I'd actually say it's the people who designed the software with the utopian mindset that the user will never do this wrong, or nobody will try to abuse this system, or anything along those lines.
Seriously, why are we having problems with email trojans now? First of all, the email system is in no way secure and anybody can pretend to be anybody else. Great. Second, we have operating systems which are too easy to break and people who don't update them when the breaks are discovered and fixed. Third, we have email clients that just go off and run whatever code is handed to them because the user tells them to.
The third thing is really the least of the trouble, as a good system in place for the first couple would be enough to prevent the problem from reaching step three very often.
If all email were sent in a secure fashion then we could be certain that mail was from who it is supposed to be from. Good. Now, people can still send crap, but we know its source. So number two prevents people from unwittingly being 0wn3d and having crap sent from them. Number three really only kicks in if you have a bunch of gullible friends. And even there a mail program that wouldn't launch the file for you and instead make you save it and launch itself would be enough of a pain that the casual, I wonder what Billy sent me in this executable despite not telling me something was coming so I'm gonna click it, mentality would ignore it for something else that's shiny.
Even if they do launch the file and it hijacks their email account, we know where the junk is coming from and the more tech savvy can let them know to get it fixed. If it uses a different account we don't know who it is from and intrinsically don't trust it, stopping the spread there.
Sadly, the bit about the missing aperture ring is true. I got one of Nikon's newer autofocus bodies and the aperture ring is gone from the included autofocus lens. Confused me a little at first. There's a wheel on the body now that can be used to control the aperture of the autofocus lens in manual control or aperture priority (you set aperture, it sets shutter speed) mode. However, the new bodies will still take the older lenses without a problem, except that you can't use autofocus, which isn't that big of a deal. You should know how to manually setup a shot if you have an SLR.
The other odd thing I found about my camera is that there's no setting for the film speed. It reads the speed off of DX encoded film instead. However, if the film isn't DX encoded it treats it as 100 speed film. Not a big fan of that, though most film does seem to have the DX encoding.
Excellent point. The bodies for older cameras with a few lenses are often going for very little, especially if you check ebay or the like.
The part that's hitting my wallet and probably the reason that I'm thinking SLR anything is steep in price is the cost of lenses. However, that's one of the reasons that I went with Nikon when I bought. They haven't changed their standard F-mount in god only knows how long, so I can find decades old lenses that will work with my camera (just that I have to manually focus, oh no) and I don't really have to worry about lenses I get today being made obsolete for future camera purchases, including the digital SLR body I intend to get someday.
You're completely right, the photographs made years and years ago aren't any worse due to a technological reason.
There's a good reason why too. The entry price on an SLR film camera is a little steep, but the entry price on an SLR digital camera is leaps and bounds above that.
If I recall correctly, Canon just put out a digital SLR that costs less than $1,000. I couldn't find a Nikon for much less than $1,500 when I was shopping for an SLR, so I went film.
Most of my pictures end up in a digital format, whether taken with my film SLR or my digital point and shoot. A lot of people like to have hard copies of their pictures too though. I'm even getting to enjoying having a photo album, despite my meticulous digital cataloging. When you factor in the cost to print a digital picture, you're hardly paying more per print via film than you are via digital. Actually, I'll have somewhere near 1,000 prints when I've paid as much for film, development and film camera as I would have for just the digital camera.
Due to the niceties of digital, like reviewing pictures and deleting ones you don't want, instant "development", and large picture capacity without changing media, I'll eventually move to a digital SLR. Hopefully the costs will come down by then. However, I'll be taking my collection of lenses with as well, making the total cost of the body I'm using to take film pictures now a negligible investment for the quality of shots I'm getting until that point.
Well, from my point of view owning a PS2 but neither a Gamecube nor Xbox, I'm hoping that one or the other next generation consoles from Nintendo or MS will have backwards compatability. Then I can get one of those machines, plus any of the back catalog on the cheap, plus a few of the newer games, and have room to grow the games for that console as well.
However, not having backwards compatability won't push me to the PS3. I can already play that console's back catalog, so unless there's some set of killer games on the PS3, it just isn't going to happen. It would, though, push me towards the Gamecube 2 if it is backwards compatable. And why not? I can't play GC cames right now, though there are a few I would love to have.
Newcomers to buying consoles might buy based on backwards compatability, but all it does for me is let me skip a generation of hardware without worrying that I'll miss out on a bunch of good games down the road. So basically if a console maker creates a backwards compatabile system, I'll not buy their hardware at least once every two systems.
Moreover, why would you want a window on a G5? It isn't like the view from one G5 to the next is going to change significantly. With PCs you get choice of components, choice of motherboards, choice of heatsinks, fans, and so on and so forth. It's probably difficult for a couple people in any given circle to accidentally end up with the same computer, making a window into the inside a view of something unique.
I can just see a lan party full of windowed G5s (playing starcraft no less):
Hey, nice window there Bob. Yeah, yours too Greg. Looks exactly the same in there as mine. Funny how that works, isn't it Bob?
Ah, wasn't aware that you needed over 4 GB for just one matrix. And it certainly is better to do it on a system that handles large memory without funny games.
Because there no Xeon Motherboard that will use 16 GB of RAM, and we certainly can't find one that will go up to 32 GB (though it is a quad processor board).
Granted, addressing that much memory must be done through a little game which adds translation cycles to the latency of all of that RAM. However, it doesn't have to be 64 bit to address more than 4 GB of RAM. The quantity is certainly enough for what you describe, and is generally on par with what I've seen the Opteron offer.
The Xeon, however, is going to have to do some work to support much more RAM than that. Luckily, it looks like that support is coming. Which is good since it should add some more competition.
He's making perfect sense. OGG is lossy. For people that have equipment that's capable of reproducing fine detail and the ears to pick it out there's a difference. FLAC is lossless, and as such there is no degradation in sound quality from the encoding itself.
What the original poster was saying is that FLAC is good for audiophiles, because there's no loss of sound quality at all. OGG is a compromise because it sounds pretty good, at least better than MP3 does, but it still can lose definition due to encoding, not just the hardware you're playing it on. Audiophiles care about that sort of thing, and thus FLAC, not OGG, is great for audiophiles.
Of course, with most portable audio players you'd do more to improve sound quality by getting a decent pair of headphones than by playing OGG than MP3, especially if you use a decent bitrate for encoding. The number of people who keep their stock 25 cent to mass produce earbuds on their $200+ players is pretty sick.
Re:It's LaCie... Good luck getting it to work
on
A Terabyte In A Cigar Box
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· Score: 2, Informative
While I can't attest to their tape drives, my girlfriend got a LaCie external Firewire/USB2 drive for animation and design classes and there have been no problems with it on PCs. Heck, I even managed to mount the thing under linux reliably on my desktop. The device path isn't exactly what I'd want to try pronouncing, but it works without issue.
OS X is apparently picky about mounting it with the firewire connection at times, but it sounds like terrible misconfiguration on a particular lab of computers. I've only heard how it recognizes the disk but refuses to mount it in that lab though. However, there's never been an issue with it connected to any of the many PCs around the apartment.
They seem pretty slick to me, and I've not seen any problems out of them on hardware I maintain. Plus the drive my gf got self powers off of firewire, so no extra cables on systems with the proper ports. Woohoo.
Well, you could reduce that to an illogical conclusion as well. That there should be no markings on the front of the thing, just buttons. The owners will know because they have the manual. They're there for whatever reason, probably that people might forget which button's which anyway. But it would look kinda neat. Also, my keyboard has letters on the keycaps despite the fact that I can touch type and don't need to look at them, and nobody else uses my keyboard.;) I guess I'm saying that I'm sure a little label could have been devised that wouldn't look the slightest bit out of place.
And yes, despite my continued posting, I realize I should have asked the owner how to turn the light on before I played with it as long as I did. It just seemed like there shouldn't have been a trick to it. And eventually that's what I did.
It's possible it was intended, and while I'm not a graphic designer, I wonder how much it would detract from the design in order to at least hint that buttons could have a second function. I'm willing to bet a little "BL" under the button would have at least made me think there was a possibility to get the light on with that button.
Or maybe they just don't think anybody will trust their iPod in another person's hands long enough to run into such issues, and if you own one you can RTM. I'm only commenting that as a non-owner of an iPod that the interface, at least in this one instance, seemed to be form over function.
I think you might be onto something with that idea. And since Apple's already been in bed with Motorola because of the PowerPC alliance thing, it probably wouldn't be too tough to convince them to licence the patent.
Well it wasn't like it was sensory deprivation darkness, we were just driving along late at night. I'd also had the joy of looking over the whole thing when there was enough light to clearly read any of the buttons. At that point though, there was barely enough light to read buttons, but nowhere near enough light to see much on the lcd. If there was even so much as a little "BL" label underneath the button to be held I might have gotten the idea that the button had more than one function. As it was there were zero interface clues that buttons could do more than one thing, and as such, I was lost. That isn't my definition of a particularly intuitive interface.
I mean, I can work through most interfaces with no real experience using them, and being able to see the iPod's display I was able to do the same, like I find many music players workable. That there's the gotcha of multiple actions per button with no clues alluding to that is why I bothered posting in the first place. I didn't think it was so outlandish.
The point of my post was that I was using the iPod without prior experience with the backlight and that because I wasn't versed with the things manual, its "brilliant" UI was worthless.
I've already granted that it was probably my friend's fault in the first place for changing defaults, and that if somebody goes to the trouble of changing defaults at least they should know how to work the thing. Didn't do me much good when he asked me to find a particular song while he was driving though.
As for what I wanted, well I looked for a backlight button or switch, looked at the labels for the buttons (much more readable than the lcd in the dark) and finding nothing attempted to go through menus in the dark. Had the buttons had sublabels or something then maybe I would've been in a better spot. Everybody agrees that having navigation menus on webpages where you have to mouseover an image and have it rollover to see where it will take you is bad interface design. From the point of view of somebody who wasn't versed with the iPod, it wasn't much different. Except I didn't know that holding down the buttons would make them do something different, because the UI had no indication of such. Brilliant UIs usually have pervasively intuitive functionality, and from that experience it seems pretty clear to me that the interface isn't all that intuitive.
There were no clues that holding buttons would make them do different things. Aside from randomly deciding to hold the button there would have been no way for me to learn that aspect of the interface without guidance or the manual. Thus my comment refuting that the design is god's gift to earth. I don't know what else to say to you to try to convince you that my comment had a point.
It's the plasticy oily sheen look they have to them, which is my personal sense of aesthetics. It's the same thing that turns me off to their older iMac design. Too much plastic for my taste. Don't like shiny plastic chairs, shiny plastic tables, or much of anything that's shiny oily plasticy looking either. That's purely a matter of tastes. I've no doubt that the little things can probably stand a bit of abuse.
I've posted a few replies to other people who've jumped on me about the backlight thing. It's become apparent my friend changed the default setting, most likely to conserve battery during the daytime. Had I known I probably wouldn't have included the story. But like I've posted previously in those replies, I'd think that such a function would be intuitively accessable even if defaults had been changed, so nobody would have to crawl to the manual. I can't really think of other issues I've had in the times I've used my friend's, but then again I've used plenty of players that have nice intuitive interfaces to get at music, or at the very least that can be learned really quickly by somebody geeky.
The reason that DVD+R media are supposed to be more compatible is that the reflectivity of the disc is supposed to be the same as a pressed disc. However, the thing that trips up the players is the book setting. Some players see the book setting of DVD+R and think to themselves, "hey, I don't know what to do with this, " despite the fact that the disc is in almost everyway the same as a pressed one. Some burners (those based off of Ricoh hardware I think) can change the book setting on the disc to DVD-ROM, so then the players won't have a problem.
Last I saw it was because of this issue that DVD-R was "more compatible" with stand alone players.
I too got a multiformat writer and have had no issues writing so far. I picked up a Hi-Val writer which does 4x -R/4x +R/2x -RW/2.4x +RW for $90 after rebate. It takes a little while to write the RW discs, but most of the time I've not found it to be an issue, since I just do other stuff while waiting for it.
Well, it is one of the reasons I'll never own a white car. They just look like cheap little toys to me. And no, I don't care much for the flat glossy paints on cars either. A nice metalic paint on a car, however, does not seem to collect the sludge and grossness that I've seen covering the backs of too many iPods. Also, a nice metalic paint on a car doesn't look like an oiled surface, like the flat gloss paints do.
I'm not saying that shine is bad, or even a bit of gleem, but that oily look just doesn't do it for me. Thankfully, auto manufacturers have long had a wide variety of paints that are able to shine and look nice, without having their product look like a cheap block of plastic. Oddly enough, it seems that most cars I see don't have a single solid glossy tone to them, except of course, the white cars. As such, it isn't really a problem.
How's that for way too long an answer to a sarcastic statement?
Well, if you'd read the post I explicitly said it was my friend's iPod, and that I was fumbling with it in the dark. I've never seen an iPod manual, nor did I have the ability to consult my friend's manual at that time. And even if I did, it was dark. Sheesh, it isn't trolling or flamebait, just an experience I had.
Another poster stated that he may have fiddled with the default settings, so the light wouldn't come on whenever a button was pressed. I'd presume he did due to not wanting to eat battery power during the daytime.
My point was merely that holding the menu button isn't exactly what I'd call intuitive to get the backlight. That, of course, is probably mitigated by the fact that you have to tell it not to light up with each button press, and to do that you'd probably have to read the manual to figure out how, and see that you can get the light on by the menu button.
My example is probably not so great because I was unaware that the mode it was in was not its default operation, and you'd probably accidentally read how to turn the light on by holding the button when reading up on how to make the light not come on when pressing buttons.
I still feel I shouldn't need to be familiar with the manual to access such a simple feature, despite what my friend may or may not have done to the default settings.
Maybe it's just me (and a ton of people are going to angrily say it is), but I think the iPod design is far to plasticy cheap looking. Perhaps it's because I'm not a fan of the movement to make everything out of shiny looking plastics with their high gloss finish that gives things things an oily look. But, even the metal backing on the iPods gets smeared with fingerprints with a little use, making the thing look terrible. Excuse me for thinking they look cheap.
And masterpiece of design? Besides the aesthetics of the material used, the interface could use a little work. For example, how do you get the backlight to turn on? I fiddled with my friends iPod for about two minutes trying to find a button to do that, and after running out of buttons trying to read the menus in near darkness before he told me to hold down one of the buttons (don't remember which) for a couple seconds. Oh, obviously... I should have guessed that.
I don't think so because throughout both articles they're referring to games that break the 2D fighter genre. For instance there's the reference to Super Smash Bros. that I mention in my original post. There's also mention of Bushido Blade if I remember correctly, a game that is very non-"fighter" in that there are so many one hit kills it isn't funny.
Power Stone 2 is the game from the Power Stone family I'm more familiar with, but the genius of the game is the interaction with the environment. The ability to string together combos of various moves isn't that great like in 2D fighters with a 3rd dimension, but with the plethora of weaponry as well as the ability to take advantage of your surroundings you have a very immersive fighting game.
I agree it isn't a 2D fighter with some 3D afterthought, but I don't think that's what the article is talking about.
They make a pretty good history, but only touch on the Dreamcast as a part. I for one thought that Power Stone/Power Stone 2 were pretty cool 3D fighters for the Dreamcast.
And don't say they aren't fighters. Super Smash Bros. was mentioned as a fighter right after the Dreamcast bit.
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Seriously, why are we having problems with email trojans now? First of all, the email system is in no way secure and anybody can pretend to be anybody else. Great. Second, we have operating systems which are too easy to break and people who don't update them when the breaks are discovered and fixed. Third, we have email clients that just go off and run whatever code is handed to them because the user tells them to.
The third thing is really the least of the trouble, as a good system in place for the first couple would be enough to prevent the problem from reaching step three very often.
If all email were sent in a secure fashion then we could be certain that mail was from who it is supposed to be from. Good. Now, people can still send crap, but we know its source. So number two prevents people from unwittingly being 0wn3d and having crap sent from them. Number three really only kicks in if you have a bunch of gullible friends. And even there a mail program that wouldn't launch the file for you and instead make you save it and launch itself would be enough of a pain that the casual, I wonder what Billy sent me in this executable despite not telling me something was coming so I'm gonna click it, mentality would ignore it for something else that's shiny.
Even if they do launch the file and it hijacks their email account, we know where the junk is coming from and the more tech savvy can let them know to get it fixed. If it uses a different account we don't know who it is from and intrinsically don't trust it, stopping the spread there.
The other odd thing I found about my camera is that there's no setting for the film speed. It reads the speed off of DX encoded film instead. However, if the film isn't DX encoded it treats it as 100 speed film. Not a big fan of that, though most film does seem to have the DX encoding.
The part that's hitting my wallet and probably the reason that I'm thinking SLR anything is steep in price is the cost of lenses. However, that's one of the reasons that I went with Nikon when I bought. They haven't changed their standard F-mount in god only knows how long, so I can find decades old lenses that will work with my camera (just that I have to manually focus, oh no) and I don't really have to worry about lenses I get today being made obsolete for future camera purchases, including the digital SLR body I intend to get someday.
You're completely right, the photographs made years and years ago aren't any worse due to a technological reason.
If I recall correctly, Canon just put out a digital SLR that costs less than $1,000. I couldn't find a Nikon for much less than $1,500 when I was shopping for an SLR, so I went film.
Most of my pictures end up in a digital format, whether taken with my film SLR or my digital point and shoot. A lot of people like to have hard copies of their pictures too though. I'm even getting to enjoying having a photo album, despite my meticulous digital cataloging. When you factor in the cost to print a digital picture, you're hardly paying more per print via film than you are via digital. Actually, I'll have somewhere near 1,000 prints when I've paid as much for film, development and film camera as I would have for just the digital camera.
Due to the niceties of digital, like reviewing pictures and deleting ones you don't want, instant "development", and large picture capacity without changing media, I'll eventually move to a digital SLR. Hopefully the costs will come down by then. However, I'll be taking my collection of lenses with as well, making the total cost of the body I'm using to take film pictures now a negligible investment for the quality of shots I'm getting until that point.
However, not having backwards compatability won't push me to the PS3. I can already play that console's back catalog, so unless there's some set of killer games on the PS3, it just isn't going to happen. It would, though, push me towards the Gamecube 2 if it is backwards compatable. And why not? I can't play GC cames right now, though there are a few I would love to have.
Newcomers to buying consoles might buy based on backwards compatability, but all it does for me is let me skip a generation of hardware without worrying that I'll miss out on a bunch of good games down the road. So basically if a console maker creates a backwards compatabile system, I'll not buy their hardware at least once every two systems.
I can just see a lan party full of windowed G5s (playing starcraft no less):
Hey, nice window there Bob.
Yeah, yours too Greg. Looks exactly the same in there as mine.
Funny how that works, isn't it Bob?
Think different indeed.
Ah, wasn't aware that you needed over 4 GB for just one matrix. And it certainly is better to do it on a system that handles large memory without funny games.
Granted, addressing that much memory must be done through a little game which adds translation cycles to the latency of all of that RAM. However, it doesn't have to be 64 bit to address more than 4 GB of RAM. The quantity is certainly enough for what you describe, and is generally on par with what I've seen the Opteron offer.
The Xeon, however, is going to have to do some work to support much more RAM than that. Luckily, it looks like that support is coming. Which is good since it should add some more competition.
What the original poster was saying is that FLAC is good for audiophiles, because there's no loss of sound quality at all. OGG is a compromise because it sounds pretty good, at least better than MP3 does, but it still can lose definition due to encoding, not just the hardware you're playing it on. Audiophiles care about that sort of thing, and thus FLAC, not OGG, is great for audiophiles.
Of course, with most portable audio players you'd do more to improve sound quality by getting a decent pair of headphones than by playing OGG than MP3, especially if you use a decent bitrate for encoding. The number of people who keep their stock 25 cent to mass produce earbuds on their $200+ players is pretty sick.
OS X is apparently picky about mounting it with the firewire connection at times, but it sounds like terrible misconfiguration on a particular lab of computers. I've only heard how it recognizes the disk but refuses to mount it in that lab though. However, there's never been an issue with it connected to any of the many PCs around the apartment.
They seem pretty slick to me, and I've not seen any problems out of them on hardware I maintain. Plus the drive my gf got self powers off of firewire, so no extra cables on systems with the proper ports. Woohoo.
I guess I'm saying that I'm sure a little label could have been devised that wouldn't look the slightest bit out of place.
And yes, despite my continued posting, I realize I should have asked the owner how to turn the light on before I played with it as long as I did. It just seemed like there shouldn't have been a trick to it. And eventually that's what I did.
Or maybe they just don't think anybody will trust their iPod in another person's hands long enough to run into such issues, and if you own one you can RTM. I'm only commenting that as a non-owner of an iPod that the interface, at least in this one instance, seemed to be form over function.
I think you might be onto something with that idea. And since Apple's already been in bed with Motorola because of the PowerPC alliance thing, it probably wouldn't be too tough to convince them to licence the patent.
Actually, I probably should have just asked my friend earlier, rather than sitting there toying with the thing for so long. Ah well.
I mean, I can work through most interfaces with no real experience using them, and being able to see the iPod's display I was able to do the same, like I find many music players workable. That there's the gotcha of multiple actions per button with no clues alluding to that is why I bothered posting in the first place. I didn't think it was so outlandish.
I've already granted that it was probably my friend's fault in the first place for changing defaults, and that if somebody goes to the trouble of changing defaults at least they should know how to work the thing. Didn't do me much good when he asked me to find a particular song while he was driving though.
As for what I wanted, well I looked for a backlight button or switch, looked at the labels for the buttons (much more readable than the lcd in the dark) and finding nothing attempted to go through menus in the dark. Had the buttons had sublabels or something then maybe I would've been in a better spot. Everybody agrees that having navigation menus on webpages where you have to mouseover an image and have it rollover to see where it will take you is bad interface design. From the point of view of somebody who wasn't versed with the iPod, it wasn't much different. Except I didn't know that holding down the buttons would make them do something different, because the UI had no indication of such. Brilliant UIs usually have pervasively intuitive functionality, and from that experience it seems pretty clear to me that the interface isn't all that intuitive.
There were no clues that holding buttons would make them do different things. Aside from randomly deciding to hold the button there would have been no way for me to learn that aspect of the interface without guidance or the manual. Thus my comment refuting that the design is god's gift to earth. I don't know what else to say to you to try to convince you that my comment had a point.
I've posted a few replies to other people who've jumped on me about the backlight thing. It's become apparent my friend changed the default setting, most likely to conserve battery during the daytime. Had I known I probably wouldn't have included the story. But like I've posted previously in those replies, I'd think that such a function would be intuitively accessable even if defaults had been changed, so nobody would have to crawl to the manual. I can't really think of other issues I've had in the times I've used my friend's, but then again I've used plenty of players that have nice intuitive interfaces to get at music, or at the very least that can be learned really quickly by somebody geeky.
Last I saw it was because of this issue that DVD-R was "more compatible" with stand alone players.
I too got a multiformat writer and have had no issues writing so far. I picked up a Hi-Val writer which does 4x -R/4x +R/2x -RW/2.4x +RW for $90 after rebate. It takes a little while to write the RW discs, but most of the time I've not found it to be an issue, since I just do other stuff while waiting for it.
Don't I wish I could drive one of those. Though I do imagine it might collect fingerprints like an iPod. ;)
I'm not saying that shine is bad, or even a bit of gleem, but that oily look just doesn't do it for me. Thankfully, auto manufacturers have long had a wide variety of paints that are able to shine and look nice, without having their product look like a cheap block of plastic. Oddly enough, it seems that most cars I see don't have a single solid glossy tone to them, except of course, the white cars. As such, it isn't really a problem.
How's that for way too long an answer to a sarcastic statement?
Another poster stated that he may have fiddled with the default settings, so the light wouldn't come on whenever a button was pressed. I'd presume he did due to not wanting to eat battery power during the daytime.
My point was merely that holding the menu button isn't exactly what I'd call intuitive to get the backlight. That, of course, is probably mitigated by the fact that you have to tell it not to light up with each button press, and to do that you'd probably have to read the manual to figure out how, and see that you can get the light on by the menu button.
My example is probably not so great because I was unaware that the mode it was in was not its default operation, and you'd probably accidentally read how to turn the light on by holding the button when reading up on how to make the light not come on when pressing buttons.
I still feel I shouldn't need to be familiar with the manual to access such a simple feature, despite what my friend may or may not have done to the default settings.
And masterpiece of design? Besides the aesthetics of the material used, the interface could use a little work. For example, how do you get the backlight to turn on? I fiddled with my friends iPod for about two minutes trying to find a button to do that, and after running out of buttons trying to read the menus in near darkness before he told me to hold down one of the buttons (don't remember which) for a couple seconds. Oh, obviously... I should have guessed that.
I'd comment but can't even get to the article. No, I'm not new here...
Power Stone 2 is the game from the Power Stone family I'm more familiar with, but the genius of the game is the interaction with the environment. The ability to string together combos of various moves isn't that great like in 2D fighters with a 3rd dimension, but with the plethora of weaponry as well as the ability to take advantage of your surroundings you have a very immersive fighting game.
I agree it isn't a 2D fighter with some 3D afterthought, but I don't think that's what the article is talking about.
And don't say they aren't fighters. Super Smash Bros. was mentioned as a fighter right after the Dreamcast bit.