in!

Tags: App, apple, apple app store, guitar, iphone, Mobile 2.0, music, six string, six strings, umg, universal music group, video games

HTC just hit us up with an official response to Apple’s patent lawsuit filed against them. In short, HTC is sticking up for themselves, naming the innovations they’ve been to market with, and listing some of the industry-wide reckognition they’ve received. Look, we’re not arguing for either side, like whether Apple is wrong for filing suit for whatever reason, or whether HTC actually did violate some of Apple’s patents, but this press release is more of a slight of hand movement than an actual response. Though they do say pretty clearly that they will defend themselves. What do you think? It’s after the break…

Seattle – March 17, 2010 – HTC Corporation today outlined its disagreement with Apple’s legal actions and reiterated its commitment to creating a portfolio of innovative smartphones that gives consumers a variety of choices. Founded in 1997 with a passion for innovation and a vision for how smartphones would change people’s lives, HTC has continually driven this vision by consistently introducing award-winning smartphones with U.S. mobile operators.

“HTC disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible,” said Peter Chou, chief executive officer, HTC Corporation. “From day one, HTC has focused on creating cutting-edge innovations that deliver unique value for people looking for a smartphone. In 1999 we started designing the XDA

The O2 XDA by HTC was the first 3.5-inch color touch screen smartphone in the world in 2002. and T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition The T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition by HTC was the first 3.5-inch color touch screen smartphone in the United States in 2002., our first touch-screen smartphones, and they both shipped in 2002 with more than 50 additional HTC smartphone models shipping since then.”

The industry has recognized HTC’s contributions through a variety of awards including Fast Company’s 2010 Top 50 Most Innovative Companies and MIT Technology Review’s 2010 50 Most Innovative Companies. The GSMA also recently awarded the HTC Hero as the “Best Phone of 2009.” Some of HTC’s technology firsts include:

• First Windows PDA (1998)

• First Windows Phone (June 2002)

• First 3G CDMA EVDO smartphone (October 2005)

• First gesture-based smartphone (June 2007)

• First Google Android smartphone (October 2008)

• First 4G WIMAX smartphone (November 2008)

In 2009, HTC launched its branded user experience, HTC Sense. HTC Sense is focused on putting people at the center by making phones work in a more simple and natural way. This experience was fundamentally based on listening and observing how people live and communicate.

“HTC has always taken a partnership-oriented, collaborative approach to business. This has led to long-standing strategic partnerships with the top software, Internet and wireless technology companies in the industry as well as the top U.S., European and Asian mobile operators,” said Jason Mackenzie, vice president of HTC America. “It is through these relationships that we have been able to deliver the world’s most diverse series of smartphones to an even more diverse group of people around the world, recognizing that customers have very different needs.”

For more information on HTC’s history of innovation, please visit: www.htc.com/history.

In a recent conversation here at ReadWriteStart we were talking about what readers want most. Beyond stories about where the latest funding opportunities are found, and beyond wanting to know what startups are doing that works, we know that sometimes our startup readers just want some simple practical advice.

Towards that end we've posted many a list. And now it's time for a review. Here are six of our best lists in abbreviated form. From how not to kill your startup, to public speaking, to funders to follow, we at ReadWriteStart want to help. If you have ideas for future lists, please post 'em as comments below.

Sponsor

6 Approaches to Your Company Blog

• The Operations Blog
• The Veteran / Inspirational Blog
• The Prediction Blog
• The Research Blog
• The Community / Advocate Blog
• The Coolhunter Blog

Kevin Rose's 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs

• Just Build It
• Iterate
• Hire Your Boss
• Demand Excellence
• Raising Money
• Hack the Press
• Invest in Advisors
• Connect With the Community
• Leverage Your User Base to Spread the Word
• Analyze Your Traffic

6 Great Approaches to Public Speaking

• How Not to Suck at a Group Presentation LA-based investor Mark Suster
• Guy Kawasaki wrote this rule for PowerPoint
• How to Present While People are Twittering: Presentation trainer Olivia Mitchell
• Uncovering Steve Jobs' Presentation Secrets: Business Week columnist Carmine Gallo
• The Lessig Method: :Lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig
• Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces

10 Principles For Not Killing Your Startup

• This one's obvious - watch your cash flow.
• Spot a real problem and concentrate your efforts on solving it.
• Identify your target market(s) and collect market feedback early on.
• Design and develop a minimum viable solution as fast as possible.
• Surround yourself with dedicated, effective people.
• Read Crossing the Chasm. Appreciate the difference between early adopters and mainstream.
• Consider other sources of competitive power than just technological sophistication.
• Have a plan for cutting through market noise.
• Invest time in selecting and testing a business model.
• Be creative and resourceful in meeting your objectives.

5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice

• BOTH SIDES OF THE TABLE @msuster
• PAULGRAHAM.COM
• A VC, @fredwilson
• VENTURE HACKS, @venturehacks
• VENTURE BLOG, @ventureblog

10 Things to Be Clear About Before You Start a Company

• Is this your first venture?
• Are you really an entrepreneur?
• Does your venture involve something you understand really well?
• Can your mother understand the value proposition?
• Can you see the right wave?
• What does your startup want to be when it grows up?
• Starting a company is hard and filled with uncertainty.
• Get a partner or fly solo?
• Would you refuse a well-paying job to do this?
• Can you raise appropriate financing?

Photo by Wiki Commons.

Why isn't there an ongoing about a person in the French Foreign Legion? That would rock. Dang, I hope no one steals that from me before I can pitch it to Vertigo!

The second volume of Chris Schweizer's Crogan Adventures is out! It's called Crogan's March, it's published by Oni Press, and it costs $14.95. That's fifteen bucks for over 200 pages of early twentieth-century Foreign Legion action! How can you resist???

Well, you shouldn't resist. Much like the first volume, Crogan's Vengeance, the latest is pretty danged excellent. It's a bit darker than the first, which is, as a pirate tale, more swashbuckling. In this book, Schweizer tackles some more pertinent issues to current events, as the debate throughout the book is whether the French are doing any actual good in north Africa. It's nice that in what is something that teenagers can read (the book is "rated" for people 13 and up), we get some interesting geopolitical debate. It's far more interesting than we usually get in comics, I'll tell you that much!

The set-up of the book is the same as the first, as will probably remain for the series. In the present, Dr. Crogan discovers his sons, Cory and Eric, doing something that requires a life lesson. In this case, Eric (the older brother) is trying to tell Cory what he can do with his money, because his parents told him he needed to "watch out for him." Cory claims he can make his own decisions, while Eric disagrees. Dr. Crogan tells them that this idea - whether someone can take away someone else's choices - has a long history, especially with regard to colonialism. Schweizer's conceit in this series is that the Crogan family has an impossibly impressive pedigree - we see the family tree at the beginning of each book, and it's full of stereotypical "action" heroes, from "Catfoot" Crogan the pirate to a Japanese ninja (yes, really) to a Wild West gunfighter to a diamond miner to a secret agent to Peter Crogan, the hero of this book. And they all live stories that help teach life lessons! Fancy that! Dr. Crogan explains to his sons that the French Foreign Legion was a group of soldiers from different countries (which isn't totally true, as many French natives fought in it) who fought for France, always in colonial adventures (Dr. Crogan uses the past tense, but the Foreign Legion still exists). In 1912, Peter Crogan was in the Legion, stationed in north Africa. And so the adventure begins!

Schweizer acknowledges the debt to Percival Christopher Wren, who wrote Beau Geste and set the standard for fiction about the Legion, and in many ways, this book is extremely old school (I've never read Beau Geste, so I can't say it's like that), with plenty of action and adventure and soldiers awaggering about the Algerian desert. There's a martinet sergeant, a dashing, heroic major, mysterious raiders who swarm out of the hills and besiege a fort, and a desperate trek through the mountains to safety. If you enjoy action, you'll love this. But Schweizer adds plenty of depth to the book, too. The martinet sergeant is certainly tough, but he also understands a great deal about what the Legion is doing in Africa. Captain Roitelet is a hero to the men, but when he first shows up, he has been demoted (from major to captain) for unknown reasons (but it's implied it's because he's too "heroic" for the stodgy officer corps). Peter Crogan is more thoughtful than the rest of the men, but even he admires Roitelet and doesn't understand why Sergeant Ludlow isn't besotted with him. Ludlow explains himself and his objections to Roitelet, and then Roitelet himself tells Crogan his philosophy. It's the principle that Dr. Crogan and his kids were debating at the beginning of the book: Ludlow believes that the rights of the French Revolution - "liberty, equality, fraternity" - shouldn't be exclusive to France, and the common people who live in slavery in north Africa deserve a chance for freedom. Roitelet, on the other hand, believes they're nothing but savages who should be thankful that France is paying them any attention. What's interesting about this argument is that while Ludlow is more enlightened than Roitelet, he still doesn't believe the natives are capable of gaining freedom on their own. Is he any better than Roitelet?

Later on, when Crogan gets separated from the rest of his unit, he ends up in the mountains helping a bunch of native refugees get to the main French fort. One of the natives, an old woman, argues with him constantly about the French presence in north Africa. It's a fascinating argument, and it keeps getting interrupted by events, where the two often find common ground. Schweizer never beats us over the head with it, and just because the old woman has her moments doesn't mean she's going to form a different opinion of Crogan or the French. It's impressive how Schweizer manages to bring up his points while the group moves through dark caves in which lurk dangerous things. The sequence remains tense even as the two characters argue political and cultural points.

Crogan's March is more downbeat than the first book, possibly because Schweizer is dealing with things that are still relevant today. Piracy might still be around, but the idea of colonialism remains a difficult point of contention among colonialists and the colonized. Schweizer does an excellent job of giving us rip-roaring action, but there's always an undercurrent of tragedy (mainly because it's often tragic) that leads us closer and closer to a conclusion that gives us no easy answers. Dr. Crogan ends his tale in a wonderful spot, explaining exactly why he do so but also making sure the readers understand the futility of war without being graphic about it. It's really a tremendous ending to a great book.

Schweizer's the kind of artist who, on the surface, looks a bit cartoony and therefore perhaps lacking in "realistic" details. However, he blends his exaggerated character features with wonderful attention to detail. Check out, for instance, our first glimpse of Tafizet:

We get this throughout the book. The battle scenes are frantic, the scenes in the cave are claustrophobic, and the characters, while they are a bit exaggerated, are still memorably drawn. Each panel gives us plenty of visual information, even the ones that are all black (and there are a few). Schweizer is very good. You know it's true!

If you missed Crogan's Vengeance, you should probably rectify that right away. However, if pirating doesn't sound like your thing but legionairing does, you should definitely check this out. You don't need to have read the first volume, and it's quite excellent.

Face aux ventes en ligne qui ne suffisent pas à compenser la chute des ventes de CD, les maisons de disques sont contraintes à diversifier leurs activités et de se concentrer sur ce qui apporte à leur catalogue une valeur ajoutée par rapport aux fichiers MP3 qu'elles espèraient vendre comme des kilos de pommes de terre. Dans cet esprit, Universal Music Group a sorti mercredi un nouveau jeu pour iPhone et iPod Touch (a priori non disponible sur l'App Store français), Six-String, qui surfe sur la vague des jeux musicaux lancée par Guitar Hero. Le phénomène attire déjà les majors depuis plusieurs années, puisqu'elles y voient enfin le moyen de vendre leurs chansons dans un environnement sécurisé (comprenez sans que les titres soient facilement copiables), à un prix qu'elles jugent convenables.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.

[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]

It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to care.

Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5."

"When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right -- our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a particular set of features. Done right, HTML 5 applications will feel more like real apps than Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."

Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+ libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries that IE should be using now natively.

Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features, not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it instead.

But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.

For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple (apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:

"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms difference."

When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard. But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today, Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of one language, the fog would be lifted:

"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers. That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8. Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."

As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same markup.

The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on 7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8.

"Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers across the board.

Meanwhile, the IE9 preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3 standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox, by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?

"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."

Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU... Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU

The architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right, was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago.

"In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there. And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a slower interpreter."

Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse, and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code -- 100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions (for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under 30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.

Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background process:

"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."

HTML 5 in large print, SVG in small print

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch playing catch-up with Chrome.

Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first time, directly and openly supporting SVG.

It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9 browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.

HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG. Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.

Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance, the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.

Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its special site devoted to the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.

The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is building a Web applications platform. Finally.

U.S. wireless provider Sprint and virtual mobile device company DeviceAnywhere have teamed up to offer a unique service to Sprint wireless subscribers. The joint venture is allowing users to walk through phone tutorials, pre or post-sale, by clicking through a virtual representation of the phone’s OS while receiving feedback. The implementation isn’t perfect, for instance power users can’t go exploring a phone’s OS as the interactions are rigidly guided, but the tutorials provide better customer experience than their all-text or text-aided-by-screen-shot counterparts. The virtual tutorials are currently available for 34 phones — we’ve been messing around with the HTC Hero and Touch Pro 2 — and can be found at sprint.com/learn.

[Via mocoNews.net]

Read

by John Lees (check out John's column, Comic Book Club, at ProjectFanboy here)

Okay, so who reads Scalped? For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Scalped is a sprawling crime drama by writer Jason Aaron and (for the most part) artist R.M. Guera, published by DC Comics’ celebrated Vertigo imprint. Set on the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation in South Dakota, it tells the story of Dashiell Bad Horse, a prodigal son returning to his childhood home and falling under the sway of community leader turned gangster Chief Red Crow. The comic has been widely met with critical acclaim, not least from here at Comic Book Resources. As well as regularly reviewing the book, CBR has prominently featured Scalped right here on the Comics Should Be Good blog. The comic is a constant fixture on What I Bought by Greg Burgas, who offers plenty of insightful commentary on the developing narrative. Brian Cronin, meanwhile, devoted an entire week of 2009’s Year of Cool Comic Book Moments to Scalped. CBR ranked the series at #5 in its Best of 2009 list. Looking beyond this site, Jerome Maida of the Philadelphia Daily News not only ranked Scalped as the best comic of 2009, but as one of the greatest comics of all time.

But the response to the book has not been universally positive. Some detractors have accused the comic of
perpetuating negative Native American stereotypes, even going so far as to condemn those who praise Scalped as part of the problem. As readers of Scalped, are we guilty of promoting racism? Well first, I would suggest arguing on these lines takes us up a blind alley where we don’t look too closely into the facts and simply accept that Scalped and its author are racist, knowingly or otherwise. So I am going to take things back a notch, and ask: is Scalped really racist?

To answer this question, we need to take a closer look at Scalped, and see how the comic itself holds up against such accusations. The most common complaint is the idea that the comic portrays all Native Americans as criminals and lowlifes. While yes, there are violent characters in Scalped and many laws are broken, this is a crime story, and is therefore by its very definition going to focus on criminals. But it should also be noted that thoroughly decent, law-abiding Native characters such as Granny Poor Bear and Franklin Falls Down challenge the notion that the book presents all Indians as scum, while the very worst figures in the book, those most devoid of redeeming qualities – such as psychotic killer Diesel or the amoral, vindictive FBI agent Nitz – are white.

One line of criticism I have encountered demanded more balance, that for every Native American engaging in crime or wallowing in drunken despair we should see another doing good for the local community or enjoying a happy and contented life on The Rez. This to me seemed like an odd request, not only because it would be utterly incongruent with the somber tone established in this particular comic, but because it clashes with the very dynamics of the genre as a whole. Should a comedy have balance by having half its content be harrowing drama? Should a horror have balance with extended sequences devoid of any suspense or peril? Why should the crime genre not be too much about crime? Perhaps, as I shall touch on later, it is more to do with the color of the characters committing the crimes.

I think part of the problem could be that much of this criticism is based on the first few issues of Scalped, or on the first graphic novel collecting the series: Indian Country. In these early chapters, the focus seems to be less on character than action, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say the characters are presented as racial stereotypes, one could see them as noir archetypes: the outsider, the gangster, the wise old drunk, the femme fatale. While there were some glimpses of the depth that was to come – take, for example, the series of near-misses and miscommunications that prevent Gina Bad Horse from getting in touch with her son in issue #4, which in the next issue are given tragic significance - in its beginning, the series felt more like a conventional crime thriller, well told. I’d argue that it was with the collection of issues contained in the second graphic novel, Casino Boogie, that Jason Aaron really began to stretch his wings and the book’s unique voice was truly established. From this point on, the intricate experimentation with time and chronological structure made Scalped less about constant action than dwelling on a single moment, reflecting on it from different perspectives and examining its causes and consequences. Characterization came to the forefront, and those archetypes began to get a lot more complicated, turning into nuanced, multi-faceted individuals. As a result, critiques based solely on the first handful of issues don’t just seem outdated, but rather it’s like they miss the point of Scalped entirely, almost as if they were talking about a different comic.

As an example of this, one character that has been a target of particular scorn is Lincoln Red Crow. Based on his first appearance in the first issue, it might be easy to dismiss him as a one-note caricature, just a typical gangster heavy. In his first appearance, he has just finished scalping some unknown victim, so it is perhaps understandable to assume the character is to become a stereotypical Indian villain. But as the series develops, Red Crow evolves into a fascinating, tragic figure. Red Crow’s soul has been steadily eroded by the moral compromises and Faustian pacts he has made to open his casino. Driven by a desire to bring prosperity to the struggling Oglala Lakota tribe, this casino for him represents these lifelong dreams becoming a reality.

After decades of fighting to secure his people’s future, he has succeeded, but at the cost of becoming the very thing he hates the most. “You done spent too long playin’ the part a’ the poor, old pissed-off ‘skin who wouldn’t be caught dead workin’ for the man,” sneers one associate, “Cause now you are the man, and you don’t know what the hell to do with yourself.”

But still, some would continue to disregard this complexity, concluding that the book’s readers will only view him as a “savage Indian” or a “greedy Indian”. Not only is this an inaccurate appraisal of Red Crow’s story – classic themes like “the loss of idealism” and “power corrupts” are universal, not exclusively Indian - but it severely underestimates the intelligence and morality of the comic’s readers, assuming they must all be as racist as its author is imagined to be. What is the more likely scenario? That deep down, all readers of Scalped secretly hate Indians, and they were attracted to a comic with Native criminals through an insatiable desire to validate their own bigotry? Or that readers of Scalped just happen to like strong storytelling and compelling characters?

Red Crow is a mass of contradictions, with Aaron encouraging the reader to alternatively view him as a tragic hero, a monster, an optimist, a tyrant, a loving father, an abusive father, a mentor, a traitor, courageous, cowardly, spiritual, violent, a man on a downward spiral of despair. But these racially-charged arguments against the book can only see Red Crow as an Indian, with all these other aspects of his character becoming secondary, simply ways of commenting on him as an Indian. In this line of thought, it seems a white criminal can be a fully-fledged character in his own right, but an Indian criminal must be seen as a representation of all Indians. Who then, out of Aaron and his detractors, is more racially progressive?

Here is a scene featuring Red Crow from the conclusion of a 2009 storyline...

It has been said that the reader generates just as much meaning from a text as a writer does, and as such no matter how fair and nuanced writers become in their depictions of Natives, the possibility of someone (over)reading a subversive racist subtext into everything will always remain. I believe Scalped to be the victim of what I call the stereotype that wasn’t there. By this, I mean that it is easy to assert that a creator is racist, but it is more difficult for said creator to conclusively prove that they’re not, meaning a piece of fiction can be burdened with a vague stigma of racism even without any substantial evidence to actually confirm what, with Scalped, too often amounts to overreaching assertions built on skewed interpretations.

Sadly, this mindset only hinders the representation of Natives (and other minorities) in fiction. It can be a vicious cycle, with writers reluctant to tackle minority-based stories for fear of being perceived as racist and so contributing to the underrepresentation of these minorities in fiction. And when a minority character does see the light of day, are they to be portrayed in a manner more “sensitive” (some would say patronizing) than their white counterparts, so as not to offend anyone? What a regressive view of minority characters, where their loftiest aspiration should be to not be offensive! Some critiques go so far as to suggest we should only allow white characters to be featured in crime stories, to be sure no one can equate any minority to criminality. I would say this is a dangerous precedent to be setting in the name of “equality”. It seems like backwards logic to me, that because there aren’t enough minority-focused stories out there, we should further limit them by branding certain genres out-of-bounds for anything but white characters. Isn’t it a better solution to stop viewing characters as “white criminals” or “Indian criminals”, to look past their color for more substantial ways of defining them?

With Scalped, Jason Aaron demonstrates that a Native American character can be just as flawed and damaged as a white character. Far from being racist, I would suggest that is a necessary step towards that sought-after equality.

One could argue that Scalped is too violent, too foul-mouthed, too unrelentingly bleak and depressing. These are all complaints based on what is right there on the page, ready to be received by its audience in one way or another. Accusing the book of racism, however, is dependent on leaps of logic and speculation on both the writer’s intention and the response of other readers that are insulting to both writer and reader alike. For those yet to read the book, my recommendation would be to check out Scalped for yourself – there are currently five graphic novel collections available – and make up your own mind about it. But please, judge it on its merits as a crime story or a character drama rather than on its stereotypes or lack thereof, because Scalped is so much more than just an “Indian comic”.