On the contrary, it's becoming easier and easier to create games. There are message boards crammed full of people participating in indie games competitions, many with only the most rudimentary of programming and art skills (no offence to them). The tools have progressed to the point where these people can put together a game, and sometimes the result is (in my opinion) worthy to be called "art". Of course, the majority is utter rubbish, but you can say that about commercial games also (Sturgeon's Law).
Funnily enough, with the rise in popularity of "pixel art" in indie games, many even look like the 8-bit games you called the "cavemen drawings of what games will become". I take your point, and perhaps games will never be as easy to create as a doodle. But it's becoming easier every day, and this, if anything, is what will deliver games as art.
The Register is the IT version of The Sun; A Red Top tabloid.
Not quite. The Register deliberately copies several traits from the tabloids. The red masthead is the most obvious of these. They also use a lot of slang, and run plenty of trashy comedy stories. However, these are always reported in a very cynical and/or tongue-in-cheek fashion, not at all like the crap you read in newspapers like The Sun.
What's more, when it comes to their tech-related articles (the majority of their output) they often publish some very interesting pieces of investigative journalism. They put out some slightly dodgy op-ed occasionally, they don't always nail their stories, and their copy editing is poor (rarely a story without a typo) but overall the site is an entertaining, and usually highly informative, read.
Just today I was reading about the village of Variseia in Cyprus, where exactly what you describe has occurred. Political upheaval has meant the village has been largely free from human influence for the past 25 years.
Everyone has made a mythology about VHS somehow losing to Sony Beta
Beta won? Damn, who does no-one tell me these things? Oh well, it doesn't really matter now - I threw out my VHS and bought an HD-DVD player last week.
As stated in the blog post itself, Danielle posted the high resolution image by mistake, due to her lack of understanding of such things. Slightly dumb? Yes. An excuse for stealing the picture and making it into a huge great billboard without a license? Nope.
I don't have kids, but I find this massively creepy. I'm pretty sure no-one would use a photo of me to advertise anything, but if they did so without my permission and I stumbled across it unexpectedly, I'd be very creeped out.
I don't really see the "creative commons = no-one would be bothered" link either. If no-one cared about this kind of use of their images, there'd be no need for the "noncommercial" CC license.
With articles such as this, it's hard to tell whether we're being subjected to bad science or bad journalism. Both the summary and TFA quite categorically state that the "myth" of fingerprints being used to improve grip has been disproven. They then go on to describe how this experiment tested whether fingerprints helped when grasping an extremely smooth surface, and found out that they didn't (well okay, actually they did, but not by very much).
Finally, some alternate hypotheses as to why fingerprints evolved are posited, the first of which is: they may improve grip on rough surfaces. Not acrylic glass or anything, but those other kind of surfaces - you know, the type that actually occur in nature.
I'm pretty sure I don't know much more now than I did before I read the article.
"Worked on"? While it's easy to say this with hindsight, all of the ideas that make up this "emergency mode" are pretty obvious. It did not require anyone to "work on" them. The patent covers the fact that the phone will do these things (the easy part), not the technical details of how it will do them (the hard part).
I have no objection to Apple protecting the hardware and software that allows their phone to do these things. I object to them being able to stop others from implementing these obvious ideas without paying royalties, and thereby ensuring that less phones will have these features in the long run than would otherwise be the case.
The real question is not how this Stephen E. Arnold imbecile managed to spew forth such an unholy spurt of verbal diarrhea, but why on earth said spurt has been inflicted on the/. readership.
If that were the case, surely he would have said something along the lines of "They were all third rate covers of 'For the Love of Money' aka the money song by the O'Jays"?
Apparently Mount Marcy, Mount Elbrus, Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Etna are all the highest mountain. Then again, I was also informed that "high mountains are the hum of human cities torture", so I think I'll just steer clear of mountains altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
"beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know"
The Genius of the Crowd - Charles Bukowski
On the contrary, it's becoming easier and easier to create games. There are message boards crammed full of people participating in indie games competitions, many with only the most rudimentary of programming and art skills (no offence to them). The tools have progressed to the point where these people can put together a game, and sometimes the result is (in my opinion) worthy to be called "art". Of course, the majority is utter rubbish, but you can say that about commercial games also (Sturgeon's Law).
Funnily enough, with the rise in popularity of "pixel art" in indie games, many even look like the 8-bit games you called the "cavemen drawings of what games will become". I take your point, and perhaps games will never be as easy to create as a doodle. But it's becoming easier every day, and this, if anything, is what will deliver games as art.
As soon as you get money for the rights to publish the final product before it is even in a releasable state...
...you're 3D Realms.
The Register is the IT version of The Sun; A Red Top tabloid.
Not quite. The Register deliberately copies several traits from the tabloids. The red masthead is the most obvious of these. They also use a lot of slang, and run plenty of trashy comedy stories. However, these are always reported in a very cynical and/or tongue-in-cheek fashion, not at all like the crap you read in newspapers like The Sun.
What's more, when it comes to their tech-related articles (the majority of their output) they often publish some very interesting pieces of investigative journalism. They put out some slightly dodgy op-ed occasionally, they don't always nail their stories, and their copy editing is poor (rarely a story without a typo) but overall the site is an entertaining, and usually highly informative, read.
Typo: I meant 35 years.
Just today I was reading about the village of Variseia in Cyprus, where exactly what you describe has occurred. Political upheaval has meant the village has been largely free from human influence for the past 25 years.
Just screwy /. CSS or something then? It seems to be displaying fine now.
Nice review anyway - although I'm still trying to work out what the "catlike typing" sentence means. :)
Looks like someone needs to learn that the tag isn't used for putting quotes around things.
'That's a big elephant in the room for them because you can imagine the Silverlight team [whose] whole existence is to add [this] functionality in.
What? I have to imagine the Silverlight team? Don't they exist?
Note to editors: I think the point of liberally sprinkling square-bracketed words around your quotes is to ensure the sentences make sense.
Don't try to reinvent the concept of gameplay.
That's the whole problem - generally speaking, they're not.
Everyone has made a mythology about VHS somehow losing to Sony Beta
Beta won? Damn, who does no-one tell me these things? Oh well, it doesn't really matter now - I threw out my VHS and bought an HD-DVD player last week.
As stated in the blog post itself, Danielle posted the high resolution image by mistake, due to her lack of understanding of such things. Slightly dumb? Yes. An excuse for stealing the picture and making it into a huge great billboard without a license? Nope.
I don't have kids, but I find this massively creepy. I'm pretty sure no-one would use a photo of me to advertise anything, but if they did so without my permission and I stumbled across it unexpectedly, I'd be very creeped out.
I don't really see the "creative commons = no-one would be bothered" link either. If no-one cared about this kind of use of their images, there'd be no need for the "noncommercial" CC license.
Read my sig and guess where I am from :-)
Hmm, somewhere that has only a loose grasp of English grammar and apostrophe use... the USA? :)
With articles such as this, it's hard to tell whether we're being subjected to bad science or bad journalism. Both the summary and TFA quite categorically state that the "myth" of fingerprints being used to improve grip has been disproven. They then go on to describe how this experiment tested whether fingerprints helped when grasping an extremely smooth surface, and found out that they didn't (well okay, actually they did, but not by very much).
Finally, some alternate hypotheses as to why fingerprints evolved are posited, the first of which is: they may improve grip on rough surfaces. Not acrylic glass or anything, but those other kind of surfaces - you know, the type that actually occur in nature.
I'm pretty sure I don't know much more now than I did before I read the article.
"Worked on"? While it's easy to say this with hindsight, all of the ideas that make up this "emergency mode" are pretty obvious. It did not require anyone to "work on" them. The patent covers the fact that the phone will do these things (the easy part), not the technical details of how it will do them (the hard part).
I have no objection to Apple protecting the hardware and software that allows their phone to do these things. I object to them being able to stop others from implementing these obvious ideas without paying royalties, and thereby ensuring that less phones will have these features in the long run than would otherwise be the case.
The real question is not how this Stephen E. Arnold imbecile managed to spew forth such an unholy spurt of verbal diarrhea, but why on earth said spurt has been inflicted on the /. readership.
If that were the case, surely he would have said something along the lines of "They were all third rate covers of 'For the Love of Money' aka the money song by the O'Jays"?
Apparently Mount Marcy, Mount Elbrus, Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Etna are all the highest mountain. Then again, I was also informed that "high mountains are the hum of human cities torture", so I think I'll just steer clear of mountains altogether.
Holy god is this funny or scary?
Yes.
So third rate, in fact, that they managed to get the number of "Money"s in the title wrong.
Unless this is a medley of Pink Floyd's "Money" with Abba's "Money, Money, Money"? I'd pay good money to hear that.
As opposed to a properly written summary, which would be a great tool for dispensing information to readers of the site.
permits users to write short notes in the air with their phone
Sort of like a touch-screen, but far more effort?
a user could take a picture with a phone camera, and annote it immediately with a short caption
Sort of like a touch-screen, but far more effort?
If only someone would invent a phone that had both an accelerometer and a touch-screen. They could make a fortune!
Quite frankly, these films hold only a weak attraction for me. Pixar are a bunch of bosons, and they can go spin.
When did Britain get moved to a different continent? Or did we get upgraded?
Apparently there's a similar problem with light pollution in Kansas, Texas and the United States.