It helps if you compare the MPAA's ratings to the ESRB's:
ESRB - MPAA
M - R
AO - NC-17
However, unlike the MPAA, the ESRB tells you exactly why it got the rating with a label on the back of the package. The two are clearly modelled on very similar criteria. I've never seen a movie that was violent enough to get an NC-17 rating, likewise for games and the AO rating. Sexual content, on the other hand, tends to easily pushes either over the line.
If this idiot wants to do something, how about finding a way to prevent these M rated titles from find their way into the hands of children? The M rating clearly says that it's for ages 17 and up, and these idiots continue to complain that 12 and 13 year old children are playing the game. The M rating is supposed to be equivalent to the MPAA's R rating for movies, and by and large, it is (perhaps it's even more generous with that rating than the MPAA is).
If he wants to lobby for something, perhaps they should make the ESRB ratings enforcable on game resellers or something. Perhaps levy fines on retailers who sell M or AO games to children under 17 (e.g. require ID to purchase these games). It'd probably be an easier fight than Jack's crusade to destroy the ESRB and Rockstar.
Even for gamers, this may not be of any immediate concern. Until Windows Vista is the dominant operating system, there will be few games built directly on WGF. WGF 1.0 won't be a big deal since it's mostly just DirectX 9 with a different underlying driver model. But if Microsoft wants developers to use WGF 2.0 (aka DirectX 10), they'll likely need to create a Windows XP version, or settle on obscurity for a few years of it's life (DirectX 9.0c still supports Windows 98).
It's also useful for any power plant that can't adjust output depending on demand and produces surplus power at times. Hydroelectric, and wind both fall into that category as well. Hydro produces the same power day, or night despite the fact that power demand at night is typically lower. Wind power production varies because of the wind.
'd be inclined to think things might be easier to translate one direction than the other
Yes, emulating x86 on PPC is probably far easier than the reverse. There are relatively few features that a Pentium III varient would have that would be absent on the PPC (and as you said, Microsoft already has VirtualPC). Going in the opposite direction means you're always starved for general purpose registers, which means you have to store and load them from memory. This can kill performance quite rapidly.
Frankly the CPU emulation is the easiest part. There are a number of tricks that the xbox crew can use for accelerating the emulation, such as shipping PPC native versions of common xbox libraries. Unfortunately, with any form of emulation there can be problems with things like timing -- code that works fine on the real machine might lock or crash waiting for an event that happens sooner or later than it expects. Take the PS1 support on the PS2, for example. You can tell the PS2 to read PS1 discs at full speed, and it works fine for some games, but others lock up or crash when you use this feature.
Next is the graphics chip. Anyone who's ever used DirectX can probably tell you that the nvidia cards do act somewhat differently from ATI cards, even though most of that is supposed to be hidden by the DirectX API. Assuming everyone used the high-level API (and that may not be a valid assumption), it's quite likely that some games rely on bugs in the API. Emulating a bug (aka Undocumented Features!) can be extremely frustrating.
The idea of making people pay for their e-mail comes up frequently, but those who propose it rarely mention the problems with it.
First, it doesn't really solve the zombie spambot problems. Spammers don't seem to care if they break the law or not, provided they don't get caught. A large amount of spam already comes from zombie PCs, and your proposal wouldn't change that. The only thing that would change is some poor slob would end up with a $500 internet bill every now and then. Since it's unlikely the customer in these instances will end up having to pay, that means general internet prices will shoot through the roof so the ISP can cover it.
Second, who will be the clearinghouse for these payments? Do you think everyone will agree to any choices anyone picks out? We can't even agree world-wide on television standards.
If and when we manage to get a grip on the zombie situation, then maybe we can revisit the pay-for-email idea, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Sadly, the only technology that seems even remotely capable of solving this problem is a technology that is even more repugnant to most of us than pay per mail schemes -- "trusted" computing. Even that will have it's problems dealing with this.
What is better to look at in order to determine bias is which party the majority of the media have supported over those 50 years. As far as I can remember, that has usually been the liberals. That was certainly true of the last election.
Memory is a tricky thing. One's own world-view can colour one's memory. You're obviously a conservative, but do you really believe there's a massive conspiracy to skew the news in favour of liberals, or perhaps it's something as mediocre as much of the media not representing your views because they don't understand them? Unfortunately, that's not as sexy as a conspiracy, is it? Frankly, from my own memory, the media portrayed John Kerry as a fairly weak-willed person, and someone who would not make a good leader. Bush, on the other hand, was a known -- the devil you know, if you will.
The good thing is that the American voters see through that blatent media endorsements of the liberals and elect conservatives like Bush and throw liberal senators out of office even if he has an important position in the senate.
You can't be serious... 51% is hardly a landslide by anyone's imagination. Frankly, the U.S. political elections appear to be very cyclic (with some places being more cyclic than others). One party has power for a time until people get sick of them, and it changes. There will be another liberal president, regardless of if you like it or not, just as there will be other conservative presidents, regardless of if liberals like it or not. So single party represents the views of all americans, and perhaps the longer the party has power, the less it represents those citizens.
The world is hardly as black and white as the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum seem to make it out to be. Don't believe that there's only one true path. Liberals come up with both good and bad ideas, as do Conservatives. Like it or not, you're going to have to live in a country that makes use of both ideals.
Ahh, yes. The "Liberal Media Bias". I really get tired of this anecdote. Maybe you were away when the Clinton blow job media feeding frenzy was going on? The media always focuses on exploiting the weaknesses of anyone who has power because it sells. As long as the story is minimally verifiable or completely unverifiable, they'll print it. Frankly, despite your claims that the media is out to get all you conservatives, I seem to recall little criticism about George H.W. Bush (they were merciless toward Dan Quayle's frequent silly mistakes, though). Reagan was pounded on his unusual economic policies, and Carter was pounded because he was a poor leader.
How about just the numbers of people from each side. In the past fifty years, there have been 6 Republican presidents having served 30 of those 50 years, and 4 Democrat presidents serving the remaining 20 years. Given the non-partisan tendency of those with power to abuse it given enough time, there OUGHT to be more Republican scandals in the white house than Democrat ones. Unless you believe that Republicans are by definition uncorruptable? (heh)
Don't mind me, though. I'm just an interested observer, and have no stake in either party (I'm Canadian). I just find the way people whip out the "Liberal Media Bias" excuse to justify anything they have to say as pathetic. Why don't you call it what it really is, Lazy Media Bias.
People do need training to use a mouse. Pointing with the mouse and double clicking is often a difficult skill for new users of the device. Most people grasp the pointing part of mouse operation fairly quickly, but a lot of people have a great deal of difficulty with double clicks. Making two successive clicks without moving the mouse can be a challenge when you're not used to using your hands like that.
If Apple wanted to improve their usability, they ought to ban double clicks, rather than worry about additional mouse buttons. Teaching people how to point the mouse -- tough but not bad. Teaching people which button to click -- fairly easy. Teaching people to (single, or double) click without moving the mouse -- far more difficult.
The fact that the developers needed to go to various websites to see what the worst IE CSS bugs are indicates 2 things: 1) the IE development team doesn't actually develop any web pages to test the software that they write (if they did, they would know EXACTLY how infurating some of these IE-only bugs are), and 2) they've never read the CSS standard spec.
It's worse than that. The only way to report a bug is to pay Microsoft for that privilege. In other words, you have to call their Product Support Services, give them your credit card, swallow the $45-$350 fee, report the bug, go through their troubleshooting steps (useless), and beg to have the fees dropped. The only type of bug reports they seem to accept without payment is security bugs.
They don't know what bugs IE has because Microsoft has effectively insulated them from receiving bug reports from all but their largest clients.
Personally, I don't completely hate the CD-R levy, however I do have a problem with it. The copyright industry is in a mad rush to get copyright changes passed (bill C-60) so that TPMs are illegal to break in Canada. Now, the music industry is also rushing to implement copy protection on their CDs to defeat those who would rip them to MP3 format. Who believes these publishers will tell the CPCC to omit the names of artists that are protected by TPMs from the list? Are we supposed to continue paying for a privilege we will soon be unable to exercise?
Just for fun, here's some of the common excuses I've heard:
"It's done this since I last got you to fix it" - Slightly different than the legitimate "it's still doing it" complaint, since this one usually comes months and months after the initial fix and is nothing more than a customer trying to get free work out of you. I've seen a customer try to pull this one after six months of the last contact (I can see being busy for a week, or even a month, but SIX?).
"And now THIS doesn't work!" You fixed their printer jam, and now their monitor displays funny colours, so they shouldn't have to pay for you to fix their monitor!
"You didn't fix the problem the first time around." Usually associated with a moving set of problems, and they use a new problem as the rational for why they refuse to pay the last bill. Each problem is usually spaced by about a month (so they can complain if you try charging them late payment fees, too), and are not usually associated with each other. Related to 1 and 2.
"But you didn't finish the work." You finished all the tasks they laid out for you at the outset, and even asked them if there was anything else they needed done, and still this complaint shows up. Sometimes it's a legitimate oversight, too often it's just them trying to get free work out of you.
"You didn't respond quick enough, so I don't think I should have to pay anything." You're in the middle of fixing a downed server when a client calls in about a printer that doesn't work. You know the client can print to the one down the hall, so you tell them to do that until you can get there to fix it for them. Of course, you fix it the next day, but they hassle you when the bill shows up in their mail (and they probably hassled you about every other bill you've ever sent them, too).
There are others, too, but these are the only ones I can think of right now.
Sony would probably have to be the one to initiate this. However, since that mod resides in the save file, all you need is an AR Max with Maxdrive to transport to/from the PC.
Low prices also attract cheap customers. The kind that will try to talk their way out of even a small bill. Spending a half hour trying to convince someone to pay a $50 bill is a huge waste of time (money).
Yes, we're overdue, but most scientists say that a reversal would take hundreds or thousands of years to finish. In fact, we may be in the midst of one right now (the magnetic field has been weakening for a couple thousand years now). But it's not like anyone will wake up tomorrow and find that compasses, and everything else that is affected by the earth's magnetic field suddenly don't work.
Some people also say we're supposed to be overdue for a glacial period since we're still in the middle of an ice age. I don't have the energy to worry about all these things I can't change even if I wanted to. And none of these things is likely to happen in my lifetime (or anywhere near my lifetime). I think I'd rather focus on things I can affect.
Tom's tells you that it is more important that the pixel be within 10% of the requested value before it should count as having changed at all - now that's a lie. Your eyes do not notice the pixel being 210 instead of 175 for 4ms, your eyes notice the complete and utter lack of ghosting.
Nonsense. You eyes will notice that the ghosting has been replaced by a different phenomenon -- edges that glow when moving. It'll be somewhat like watching video that's been passed through a sharpen filter. It can take the panel they tested up to 32ms to stabilize to that 10% of the requested value. Since that panel seems to need more than 20ms for around 40% of the shades it can display, this is still a form of ghosting. Personally, I imagine the "slower" VP191b they graphed alongside the VX924 is far better at displaying video since it delivers under 15ms response consistently. Now, this "overdrive" technology is still young, and I imagine it's possible that they'll figure out how to properly regulate it so that it hits the requested value (or very close) on the first shot instead of taking two or three redraws to hit.
Now, these manufacturers are playing number games here. They don't measure how long it takes to show the requested pixel shade, but rather how long it takes to pass the requested pixel shade. If you look at the oscilloscope, the LCD hits 175 in 4ms, but continues to rise to 210 for several ms past that. It'd be more honest to at least measure how long it takes to peak. The ISO/VESA standard measurement for these values don't reflect the speed (or lack thereof) of the display, either. White-black-white transitions aren't a typical usage pattern by any stretch of the imagination. And unfortunately since faster response rate sells, manufacturers have a lot of motivation to find new ways to fudge the results to give them an edge in the marketplace. Unfortunately LCD performance can't be measured with a single number (or two or three or...)
Now, I own an NEC Multisync LCD1760NX which was rated as a 16ms panel when I bought it. How much faster is that VX924? How much compared to the VP191b? With all these number games, I honestly have no way of knowing. I can assume one thing, though, the VX924 certainly isn't 4x faster, and probably not 2x faster, either.
I think there's two reasons why people don't like 3D platform games. One is virtually all of them involve fighting with the camera to see what you want to see. The other is the fact they add another dimension to jumping puzzles -- not only do you need to time the jump correctly, you also need to aim correctly (sometimes the camera angle interferes with both of these tasks).
The problem isn't really that 3D is bad, and 2D is good, but rather that it's a lot more difficult to make a good 3D game than a good 2D game. A 2D game camera only needs to make sure the player is more-or-less centred on the screen, and can see enough of what's in front of them. A 3D camera has to worry about foreground objects that might obscure the camera, as well as get the proper angle so the player can see what they're supposed to do, and line up their attacks/jumps/whatever. The result is that there are a lot of 3D games that would've worked just fine in two dimensions is suddenly seriously flawed when transitioned to three.
You also mentioned the PoP games, which are probably one of the best examples of a well designed platformer in recent times. There are relatively few times where the camera gets in the way during critical moments. The controls are straight forward, and are easy enough to get the hang of. However, Warrior Within has one critical flaw -- they listened to the people who complained about SoT. Combat itself became less monotonous, but also much more common, which made it monotonous. In this case, I'm not sure if the cure is better or worse than the disease. I'm not sure I like the "asshole prince" in WW, either and I'm not sure how "more mature" equals swearing, and bigger breasts (and metal thong bikinis). Doing the platform puzzles while running from the Dahaka was fun, though.
Some games saw little or no change in the 3D transition. RTS, RPG and several sports games, for example, work equally well in 2D or 3D. The only real change is appearance (and perhaps a loss of eye candy features like zoom and rotation). Aside from developers who use 3D models but don't have the budget to create good 3D models, the introduction of 3D has changed these games very little. Other games are pretty much defined by being 3D. Racing games and FPS games are both examples (I know 2D racing games existed, but they're quite different from today's 3D games).
Yes, you are. I use FAT because it's old, and documented and therefore it's possible for common human beings to fix it. It's a pity I usually have to use NTFS because the 4GB file limit of FAT is starting to become a problem (far too many types of corruption on NTFS volumes [MFT corruption, for example] are only solvable by backup/format/restore).
Actually, they're not. The response times that are quoted are rise/fall numbers, and those tend to be somewhat faster than grey-to-grey numbers. Try a FPS game on a 16ms display, and you'll see this -- despite the fact the display is limited to 60Hz refresh, and 16ms should be fast enough for 62fps, there's still ghosting in textures. There is an article on this here. For example, Viewsonic's VX724 only needs 6ms to transition from white to black to white (two transitions), it takes 4ms to transition from one shade of grey to another (one transition).
Then there's the problem that this technology mentioned in TFA is meant to solve -- the LCDs don't instantaneously switch from one shade to another. They slowly (relative to the response rate) switch from one shade to another. Blur can become visible if the pixel isn't held at a particular shade for enough time before changing again. I suspect this technology is more about getting use out of the slower 20-30ms displays than helping the high speed displays that are more common for computer users. Sadly many LCD TVs on the market today seem to use this slower display panel technology.
Perhaps I should've insertted the word "implementation" in there. Replacing files that are in use while installing a program on Linux typically isn't a problem because you don't generally install Linux programs on a FAT partition. ext3, reiserfs, xfs, and jfs are all much better suited to that task.
The problem Raymond Chen explains isn't so much that the rename is harmful, but rather that an incomplete install is harmful. The same thing would happen with Microsoft's currently standard way of doing things -- replacing files at reboot. If you replaced B.dll because it wasn't in use, and used advpack to replace A.dll on next reboot, you'd still have to worry that if Process X loads B.dll, it may not be compatible with the old A.dll. Raymond replies that you can just write your setup program to be smarter and replace none of the files. That, too, has problems since you need to know the exact relationship between the modules of your program. Understanding this can be more difficult than the original task of writing that software. Installing new files has this risk, as well, especially when some of the new files are extensions or plugins to existing programs (like explorer).
This leaves you with two "always safe" installation choices -- either install without needing to replace any files, or install nothing until the system gets rebooted. Any other time, you're risking crashes of some sort if you take this thinking to the logical extreme. Unfortunately, us silly users are demanding fewer reboots not more, so most developers have to gamble. In the worst case, you reboot and your problems go away.
Well, "Debris Seen Not Hitting Shuttle During Launch" wouldn't have been a very catchy headline, would it? I'm just surprised they didn't take it to the next level, "Fiery Destruction of Shuttle Imminent".
That's not really true. The problem is that the installer can not replace any files that are in use by any open program. The windows file systems (FAT/NTFS) prohibit removing a file that's in use (although with NTFS, you can rename the file while it's in-use). The only sure-fire way to make sure the file is not in use is to reboot. There's no danger of a BSOD or any other severe system crash, though.
It's the brain-damaged file system's fault. Contrast this to Linux/UNIX file systems which can typically unlink a file (delete) without freeing the associated inode until the file is actually unloaded by all users of the file. The upside is that the upgrade can take effect without a reboot, the downside is that you may not be fully upgraded unless you restart all applications that use that file you're upgrading. When you upgrade apache, making sure all relavent services are restarted is easy. When you upgrade glibc, it's far from easy.
And the real kicker out of all of this is that Microsoft is unlikely to ever change this. I would prefer a system that worked more like Linux in this regard, but unfortunately many programs on Windows require this annoying file locking scheme to exist exactly as it does right now. If Microsoft changes this, it will break some software, and people will blame Microsoft for the breakage. Even people within Microsoft understand the problems this exectuable locking causes, which is why.NET programs for IIS use this strange shadow copy (different from W2K3's shadow copy feature!) method to allow you to update your website, despite the fact the executables in the target directory should be in use.
If it was GWBasic, it would've had to fit in 64K (or maybe it's 64K code + 64k data - it's [thankfully] been so long). Perhaps you used QuickBasic, instead?
Segment:Offset addressing is for the birds, though. It's no fun needing to know if your pointers are near or far, or if you're using a small, medium or large memory model in your language.
Slashdot Mirror
ESRB - MPAA
M - R
AO - NC-17
However, unlike the MPAA, the ESRB tells you exactly why it got the rating with a label on the back of the package. The two are clearly modelled on very similar criteria. I've never seen a movie that was violent enough to get an NC-17 rating, likewise for games and the AO rating. Sexual content, on the other hand, tends to easily pushes either over the line.
If he wants to lobby for something, perhaps they should make the ESRB ratings enforcable on game resellers or something. Perhaps levy fines on retailers who sell M or AO games to children under 17 (e.g. require ID to purchase these games). It'd probably be an easier fight than Jack's crusade to destroy the ESRB and Rockstar.
Even for gamers, this may not be of any immediate concern. Until Windows Vista is the dominant operating system, there will be few games built directly on WGF. WGF 1.0 won't be a big deal since it's mostly just DirectX 9 with a different underlying driver model. But if Microsoft wants developers to use WGF 2.0 (aka DirectX 10), they'll likely need to create a Windows XP version, or settle on obscurity for a few years of it's life (DirectX 9.0c still supports Windows 98).
It's also useful for any power plant that can't adjust output depending on demand and produces surplus power at times. Hydroelectric, and wind both fall into that category as well. Hydro produces the same power day, or night despite the fact that power demand at night is typically lower. Wind power production varies because of the wind.
Frankly the CPU emulation is the easiest part. There are a number of tricks that the xbox crew can use for accelerating the emulation, such as shipping PPC native versions of common xbox libraries. Unfortunately, with any form of emulation there can be problems with things like timing -- code that works fine on the real machine might lock or crash waiting for an event that happens sooner or later than it expects. Take the PS1 support on the PS2, for example. You can tell the PS2 to read PS1 discs at full speed, and it works fine for some games, but others lock up or crash when you use this feature.
Next is the graphics chip. Anyone who's ever used DirectX can probably tell you that the nvidia cards do act somewhat differently from ATI cards, even though most of that is supposed to be hidden by the DirectX API. Assuming everyone used the high-level API (and that may not be a valid assumption), it's quite likely that some games rely on bugs in the API. Emulating a bug (aka Undocumented Features!) can be extremely frustrating.
First, it doesn't really solve the zombie spambot problems. Spammers don't seem to care if they break the law or not, provided they don't get caught. A large amount of spam already comes from zombie PCs, and your proposal wouldn't change that. The only thing that would change is some poor slob would end up with a $500 internet bill every now and then. Since it's unlikely the customer in these instances will end up having to pay, that means general internet prices will shoot through the roof so the ISP can cover it.
Second, who will be the clearinghouse for these payments? Do you think everyone will agree to any choices anyone picks out? We can't even agree world-wide on television standards.
If and when we manage to get a grip on the zombie situation, then maybe we can revisit the pay-for-email idea, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Sadly, the only technology that seems even remotely capable of solving this problem is a technology that is even more repugnant to most of us than pay per mail schemes -- "trusted" computing. Even that will have it's problems dealing with this.
The world is hardly as black and white as the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum seem to make it out to be. Don't believe that there's only one true path. Liberals come up with both good and bad ideas, as do Conservatives. Like it or not, you're going to have to live in a country that makes use of both ideals.
How about just the numbers of people from each side. In the past fifty years, there have been 6 Republican presidents having served 30 of those 50 years, and 4 Democrat presidents serving the remaining 20 years. Given the non-partisan tendency of those with power to abuse it given enough time, there OUGHT to be more Republican scandals in the white house than Democrat ones. Unless you believe that Republicans are by definition uncorruptable? (heh)
Don't mind me, though. I'm just an interested observer, and have no stake in either party (I'm Canadian). I just find the way people whip out the "Liberal Media Bias" excuse to justify anything they have to say as pathetic. Why don't you call it what it really is, Lazy Media Bias.
If Apple wanted to improve their usability, they ought to ban double clicks, rather than worry about additional mouse buttons. Teaching people how to point the mouse -- tough but not bad. Teaching people which button to click -- fairly easy. Teaching people to (single, or double) click without moving the mouse -- far more difficult.
They don't know what bugs IE has because Microsoft has effectively insulated them from receiving bug reports from all but their largest clients.
Personally, I don't completely hate the CD-R levy, however I do have a problem with it. The copyright industry is in a mad rush to get copyright changes passed (bill C-60) so that TPMs are illegal to break in Canada. Now, the music industry is also rushing to implement copy protection on their CDs to defeat those who would rip them to MP3 format. Who believes these publishers will tell the CPCC to omit the names of artists that are protected by TPMs from the list? Are we supposed to continue paying for a privilege we will soon be unable to exercise?
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"It's done this since I last got you to fix it" - Slightly different than the legitimate "it's still doing it" complaint, since this one usually comes months and months after the initial fix and is nothing more than a customer trying to get free work out of you. I've seen a customer try to pull this one after six months of the last contact (I can see being busy for a week, or even a month, but SIX?).
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"And now THIS doesn't work!" You fixed their printer jam, and now their monitor displays funny colours, so they shouldn't have to pay for you to fix their monitor!
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"You didn't fix the problem the first time around." Usually associated with a moving set of problems, and they use a new problem as the rational for why they refuse to pay the last bill. Each problem is usually spaced by about a month (so they can complain if you try charging them late payment fees, too), and are not usually associated with each other. Related to 1 and 2.
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"But you didn't finish the work." You finished all the tasks they laid out for you at the outset, and even asked them if there was anything else they needed done, and still this complaint shows up. Sometimes it's a legitimate oversight, too often it's just them trying to get free work out of you.
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"You didn't respond quick enough, so I don't think I should have to pay anything." You're in the middle of fixing a downed server when a client calls in about a printer that doesn't work. You know the client can print to the one down the hall, so you tell them to do that until you can get there to fix it for them. Of course, you fix it the next day, but they hassle you when the bill shows up in their mail (and they probably hassled you about every other bill you've ever sent them, too).
There are others, too, but these are the only ones I can think of right now.Sony would probably have to be the one to initiate this. However, since that mod resides in the save file, all you need is an AR Max with Maxdrive to transport to/from the PC.
Low prices also attract cheap customers. The kind that will try to talk their way out of even a small bill. Spending a half hour trying to convince someone to pay a $50 bill is a huge waste of time (money).
Some people also say we're supposed to be overdue for a glacial period since we're still in the middle of an ice age. I don't have the energy to worry about all these things I can't change even if I wanted to. And none of these things is likely to happen in my lifetime (or anywhere near my lifetime). I think I'd rather focus on things I can affect.
Now, these manufacturers are playing number games here. They don't measure how long it takes to show the requested pixel shade, but rather how long it takes to pass the requested pixel shade. If you look at the oscilloscope, the LCD hits 175 in 4ms, but continues to rise to 210 for several ms past that. It'd be more honest to at least measure how long it takes to peak. The ISO/VESA standard measurement for these values don't reflect the speed (or lack thereof) of the display, either. White-black-white transitions aren't a typical usage pattern by any stretch of the imagination. And unfortunately since faster response rate sells, manufacturers have a lot of motivation to find new ways to fudge the results to give them an edge in the marketplace. Unfortunately LCD performance can't be measured with a single number (or two or three or...)
Now, I own an NEC Multisync LCD1760NX which was rated as a 16ms panel when I bought it. How much faster is that VX924? How much compared to the VP191b? With all these number games, I honestly have no way of knowing. I can assume one thing, though, the VX924 certainly isn't 4x faster, and probably not 2x faster, either.
The problem isn't really that 3D is bad, and 2D is good, but rather that it's a lot more difficult to make a good 3D game than a good 2D game. A 2D game camera only needs to make sure the player is more-or-less centred on the screen, and can see enough of what's in front of them. A 3D camera has to worry about foreground objects that might obscure the camera, as well as get the proper angle so the player can see what they're supposed to do, and line up their attacks/jumps/whatever. The result is that there are a lot of 3D games that would've worked just fine in two dimensions is suddenly seriously flawed when transitioned to three.
You also mentioned the PoP games, which are probably one of the best examples of a well designed platformer in recent times. There are relatively few times where the camera gets in the way during critical moments. The controls are straight forward, and are easy enough to get the hang of. However, Warrior Within has one critical flaw -- they listened to the people who complained about SoT. Combat itself became less monotonous, but also much more common, which made it monotonous. In this case, I'm not sure if the cure is better or worse than the disease. I'm not sure I like the "asshole prince" in WW, either and I'm not sure how "more mature" equals swearing, and bigger breasts (and metal thong bikinis). Doing the platform puzzles while running from the Dahaka was fun, though.
Some games saw little or no change in the 3D transition. RTS, RPG and several sports games, for example, work equally well in 2D or 3D. The only real change is appearance (and perhaps a loss of eye candy features like zoom and rotation). Aside from developers who use 3D models but don't have the budget to create good 3D models, the introduction of 3D has changed these games very little. Other games are pretty much defined by being 3D. Racing games and FPS games are both examples (I know 2D racing games existed, but they're quite different from today's 3D games).
Yes, you are. I use FAT because it's old, and documented and therefore it's possible for common human beings to fix it. It's a pity I usually have to use NTFS because the 4GB file limit of FAT is starting to become a problem (far too many types of corruption on NTFS volumes [MFT corruption, for example] are only solvable by backup/format/restore).
Then there's the problem that this technology mentioned in TFA is meant to solve -- the LCDs don't instantaneously switch from one shade to another. They slowly (relative to the response rate) switch from one shade to another. Blur can become visible if the pixel isn't held at a particular shade for enough time before changing again. I suspect this technology is more about getting use out of the slower 20-30ms displays than helping the high speed displays that are more common for computer users. Sadly many LCD TVs on the market today seem to use this slower display panel technology.
Perhaps I should've insertted the word "implementation" in there. Replacing files that are in use while installing a program on Linux typically isn't a problem because you don't generally install Linux programs on a FAT partition. ext3, reiserfs, xfs, and jfs are all much better suited to that task.
This leaves you with two "always safe" installation choices -- either install without needing to replace any files, or install nothing until the system gets rebooted. Any other time, you're risking crashes of some sort if you take this thinking to the logical extreme. Unfortunately, us silly users are demanding fewer reboots not more, so most developers have to gamble. In the worst case, you reboot and your problems go away.
But I also said it only works on NTFS. If you run FAT, you can not do this. Backwards compatibility rears it's ugly head once again.
Well, "Debris Seen Not Hitting Shuttle During Launch" wouldn't have been a very catchy headline, would it? I'm just surprised they didn't take it to the next level, "Fiery Destruction of Shuttle Imminent".
It's the brain-damaged file system's fault. Contrast this to Linux/UNIX file systems which can typically unlink a file (delete) without freeing the associated inode until the file is actually unloaded by all users of the file. The upside is that the upgrade can take effect without a reboot, the downside is that you may not be fully upgraded unless you restart all applications that use that file you're upgrading. When you upgrade apache, making sure all relavent services are restarted is easy. When you upgrade glibc, it's far from easy.
And the real kicker out of all of this is that Microsoft is unlikely to ever change this. I would prefer a system that worked more like Linux in this regard, but unfortunately many programs on Windows require this annoying file locking scheme to exist exactly as it does right now. If Microsoft changes this, it will break some software, and people will blame Microsoft for the breakage. Even people within Microsoft understand the problems this exectuable locking causes, which is why .NET programs for IIS use this strange shadow copy (different from W2K3's shadow copy feature!) method to allow you to update your website, despite the fact the executables in the target directory should be in use.
Segment:Offset addressing is for the birds, though. It's no fun needing to know if your pointers are near or far, or if you're using a small, medium or large memory model in your language.