Having grown up around dogs, and now having two cats, I think a lot of people underestimate a cats intelligence because the cat is only interested in pleasing itself. I personally have cats who have figured out how simple mechanical devices like doors and drawers operate, and they have also figured out that I dislike them opening certain doors and drawers and they will get squirted by a spray bottle if they try (so they wait until I am asleep or away to misbehave).
Now, I'm not saying they're super smart creatures but they certainly have decent problem solving skills and an understanding of consequences at a fairly high level.
Beyond this I have seen my cats talk to each other using the same "phrase" to mean similar things in similar situations; and I'm curious whether the slight difference in meaning might actually be represented in a slight difference in the sound that is beyond my ability to hear. To explain what I mean, my cats may a "Birup" noise that seems to mean "Chase me" or "I'm Chasing You" when they play together.
Wouldn't the real benefit be that you wouldn't have to create two separate code-bases to create an application that both supported GPU optimization and could run naively on any system?
I've had a couple of ideas in my life that were very similar to several very successful start-ups at a similar point in time as their founders did (as I imagine several hundred thousand people did) and I have learned that most of the world is quick to find fault with original ideas and offers little advice on how to overcome those problems.
My suggestion would be to refine your idea into the simplest form possible and create a prototype to show to people, and then use their feedback to improve your idea. Realistically, if your idea is too complicated to to create a prototype it is probably too complicated for you to be successful with anyways...
One thing I think is lost on a lot of people is that programming is much more of a "Craft" then a simple skill that can be picked up; and the predominant factor in whether someone becomes a good programmer or not is whether they receive good guidance, mentor-ship and training when they first start programming in a corporate environment. I have seen far too many organizations who believe they're saving money by not hiring senior developers, and by not training their staff in the technologies they're working with; but (in the long run) it costs them more money in the long run to fix their mistakes, and they lose a lot of respect of their clients because of their poor product.
I think why E3 is changing back is because, although the new format was better for doing business, E3 was rapidly becomming an unimportant event for publishers because it was losing the attention of gamers. For years E3 has been more about building hype than it was about getting stock into retail outlets, and (with the growing popularity of blogs) the average stock-boy was starting to have a greater influence on pre-launch excitment for a game then gaming magazines were.
Its actually amazing that people don't understand the difference in Canadian politics and American politics:
Back in the day the Reform party represented similar views as more moderate/liberal Republicans The Conservative party of today represents similar views as more moderate/conservative Democrats The Liberal party of today represents similar views as the core of the Democrats The NDP party of today represents similar views as the extreme elements of the Democrats
Certainly, changing the copyright laws in Canada by the Conservative party is a (generally) bad thing but it is a change that would probably be made regardless of who was in power. The unfortunate thing is that lobby groups have a lot of power in every government, few politicians understand the consequences of legislation like this, and few pieces of legislation allow a free vote.
You may not care whether your current graphics card is obsolete after 3 years today but, with the combination of how powerful GPUs have become and the diminishing returns on further investment in graphics techonogy, in the near future your GPU will be good for much longer than 3 years. I'm not saying that this will happen tomorow, but 3D graphics have come a long way since One Must Fall and Doom, and I suspect that within 5 to 10 years we will have hit a point where even the most insane graphics whore won't care anymore.
I think it is entirely appropriate to investigate a company when large ammounts of personal information ends up being 'stolen'... If it turns out that the company did not take the necessary steps to protect people's personal information they should face some consequences. At the same time, there has to be an understanding that even the best technologies available and best practices may not prevent all personal information theft so a company should not face harsh consequences if they took the necessary steps to protect people's information.
One of the main reasons that we now have 800 stream processors on fancy graphics cards is that you can split the most costly portions of advanced rasterization into hundreds of independant processes.
I know this may not be a popular question, but what is the point with raytracing for games?
We're finally getting to a level of technology with rasterization where we're producing visuals at a level which is "Good Enough" (or better) for practically every genre. Do we really need to get on the hardware treadmill for the next 10 years to get to a similar technology level to get slightly more realistic lighting and reflections?
It could be that I am in some sort of unique position, but I have worked with several completely awful women programmers (code with 3,000 line functions, and functions which take in a Hashmap rather than pass the 3 parameters for example) and I noticed in university quite a few women in computer science barely passing because their boyfriend did their assignments.
Now, maybe the woman who wrote the article finds women programmers better on average because the average woman programer has a similar thought and organizational structure to how she prefers to write her code; but I don't think there is any (real) evidence that shows women programmers are better in general.
The number 60 calories/pound of muscle per day came from a news story I had seen earlier this year...
Upon googling it seems that there is no solid answer and people are claiming anywhere from 6 calories per day to 90 calories per day; it isn't quite as simple as the 35 calories you listed either being that most (seemingly trustworthy) sites claimed between 35 and 50 calories per pound of muscle per day.
If you want to lose a decent ammount of weight all you need to do is put on 2.5 lbs of muscle (150 extra calories burned per day), eat 150 less calories than you need to maintain your current body weight (without considering excercise), and burn an additional 150 calories per day; this works out to a grand total of 450 calories more burned per day than you're currently taking in.
Wii Fit may not turn you into a body builder but its weight training program should be able to help you put on 2.5lbs of muscle, its aerobics program may not be nearly as good as jogging but it should be able to help you burn 150 calories per day, and if you cut down on sugar/cream in your coffee (or start drinking diet pop) you should easily be able to cut out 150 calories per day.
Basically, Wii Fit may not be much of a workout but it is all you (probably) really need.
Seriously, where do you get the quantity of 'Biomass' you need to generate all of this fuel?
I'm not an expert but from what I know most of the waste materials from products we create is used in some fashion, and I suspect the quantity of 'Biomass' needed to generate 1 Litre of fuel is fairly large. Maybe you can just use garbage and other waste materials to make this fuel, but does 1 person generate enough waste in their daily life to create enough fuel to drive their car?
I've worked as a web developer for years and can honestly say that it isn't hard to make an accessable website/webapplication but it doesn't happen because no one is willing to pay for it. Even the fact that there are laws in place in some countries that require certain standards doesn't motivate (most) clients into paying the extra 5% to have an accessable website; on top of this it doesn't help that your (dishonest) VP of marketing just pulls a number out of the air when they go after a project and you are (typically) heavily underfunded for the work you have to do.
Congratulations, you have now (officially) made the dumbest comment on Slashdot...
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are not preventing you from buying a high end gaming rig and playing your open-source PC games on it. What Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are doing is producing low cost, high performance, closed gaming platform with a standard user interface in order to provide a high quality gaming experience.
If we move towards an opensource platform we get the joy of eliminating all hardware inovation because group think will never allow for unconventional ideas to be produced. In other words the Wii or Nintendo DS would never be produced because conventional though would be that everyone wanted a keyboard and mouse, gamepad or conventional handheld to play videogames...
I might be in the minority here, but I'm not a huge gamer. I didn't grow up with Nintendo or Sega, I'm not a Counterstrike master, I prefer Bejewled to Tetris, I never played Duke Nukem or DOOM or Myst. That said, I've always found the Killzone games irresistably attractive due to their Saving Private Ryan-esque, post-apocalyptic, frantic atmosphere, the sweeping environments and orchestral score, the sound work, the surreal environments, and most importantly, the Helghast, who are so frighteningly sinister and menacing that I enjoy the game most when I'm inflicting the most painful death possible on them. The whole franchise is like an interactive sci-fi action movie. It's not groundbreaking, it's not revolutionary, it doesn't draw me in. It's something I can sit down and enjoy after a frustrating day at work, something I can fire up when friends are over and there's nothing on HBO.
Maybe I misunderstand, but it seems like you're saying you love Killzone because it is exactly like a dozen other first person shooters that are on every platform?
I realize that you probably haven't played most of the games that Killzone has copied but that doesn't change the fact that you could play dozens of games that are exactly like Killzone except for being better.
PS3 worldwide sales are so far following the sales trends of the GameCube, with the PS3 getting a small boost from the EU launch. It also follows pretty close to the worldwide XBox sales, which only had a large market share in the US and ignored everywhere else. For US numbers only, the PS3 is selling slightly below the GameCube--the also-ran of the last generation in terms of market penetration.
The PS3 is competing against a console with a year's head start to break 10m units, and another console that has a wicked upwards surge and will probably break 10m units within the next few months. Sony has a lot of work to do to avoid becoming the also-ran of this generation. With the number of exclusives moving multiplatform, it may already be too late to retake momentum.
The unfortunate thing (for Sony) is that vgchartz.com does not have data for the Gamecube in Europe... In other words the PS3 is selling at (approximately) 2/3 the rate of the Gamecube...
Rudimentary statistics tells us that if you have a 1 in 10,000,000 probability of having 11 broken XBox systems in a row (and the probability of each XBox 360 system being broken is equal) than the probability of an individual XBox 360 system breaking would be (1/10,000,000) to the 11th root...
This works out to being 23%...
If you assume that Microsoft is remarkably unlucky and the odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000 the probability (1 in 1,000) of an individual XBox 360 being broken would be 12%
Even if you assume that Microsoft is the least lucky company in the world and the odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 (1 in 1,000,000) the probability of an individual XBox 360 breaking would be 6.5%...
The reasonable assumption is that the XBox 360 is failing far more often than Microsoft is willing to admit (likely at 15% to 25%). I'm probably going to get flamed by someone who knows 20 people who haven't had an XBox 360 failure but the probability of that happening (assuming a 25% failure rate) is 1 in 315 which is pretty likely given a large enough sample.
Yeah, a whole bunch of last gen ports with some waggle tacked on...
Not only is the third party Wii library a joke but the big first party titles like Metroid are looking like crap. No wonder the only thing you hear from Wii owners is my Wii is gathering dust and I haven't touched the thing in months.
Give the bullshit a rest troll.
Poor Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll...
You used to at least talk about how great the PS3 was before you bashed the Wii, have things gotten so dark for the PS3 that even you can't see the bright spots?
I miss the days where you used to hype unknown properties as the second comming, and talk about how the power of the Cell was a better product than the Wiimote...
The reduction in scope of E3 (and delaying it until later in the year) has had an unintended consequence of every major publisher doing their own micro conference in May to release information about the second half of the year.
Sony did their Gamer's Day press conference last week (or the week before, I really can't remember) and many third parties joined in on releasing a lot of information about upcomming PS3/PSP games... There was something like 40 games announced with details being released over the days following the conference.
Nintendo is doing a very similar conference today and tomorow and will (likely) have a similar number of titles announced.
Even without new titles, if you check out release dates the Wii has roughly the same number of titles announced until the end of the year as the PS3. The main difference is the Wii has far (FAR) more titles being released before September than the PS3 does; it is hypothetically possible that the Wii's (post september) line-up will grow at Nintendo's conference, E3 and TGS until it is far greater than the PS3's (post september) line-up.
Because of the costs associated with voice acting you tend to have very limited dialogue which ends up becoming repetative rapidly, and creates a far more static world. With a text based game you can have every character in the game have several unique things to say at any given time and (as a player finishes objectives) have what they change through out the game. Your development team of (roughly) 6 dialogue writers can quickly fill a town setting with content so that everyone in the town says something funny, interesting or useful towards the game; in most voice acted games every character in the game says the exact same canned saying because no developer has the time, money or storage space to create unique sound clips for every character in game.
This story is "old" (as in a couple of days) and from what I have seen the general consensus is that what Miyamoto said was poorly translated and taken out of context.
Essentially, when Miyamoto said he could "make Halo" what he meant was "He could make a game like Halo"...
I could be wrong but I think Miyamoto was saying he makes the games he does because they're the kinds of games he wants to make; he is not influenced by the popularity of a genre or series to attempt to make games like them.
Slashdot Mirror
Having grown up around dogs, and now having two cats, I think a lot of people underestimate a cats intelligence because the cat is only interested in pleasing itself. I personally have cats who have figured out how simple mechanical devices like doors and drawers operate, and they have also figured out that I dislike them opening certain doors and drawers and they will get squirted by a spray bottle if they try (so they wait until I am asleep or away to misbehave).
Now, I'm not saying they're super smart creatures but they certainly have decent problem solving skills and an understanding of consequences at a fairly high level.
Beyond this I have seen my cats talk to each other using the same "phrase" to mean similar things in similar situations; and I'm curious whether the slight difference in meaning might actually be represented in a slight difference in the sound that is beyond my ability to hear. To explain what I mean, my cats may a "Birup" noise that seems to mean "Chase me" or "I'm Chasing You" when they play together.
Wouldn't the real benefit be that you wouldn't have to create two separate code-bases to create an application that both supported GPU optimization and could run naively on any system?
I've had a couple of ideas in my life that were very similar to several very successful start-ups at a similar point in time as their founders did (as I imagine several hundred thousand people did) and I have learned that most of the world is quick to find fault with original ideas and offers little advice on how to overcome those problems.
My suggestion would be to refine your idea into the simplest form possible and create a prototype to show to people, and then use their feedback to improve your idea. Realistically, if your idea is too complicated to to create a prototype it is probably too complicated for you to be successful with anyways ...
One thing I think is lost on a lot of people is that programming is much more of a "Craft" then a simple skill that can be picked up; and the predominant factor in whether someone becomes a good programmer or not is whether they receive good guidance, mentor-ship and training when they first start programming in a corporate environment. I have seen far too many organizations who believe they're saving money by not hiring senior developers, and by not training their staff in the technologies they're working with; but (in the long run) it costs them more money in the long run to fix their mistakes, and they lose a lot of respect of their clients because of their poor product.
I think why E3 is changing back is because, although the new format was better for doing business, E3 was rapidly becomming an unimportant event for publishers because it was losing the attention of gamers. For years E3 has been more about building hype than it was about getting stock into retail outlets, and (with the growing popularity of blogs) the average stock-boy was starting to have a greater influence on pre-launch excitment for a game then gaming magazines were.
Its actually amazing that people don't understand the difference in Canadian politics and American politics:
Back in the day the Reform party represented similar views as more moderate/liberal Republicans
The Conservative party of today represents similar views as more moderate/conservative Democrats
The Liberal party of today represents similar views as the core of the Democrats
The NDP party of today represents similar views as the extreme elements of the Democrats
Certainly, changing the copyright laws in Canada by the Conservative party is a (generally) bad thing but it is a change that would probably be made regardless of who was in power. The unfortunate thing is that lobby groups have a lot of power in every government, few politicians understand the consequences of legislation like this, and few pieces of legislation allow a free vote.
You may not care whether your current graphics card is obsolete after 3 years today but, with the combination of how powerful GPUs have become and the diminishing returns on further investment in graphics techonogy, in the near future your GPU will be good for much longer than 3 years. I'm not saying that this will happen tomorow, but 3D graphics have come a long way since One Must Fall and Doom, and I suspect that within 5 to 10 years we will have hit a point where even the most insane graphics whore won't care anymore.
I think it is entirely appropriate to investigate a company when large ammounts of personal information ends up being 'stolen' ... If it turns out that the company did not take the necessary steps to protect people's personal information they should face some consequences. At the same time, there has to be an understanding that even the best technologies available and best practices may not prevent all personal information theft so a company should not face harsh consequences if they took the necessary steps to protect people's information.
The problem with the Wiimote is that it track motion but there is no way of tracking orientation ... It is likely that the WiiNubin tracks orientation.
Actually, yes ...
One of the main reasons that we now have 800 stream processors on fancy graphics cards is that you can split the most costly portions of advanced rasterization into hundreds of independant processes.
I know this may not be a popular question, but what is the point with raytracing for games?
We're finally getting to a level of technology with rasterization where we're producing visuals at a level which is "Good Enough" (or better) for practically every genre. Do we really need to get on the hardware treadmill for the next 10 years to get to a similar technology level to get slightly more realistic lighting and reflections?
I have to agree with you ...
It could be that I am in some sort of unique position, but I have worked with several completely awful women programmers (code with 3,000 line functions, and functions which take in a Hashmap rather than pass the 3 parameters for example) and I noticed in university quite a few women in computer science barely passing because their boyfriend did their assignments.
Now, maybe the woman who wrote the article finds women programmers better on average because the average woman programer has a similar thought and organizational structure to how she prefers to write her code; but I don't think there is any (real) evidence that shows women programmers are better in general.
The number 60 calories/pound of muscle per day came from a news story I had seen earlier this year ...
Upon googling it seems that there is no solid answer and people are claiming anywhere from 6 calories per day to 90 calories per day; it isn't quite as simple as the 35 calories you listed either being that most (seemingly trustworthy) sites claimed between 35 and 50 calories per pound of muscle per day.
If you want to lose a decent ammount of weight all you need to do is put on 2.5 lbs of muscle (150 extra calories burned per day), eat 150 less calories than you need to maintain your current body weight (without considering excercise), and burn an additional 150 calories per day; this works out to a grand total of 450 calories more burned per day than you're currently taking in.
Wii Fit may not turn you into a body builder but its weight training program should be able to help you put on 2.5lbs of muscle, its aerobics program may not be nearly as good as jogging but it should be able to help you burn 150 calories per day, and if you cut down on sugar/cream in your coffee (or start drinking diet pop) you should easily be able to cut out 150 calories per day.
Basically, Wii Fit may not be much of a workout but it is all you (probably) really need.
Seriously, where do you get the quantity of 'Biomass' you need to generate all of this fuel?
I'm not an expert but from what I know most of the waste materials from products we create is used in some fashion, and I suspect the quantity of 'Biomass' needed to generate 1 Litre of fuel is fairly large. Maybe you can just use garbage and other waste materials to make this fuel, but does 1 person generate enough waste in their daily life to create enough fuel to drive their car?
I've worked as a web developer for years and can honestly say that it isn't hard to make an accessable website/webapplication but it doesn't happen because no one is willing to pay for it. Even the fact that there are laws in place in some countries that require certain standards doesn't motivate (most) clients into paying the extra 5% to have an accessable website; on top of this it doesn't help that your (dishonest) VP of marketing just pulls a number out of the air when they go after a project and you are (typically) heavily underfunded for the work you have to do.
Congratulations, you have now (officially) made the dumbest comment on Slashdot ...
...
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are not preventing you from buying a high end gaming rig and playing your open-source PC games on it. What Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are doing is producing low cost, high performance, closed gaming platform with a standard user interface in order to provide a high quality gaming experience.
If we move towards an opensource platform we get the joy of eliminating all hardware inovation because group think will never allow for unconventional ideas to be produced. In other words the Wii or Nintendo DS would never be produced because conventional though would be that everyone wanted a keyboard and mouse, gamepad or conventional handheld to play videogames
Well, except Halo isn't that big of a series ...
http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=Halo&console=&publisher=&sort=Total
http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=Grand+Theft+Auto&console=&publisher=&sort=Total
Maybe I misunderstand, but it seems like you're saying you love Killzone because it is exactly like a dozen other first person shooters that are on every platform?
I realize that you probably haven't played most of the games that Killzone has copied but that doesn't change the fact that you could play dozens of games that are exactly like Killzone except for being better.
The unfortunate thing (for Sony) is that vgchartz.com does not have data for the Gamecube in Europe
In other words the PS3 is selling at (approximately) 2/3 the rate of the Gamecube
Pal Regions
Rudimentary statistics tells us that if you have a 1 in 10,000,000 probability of having 11 broken XBox systems in a row (and the probability of each XBox 360 system being broken is equal) than the probability of an individual XBox 360 system breaking would be (1/10,000,000) to the 11th root ...
...
...
This works out to being 23%
If you assume that Microsoft is remarkably unlucky and the odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000 the probability (1 in 1,000) of an individual XBox 360 being broken would be 12%
Even if you assume that Microsoft is the least lucky company in the world and the odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 (1 in 1,000,000) the probability of an individual XBox 360 breaking would be 6.5%
The reasonable assumption is that the XBox 360 is failing far more often than Microsoft is willing to admit (likely at 15% to 25%). I'm probably going to get flamed by someone who knows 20 people who haven't had an XBox 360 failure but the probability of that happening (assuming a 25% failure rate) is 1 in 315 which is pretty likely given a large enough sample.
Poor Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll
You used to at least talk about how great the PS3 was before you bashed the Wii, have things gotten so dark for the PS3 that even you can't see the bright spots?
I miss the days where you used to hype unknown properties as the second comming, and talk about how the power of the Cell was a better product than the Wiimote
The reduction in scope of E3 (and delaying it until later in the year) has had an unintended consequence of every major publisher doing their own micro conference in May to release information about the second half of the year.
... There was something like 40 games announced with details being released over the days following the conference.
Sony did their Gamer's Day press conference last week (or the week before, I really can't remember) and many third parties joined in on releasing a lot of information about upcomming PS3/PSP games
Nintendo is doing a very similar conference today and tomorow and will (likely) have a similar number of titles announced.
Even without new titles, if you check out release dates the Wii has roughly the same number of titles announced until the end of the year as the PS3. The main difference is the Wii has far (FAR) more titles being released before September than the PS3 does; it is hypothetically possible that the Wii's (post september) line-up will grow at Nintendo's conference, E3 and TGS until it is far greater than the PS3's (post september) line-up.
Personally, I hate voice acting in most games ...
Because of the costs associated with voice acting you tend to have very limited dialogue which ends up becoming repetative rapidly, and creates a far more static world. With a text based game you can have every character in the game have several unique things to say at any given time and (as a player finishes objectives) have what they change through out the game. Your development team of (roughly) 6 dialogue writers can quickly fill a town setting with content so that everyone in the town says something funny, interesting or useful towards the game; in most voice acted games every character in the game says the exact same canned saying because no developer has the time, money or storage space to create unique sound clips for every character in game.
This story is "old" (as in a couple of days) and from what I have seen the general consensus is that what Miyamoto said was poorly translated and taken out of context.
...
Essentially, when Miyamoto said he could "make Halo" what he meant was "He could make a game like Halo"
I could be wrong but I think Miyamoto was saying he makes the games he does because they're the kinds of games he wants to make; he is not influenced by the popularity of a genre or series to attempt to make games like them.