There are plenty of ways to extend the lifetime of a single player game without adding multiplayer, and Ratchet and Clank Going Commando is an excellent example.
Yes, the main storyline game takes about 10-15 hrs of play, but once you finish, you open up a Challenge Mode where the difficulty is higher, but the number of bolts (currency units) to buy weapons and other goodies drastically increases. Further weapon enhancements become unlocked. Additionally, there are skill points that unlock 'cheats' and platinum bolts that can be used to by modifications for weapons. Continuing to unlock all these items will unlock special DVD content, such as drawing board ideas, making-of movies, TV spots, and so forth. I've already added at least 20 more hours of gameplay after finishing the game just to continue to unlock things, and that $40 has definitely been well spent, IMO.
However, R&C tends to be the exception, not the rule, for many platformers or shooters nowadays.
When comparing the first Jak and the first R&C, both games are very tight, but Jak has just a bit of a edge for some extra polish and a touch more on the humorous side.
However, while the concept of putting GTA-like missions into a platformer is very unique and could possibly charge up that genre for future games, Jak 2 lost a lot in the sequel when comparing game play. Humor is there, for sure, but there's not as much puzzles in terms of how to make certain jumps or get around certain enemy hoards, and while mini-games exist, they're not as varied as what was in Jak 1. The game quickly becomes all about the weapons, as opposed to melee combat, and even there, there's no difficult challenge when in the field when armed. It took me about 18hrs to finish it, but I've heard others were 10hrs or less. And unlike Jak 1, getting the elusive (every secret/object/etc) 100% completion doesn't feel like one will get much for it.
R&C 2, based on the demo, looks like more of the same, but upping/changing the weapons and improving the game engine (there's a level that is a small, 500m-ish diameter asteroid sphere that you can walk around and see the horizon change that fast). So saying that it can just be a mission pack/add-on may be truthful, but sometimes, it's best not to mess with the gameplay of a title when you release a sequel. With Jak 2 being a disappointment despite the hype, I don't expect R&C 2 to let me done even if it is just R&C with new toys. The original was a nicely polished game (save for one underwater against-the-clock level that I know has frusterated players left and right) and if the sequel is simply more of the same, all the better.
Now if they would only get out a sequel to Sly Cooper, keeping again the same formula but upping the gameplay amount, then we'll be all set...
I expect to get my copy of R&C 2 tonight to confirm everything.
..it's the plot, characters, and other parts of the presentation. The last several Disney movies ( Atlantis, Treasure Island) have suffered from being overly casted by big names but lacking any plot, and while trying to be serious, they through in characters that are to be lovable and huggable. This has been going on ever since Lion King, as they struggle to try to recreate the formula that Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, the Little Mermaid, and Alladin were about to do.
On the other hand, the story writing and characters created by Pixar in the their last several movies could have easily been able to be done with traditional animation, assuming a good animation studio was behind it. The 3d CGI adds the right amount of sparkle to an already top-notch story, but the writing is so good, that the 3d is not necessary.
What Disney needs is to rethink their approach to their 'animated' features. Lilo and Stitch *was* funny and was a good movie, and beautiful to look at with the watercolor backgrounds. If it was done in 3d, it actually may have actually lost something in the final presenation. But the key improvement was the writing where they turned back to their past talent and got them to do their thing, and didn't muck about in making it family friendly. As such, it's a very witty movie. But when the management gets too deep in the details to make a movie more appealing to the very young crowd, it suffers drastically (such as Treasure Planet did).
Fortunately, I don't think Dreamworks is giving up their feature animation department. Sure, Sinbad didn't do so well, but they have had a few good shots with that and with The Road to El Diablo. (If anything, Dreamworks fault lies in too much 2D/3D overlap). WB has disbanded it's feature animation department (The new LT movie is not much as aniamted as it is live), and FOX killed it's line after Titan AE failed. It's a shame that people think that 3d is the only way that people will appreicate an animated movie. The only reason that every Pixar movie has worked is that every Pixar movie has great writing behind it, not just a bunch of render farms.
I played the demo, but my reserve copy got here today at my local Gamestop, and I've got about an hour of gameplay into it. The full game doesn't disappoint; smooth beautiful graphics (with several nods to the animation style from the original 2d games), the fighting is great (particularly with the slow/reverse time effects you can use) and the jumping puzzles are yet to be impossible (and thanks to the reverse time of the dagger, you can rewind to retry the difficult jumps a limited number of times, but save points are sufficiently frequent to not make this a problem).
HDTV is NOT the same as digital television. HDTV is High Definition TV, which is where your ultra-large plasma TV will display in all it's beauty and can be recieved with standard over-the-air signals without the need of digital TV, as it's already there now (While I think the FCC is interesting in promoting HDTV, it's not a mandate yet). DTV is digital TV, and that's the transferring of everything, including the mandated shutdown of analog-out from broadcast towers, by 2006, though most likely this will go even later.
And if you read carefully, and look at older issues, you will be able to make at least one copy for personal use of any non-premium/PPV show on the network, at least, with unlimited duplication of standard over-the-air broadcasts. This has been voted by the FCC back in July/August at some point.
I know I read elsewhere that the FCC had previously rules that *digitial* TV (DTV) signals must have minimum recording rules (see this article for example). These specifically allow at least one time recording of a DTV signal for personal use.
Yet, HDTV (high definition TV) may have difference restrictions? This seems really odd, and part of the problem is the slow process of implementing two different but new standards at the same time. I believe that HDTV will be carried by DTV in the FCC vision of things to come, so I would expect DTV rules to carry more weight than the HDTV rules.
...based on the MSDN user experience page, this is going to prompt the use of the late-coming OBJECT tag, which is designed to be a nice fallback system to display alternative content if existing mechanisms aren't in place; eg, if an outer OBJECT block can't find a plug-in or isn't given permission, then it can fall back to the next inner-level OBJECT (maybe an image), or if no image capacities are their (in the case of lynx), fall back to a plain text HTML-based OBJECT. This tag was introduced in HTML 4, but because of the various reliances on EMBEDs and other methods for getting ActiveX controls and plugins to work, it never really caught hold.
Additionally, note that if you have a certain advanced option on, you will never be asked to confirm loading plugins, and thus you will always fall back to alternative content. No more flash "punch-the-monkey" ads, hmm? (Mind you, this needs to be overridable page-by-page, so that some sites that ARE flash, like Homestar Runner, can be accessed correctly).
Harmonix has previously done Amplitude and Frequency, both music oriented games, and the same question "Can I import my own songs into it?" has been asked, and the answer is no. It's not issues with copyright, legality or the like. But instead, it's a lot of extra audio and programming work to get the songs into Amp/Freq/KR because they have to break down the songs into the individual components, fine tune it, and other difficult tasks that can bring up the size of the file to a huge size, larger than what can fit on a standard mem card.
KR is going to be to Karaoke as Amp/Freq was to a jukebox -- neither was MEANT to be a replacement for that, but only a way to provide some play value to it.
Having a few friends who didn't play Frequency before Amplitude, I'd suggest skipping Freq and trying Amplitude out first, as the latter is much more polished (save for a nasty net-play bug) and is generally a better game. Of course, you could always pick up Freq on the cheap ($20 easily), then move to Amp, and get the benefits of both.
If this was anyone besides Harmonix working on KE, I'd be worried about it as being something on the order of Brittney's music title for the PS2, but Harmonix knows what it's doing in the music genre (a few members are (re)mixers themselves, not just programmers), and will know how to make this game addictive.
While you may be in jest, the next big game planned from Harmonix (the developers of the PS2 music games Frequency and Amplitude) is "Karaoke Revolution", which is expected to use the headset from SOCOM, and where the goal will be to match the tone, pitch, and speed of real songs alongside the karaoke versions, as revealed at E3. Don't have Harmonix's website handy, but you can find details through the Freq/Amp website, http://www.freq.com/
Instead of adding new and experimental UI features, why not use a feature found on nearly every OS and that most end users will recognize - in this case, the lock symbol that indicates whether you're on a secure site or not. Obviously such a symbol would need to be something sufficiently different, but this is a well established (despite being lacking any standard specification) UI element that would require nearly no new training by the end user.
I realize that to provide both a widescreen and a fullscreen version, with 5.1 sound and little encoding artifacts, would generally require a second disk for most feature films, I don't understand the trend currently for many newer movies to have separate boxes for Wide and Full, particularly when the version info is not easy to pick out (Now whenever I get a DVD, I doublecheck the back of the box to get all the formatting information to make sure it's what I expect). The old Warner DVD titles were flippies in that one side was full, the other wide, but this means you didn't have a picture on the DVD media itself (oh, boo hoo!). It would seem to me that providing both versions of the movie on a flippy disk in one box would be cheaper than making up two distribution runs, particularly when the number of full vs. wide is still rapidly changing.
I remember way back when when they released demos BEFORE the game hit the shelves, as to give people a chance to play it before buying and as to hopefully make them buy it at full price rather than stale bargain bin prices.
Mind you, 100meg+ demos aren't very EASY to transfer nowadays, much less with the terrible state of sites like FilePlanet, etc. (Has anyone considered a positive use of P2P to split such large files over several clients?)...
If the "commercial email" was highly targetted, 'lightweight' (nothing beyond basic HTML) and marked in such a way as to be able to filter it 100% (e.g. "[ADV]" at the start of the subject), and that by opting in to receive such email would give me a discount/benefit on some site, and that I could opt to get out at any time (and losing such benefit), I'd considering opting in.
This is comparable to Salon's all day premium pass, where by watching a short flash ad gives you free access to all of Salon's premium content. It's a minor tradeoff, at least IMO, to get some of Salon's better articles. When I don't want to see the articles for a day, I simply don't watch the ad, and that's it.
However, the email needs to be minimally intrusive; no extreme tracking or cookies or other payloads, and the like. Maybe you can active your benefit by following a specific link in the email, such that you're forced to read it (as opposed to filtering it to/dev/null).
While this would easily work, I don't have a lot of trust in email marketing to follow such rules, which means this will never happen, and even if it did, you as the email receiver would have much less ability to control how the marketers use your info.
That is, say I have all my music appropriate tagged for artist, year, and music type (say through MusicBrainz or something similar). Maybe each track has it's own classification for those CDs that have 'various artists' or that the artist goes into a number of different styles, or whatever. You also have tracks from some CDs that are meant to be played without a break between them ("Dark Side of the Moon" for example has a couple of tracks like this).
Now, what I'd LIKE to do is to have my mp3 player look at the current song, then using a combination of random factors and some expert knowledge to select the next song to play as to have a nice subtle shift in music tone. Right now, the random feature in most music players could easily put up a grunge track right after a classic track, then into some 60s rock. This is not necessarily wrong, but it's a bit drastic.
I've considered a way to build up a finite state machine of the various musical types as typically defined by the MP3 ID tags, such that each type is a state, and you can only effectively move to very related types in the FSM. (A random factor with possibly some weighting would be used to determine which state to go to: if you are currently at "80s Synthpop", you have a good chance to go to "70s Pop" or "90s Pop" and a slight chance to move to "Electronica", for example). Such a FSM would need a lot of community suggestions, and maybe the end result would require some net-lookup table as to get the current FSM status.
So the program as I see it would look at this FSM, the artist, and other details (again, if there's a song that should follow it, it gets higher weighing), the program generates a weighted list of tracks to go to next, hits the RNG, and pulls out the next track. At which point it repeats itself. Various aspects, such as the weighting on the genre, artist, or play order, could be included. Additionally, the FSM should allow for a "completely unrelated" jump to a different genre that's not necessarily related to the current one, but with some chance as set by the user. Thus, with this program in play, if you have a good select of CD tracks, you can have the playlist progress slowly through genres, thus not having massive mood changes during the playlist, unless you have set it up as such.
I know there are programs that can generated weighted playlists from your input , such as LongPlayer, but this only looks at your ratings, and doesn't try to do anything tricky on the list otherwise.
Mind you, the way current MP3 players work, this would most likely be done by generating a playlist from your current song selection, which you then feed to winamp or whatever. A plugin that does this dynamically would be best, but I don't think a lot of these mp3 players have that type of ability builtin, and instead, you have programs like LongPlayer that call out to WinAmp to only play the song, LPlayer doing the playlist selection.
Does anyone know if such projects exist yet, or is this even something the community would be interested in?
Actually, I thought of this first this, and went looking for stories as to the current state. The last I can find was this Slashdot posting that stated that the full 9th Circuit did find that site unlawful, and ordered it taken down just under a year ago. (The above poster is correct, in that a 3-judge panel of the 9th overturned the lower ruling, but later the full court reinstated it). A quick search reveals no other progress about this case.
Of course, that's the 9th Circuit (CA, WA, and OR), meaning that that precident has little effect on what appears to be an East Coast battle. It can be used as evidence, but it can't be used as a rules-setting precident. However, I do agree that the conditions w.r.t. to the spammer case in the main story are very similar, and the tactics, though not initiated by the web page author, that basically boil down to harassment and threats, are going to be the thorn in this case.
Extra intake fan port. Unless you have a case that has a panel that would cover the 5.25 portion, you can purchase fan kits that can help with air flow if you have a case problem.
Cooled HD drive bay. Similar to the above, but right behind the fans is a mount for a standard 3.5" drive, if you're doing any sort of video editing or massive drive utilization, you can stick this in there and keep the drive itself nice and cool.
Sound card "breakout" box. At least on my Windows drive, my SB Extigy Platinum has a nice 5.25" box that I can connect various sound equipment as well as more USB/firewire devices at the front of the computer instead of the back, also had the IR recievers for the remote. There's also third party breakout boxes that are not quite as sophisticated, but at least offer various audio utilites including standard stereo in's and out's, graphics equalizers, etc., typically installed by adding a back panel where a PCI would normally go, routing the normal sound card inputs to this, and then a ribbon cable to the box.
Extra USB/Firewire connect points. You can never go wrong with adding more of these; I believe I've seen commercial solutions that fit nicely into the 5.25" bay, but if you're willing to get a bit dirty by cutting the plastic facing to add these ports, it's doable.
System monitor. Little panels with a 20x4 (maybe 40x4?) LCD display that can be used to track temperatures, voltages, and possible access some/dev type readings so that even with the screensaver on/monitor off, you can quickly glance at the LCD and figure out the state of the machine.
Another DVD-Rom/CD-Rom drive. The original poster sounds like he already has one DVD-R and a CD-RW, but if you're a gamer, a lot of newer games require the CD in the drive to play. Easy enough if you're only playing one game, but what if you want to bounce back and forth between two or more games? You can keep both game CDs in separate drives, and thus you don't have to worry about disk flipping while playing.
Another CD-R(W) drive. Plan weekly backups to this drive (w/o erasing the original data), just making sure that you flip in a new unformatted CDR into the drive on a normal schedule, and this way, as long as you only use that drive for that purpose, you won't miss a backup because you swapped disks on your main burner.
Pulling components that the average linux joe may not use regularly and yet retaining a nice plugable extention interface, as was done with Phoenix (built on Mozilla's extentions, but also such that Mozilla features removed in the main Phoenix binary could be recovered with extentions), is a better way to approach the building of applications instead of building monolithic applications that can do everything out of the box *cough*emacs*cough*. And if it's built on the same cross-platform ease as opposed to several other OSS email clients, I'd love that, as I typically interface my linux box from Windows, and while mutt works, I really am beginning to need something graphical to handle my mail better.
My next computer purchase for a linux box, I plan to get a mid-range chip, then underclock it a few notches as to reduce it's operating temperature and thus extend the reliability of the chip. I don't want to spend a fortune and worry my hair out over whether my CPU is running too hot or not. While I can understand Intel's concern with resellers of their CPUs falsing advertizing faster chips but in reality selling overclocked ones, I hope Intel realizes that it's better to allow consumers to be able to over/underclock the CPU, and instead pursue legal actions against resellers that fake CPU speeds, instead of going for an overpreventative hardware solution.
Ambrosia's made several excellent games for the Mac, and I'd definitely be interested in buying any Windows ports that they make. Their first games were generally enhanced clones of classic arcade games (Maelstorm : Astroids ; Aperion : Centipede ; Barracks : Qix, and so forth), but then they got into original designs like with Escape Velocity and Avara. Their games are nearly always of high quality, requirely nearly no updates after release (and I was part of a beta testing cycle once and I know that they do heavily beta test before release). And for $25, you get games that are overly additive, certainly a reasonable exchange.
More so, I'm finding that there's not a lot of shareware authors interested in the Windows market. It may be the case where the market suffers from two problems: it's so potentally large that it's hard to let people know you have a new game and secondly, there's more people on the Windows side that I would think would look for cracks and codes to avoid the registration than there are on the Mac side (mostly due to numbers again, mac users generally have some sort of loyality to those that develop good software for the platform). So having more choices for shareware games is a good thing. Sure, you can argue that a lot of good games can be found via Flash or JAva, but Flash and Java still has some limits that can't faithfully be used to make the same type of games that you can do on the native system programs.
So here's to good luck to Ambrosia for success in this venture.
Something I've been looking for...
on
An IMDb for Books
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· Score: 3, Interesting
...at least in terms of a quick way to get pertinent data on a book (title, author, publication date, etc) via it's ISBN, ideally in an XML-type format. Sure, I know you can scrap that info from Amazon, but a simple database would be nice. I know there exists a similar XML-based database for DVD releases, and the various CD music databases already exist, but otherwise, the only place I could find a ISNB lookup outside of Amazon was one that simply returned a title for the ISBN.
I'd also like to see something on the order for computer and video game software. Again, everything tied to the ISBN with some necessary database details to file in.
I've been of the opinion that we need to have 3 different viewing (including sorting and moderation point modifiers) settings for each user: one for 'normal' viewing, one for when you have mod points, and one for stories older than some threshold. For example, I'd view stories when I moderatored with no modifiers and a low threshold, while stories that I want to review after some vacation or older stories, I'd only want +3 or higher.
Unfortunately, this would be an increase in the size of the database (up to, but probably not, 3times larger), and probably would only be used by a fraction of the/. readership.
The project that the original post refered to as a lacking attempt, I was at UMich as it was being developed (has since moved on to UIC), and their goal there at that time was to try to put ChE into Virtual Reality, to explode a chemical reactor at several difference scales (unit, particle flow, and reaction within the catalyst). They got the layout down well and the various movements well, but as the poster indicated, it was awkward and was meant to be used with the full VR helmet (though you could run it on a standard monitor too). It was interesting but it didn't seem practical as a teaching aid to a large number of students.
In general, using existing gaming engines as a starting point has 2 issues to consider particularly in ChE:
First is the modelling of the plant or whatever you want to see. This is rather easy since most of these engines can give you a realistic design without necessarily a lot of detail, making these engines ideally suited for the purpose (as opposed to starting from scratch with new 3d modelling program).
The other aspect is getting the "actions", specifically the chemical and physical phenomenia, correctly working. Sure, one can create a map file that has a scripted action such that it follows the physical world counterpart exactly, because you've scripted the path that way. Much more interesting, however, is to actually build in physical and chemical models into the map and let the user and other events cause objects to follow these models. For example, it's very easy to model simple chemical reactions via a finite difference forward partial differential equation method in real time, such that one can have the output of a reactor unit change in response to a change that the user makes in the flow concentration, say by using the game engine to interact with an upstream valve, or such. It would take some effort to build that into the BSP map as opposed to modifying the game engine, but it could be done and would give a much wider range of varied situations than having a number of preset input variables with a fixed number of output possibilities.
Now, do consider if a 3d medium is entirely appropriate for such things; in the case of the reactor example above, 3d is probably overkill to some extent, as that could also be handled by a simple Tk/scripted GUI interface or with something like LabView or Excel, even. But the poster's other example of a crstal cell is something that works right in 3d, so is entirely appropriate.
Another thing to consider is that the older engines (Q2, HL, and Unreal) will work much better on the typical computer equipment that universities will have compared to the newer engines of Q3A, UT2003, and Doom3. You should be able to do all the same physical/chemical modelling in these engines, but the amount of detail you can get from the latter ones is probably overkill for a teaching aide. And since most non-first-tier universities are probably working with machines in the 800MHz to 1.5GHz range without fast 3d cards, you'll get very poor performance out of them.
One final consideration is that some modelling might work better in the Quake-like engines, while others better in the Unreal one, mostly due to the difference in how maps are generated. A Q2 engine would NOT be good for a large outdoor area as you'd expect a chemical plant to be situated in, but Unreal should be great for that (though both will struggle if you pack the scene with polygols). On the other hand, Q2 is probably easier to use for enclosed spaces if you have such that you want to model, or if you're focused more on objects as opposed to trying to carve out a room as with Unreal.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of ways to extend the lifetime of a single player game without adding multiplayer, and Ratchet and Clank Going Commando is an excellent example. Yes, the main storyline game takes about 10-15 hrs of play, but once you finish, you open up a Challenge Mode where the difficulty is higher, but the number of bolts (currency units) to buy weapons and other goodies drastically increases. Further weapon enhancements become unlocked. Additionally, there are skill points that unlock 'cheats' and platinum bolts that can be used to by modifications for weapons. Continuing to unlock all these items will unlock special DVD content, such as drawing board ideas, making-of movies, TV spots, and so forth. I've already added at least 20 more hours of gameplay after finishing the game just to continue to unlock things, and that $40 has definitely been well spent, IMO. However, R&C tends to be the exception, not the rule, for many platformers or shooters nowadays.
However, while the concept of putting GTA-like missions into a platformer is very unique and could possibly charge up that genre for future games, Jak 2 lost a lot in the sequel when comparing game play. Humor is there, for sure, but there's not as much puzzles in terms of how to make certain jumps or get around certain enemy hoards, and while mini-games exist, they're not as varied as what was in Jak 1. The game quickly becomes all about the weapons, as opposed to melee combat, and even there, there's no difficult challenge when in the field when armed. It took me about 18hrs to finish it, but I've heard others were 10hrs or less. And unlike Jak 1, getting the elusive (every secret/object/etc) 100% completion doesn't feel like one will get much for it.
R&C 2, based on the demo, looks like more of the same, but upping/changing the weapons and improving the game engine (there's a level that is a small, 500m-ish diameter asteroid sphere that you can walk around and see the horizon change that fast). So saying that it can just be a mission pack/add-on may be truthful, but sometimes, it's best not to mess with the gameplay of a title when you release a sequel. With Jak 2 being a disappointment despite the hype, I don't expect R&C 2 to let me done even if it is just R&C with new toys. The original was a nicely polished game (save for one underwater against-the-clock level that I know has frusterated players left and right) and if the sequel is simply more of the same, all the better.
Now if they would only get out a sequel to Sly Cooper, keeping again the same formula but upping the gameplay amount, then we'll be all set...
I expect to get my copy of R&C 2 tonight to confirm everything.
On the other hand, the story writing and characters created by Pixar in the their last several movies could have easily been able to be done with traditional animation, assuming a good animation studio was behind it. The 3d CGI adds the right amount of sparkle to an already top-notch story, but the writing is so good, that the 3d is not necessary.
What Disney needs is to rethink their approach to their 'animated' features. Lilo and Stitch *was* funny and was a good movie, and beautiful to look at with the watercolor backgrounds. If it was done in 3d, it actually may have actually lost something in the final presenation. But the key improvement was the writing where they turned back to their past talent and got them to do their thing, and didn't muck about in making it family friendly. As such, it's a very witty movie. But when the management gets too deep in the details to make a movie more appealing to the very young crowd, it suffers drastically (such as Treasure Planet did).
Fortunately, I don't think Dreamworks is giving up their feature animation department. Sure, Sinbad didn't do so well, but they have had a few good shots with that and with The Road to El Diablo. (If anything, Dreamworks fault lies in too much 2D/3D overlap). WB has disbanded it's feature animation department (The new LT movie is not much as aniamted as it is live), and FOX killed it's line after Titan AE failed. It's a shame that people think that 3d is the only way that people will appreicate an animated movie. The only reason that every Pixar movie has worked is that every Pixar movie has great writing behind it, not just a bunch of render farms.
I played the demo, but my reserve copy got here today at my local Gamestop, and I've got about an hour of gameplay into it. The full game doesn't disappoint; smooth beautiful graphics (with several nods to the animation style from the original 2d games), the fighting is great (particularly with the slow/reverse time effects you can use) and the jumping puzzles are yet to be impossible (and thanks to the reverse time of the dagger, you can rewind to retry the difficult jumps a limited number of times, but save points are sufficiently frequent to not make this a problem).
HDTV is NOT the same as digital television. HDTV is High Definition TV, which is where your ultra-large plasma TV will display in all it's beauty and can be recieved with standard over-the-air signals without the need of digital TV, as it's already there now (While I think the FCC is interesting in promoting HDTV, it's not a mandate yet). DTV is digital TV, and that's the transferring of everything, including the mandated shutdown of analog-out from broadcast towers, by 2006, though most likely this will go even later. And if you read carefully, and look at older issues, you will be able to make at least one copy for personal use of any non-premium/PPV show on the network, at least, with unlimited duplication of standard over-the-air broadcasts. This has been voted by the FCC back in July/August at some point.
I know I read elsewhere that the FCC had previously rules that *digitial* TV (DTV) signals must have minimum recording rules (see this article for example). These specifically allow at least one time recording of a DTV signal for personal use. Yet, HDTV (high definition TV) may have difference restrictions? This seems really odd, and part of the problem is the slow process of implementing two different but new standards at the same time. I believe that HDTV will be carried by DTV in the FCC vision of things to come, so I would expect DTV rules to carry more weight than the HDTV rules.
...based on the MSDN user experience page, this is going to prompt the use of the late-coming OBJECT tag, which is designed to be a nice fallback system to display alternative content if existing mechanisms aren't in place; eg, if an outer OBJECT block can't find a plug-in or isn't given permission, then it can fall back to the next inner-level OBJECT (maybe an image), or if no image capacities are their (in the case of lynx), fall back to a plain text HTML-based OBJECT. This tag was introduced in HTML 4, but because of the various reliances on EMBEDs and other methods for getting ActiveX controls and plugins to work, it never really caught hold. Additionally, note that if you have a certain advanced option on, you will never be asked to confirm loading plugins, and thus you will always fall back to alternative content. No more flash "punch-the-monkey" ads, hmm? (Mind you, this needs to be overridable page-by-page, so that some sites that ARE flash, like Homestar Runner, can be accessed correctly).
Harmonix has previously done Amplitude and Frequency, both music oriented games, and the same question "Can I import my own songs into it?" has been asked, and the answer is no. It's not issues with copyright, legality or the like. But instead, it's a lot of extra audio and programming work to get the songs into Amp/Freq/KR because they have to break down the songs into the individual components, fine tune it, and other difficult tasks that can bring up the size of the file to a huge size, larger than what can fit on a standard mem card. KR is going to be to Karaoke as Amp/Freq was to a jukebox -- neither was MEANT to be a replacement for that, but only a way to provide some play value to it.
If this was anyone besides Harmonix working on KE, I'd be worried about it as being something on the order of Brittney's music title for the PS2, but Harmonix knows what it's doing in the music genre (a few members are (re)mixers themselves, not just programmers), and will know how to make this game addictive.
While you may be in jest, the next big game planned from Harmonix (the developers of the PS2 music games Frequency and Amplitude) is "Karaoke Revolution", which is expected to use the headset from SOCOM, and where the goal will be to match the tone, pitch, and speed of real songs alongside the karaoke versions, as revealed at E3. Don't have Harmonix's website handy, but you can find details through the Freq/Amp website, http://www.freq.com/
Instead of adding new and experimental UI features, why not use a feature found on nearly every OS and that most end users will recognize - in this case, the lock symbol that indicates whether you're on a secure site or not. Obviously such a symbol would need to be something sufficiently different, but this is a well established (despite being lacking any standard specification) UI element that would require nearly no new training by the end user.
I realize that to provide both a widescreen and a fullscreen version, with 5.1 sound and little encoding artifacts, would generally require a second disk for most feature films, I don't understand the trend currently for many newer movies to have separate boxes for Wide and Full, particularly when the version info is not easy to pick out (Now whenever I get a DVD, I doublecheck the back of the box to get all the formatting information to make sure it's what I expect). The old Warner DVD titles were flippies in that one side was full, the other wide, but this means you didn't have a picture on the DVD media itself (oh, boo hoo!). It would seem to me that providing both versions of the movie on a flippy disk in one box would be cheaper than making up two distribution runs, particularly when the number of full vs. wide is still rapidly changing.
Mind you, 100meg+ demos aren't very EASY to transfer nowadays, much less with the terrible state of sites like FilePlanet, etc. (Has anyone considered a positive use of P2P to split such large files over several clients?)...
This is comparable to Salon's all day premium pass, where by watching a short flash ad gives you free access to all of Salon's premium content. It's a minor tradeoff, at least IMO, to get some of Salon's better articles. When I don't want to see the articles for a day, I simply don't watch the ad, and that's it.
However, the email needs to be minimally intrusive; no extreme tracking or cookies or other payloads, and the like. Maybe you can active your benefit by following a specific link in the email, such that you're forced to read it (as opposed to filtering it to /dev/null).
While this would easily work, I don't have a lot of trust in email marketing to follow such rules, which means this will never happen, and even if it did, you as the email receiver would have much less ability to control how the marketers use your info.
That is, say I have all my music appropriate tagged for artist, year, and music type (say through MusicBrainz or something similar). Maybe each track has it's own classification for those CDs that have 'various artists' or that the artist goes into a number of different styles, or whatever. You also have tracks from some CDs that are meant to be played without a break between them ("Dark Side of the Moon" for example has a couple of tracks like this).
Now, what I'd LIKE to do is to have my mp3 player look at the current song, then using a combination of random factors and some expert knowledge to select the next song to play as to have a nice subtle shift in music tone. Right now, the random feature in most music players could easily put up a grunge track right after a classic track, then into some 60s rock. This is not necessarily wrong, but it's a bit drastic.
I've considered a way to build up a finite state machine of the various musical types as typically defined by the MP3 ID tags, such that each type is a state, and you can only effectively move to very related types in the FSM. (A random factor with possibly some weighting would be used to determine which state to go to: if you are currently at "80s Synthpop", you have a good chance to go to "70s Pop" or "90s Pop" and a slight chance to move to "Electronica", for example). Such a FSM would need a lot of community suggestions, and maybe the end result would require some net-lookup table as to get the current FSM status.
So the program as I see it would look at this FSM, the artist, and other details (again, if there's a song that should follow it, it gets higher weighing), the program generates a weighted list of tracks to go to next, hits the RNG, and pulls out the next track. At which point it repeats itself. Various aspects, such as the weighting on the genre, artist, or play order, could be included. Additionally, the FSM should allow for a "completely unrelated" jump to a different genre that's not necessarily related to the current one, but with some chance as set by the user. Thus, with this program in play, if you have a good select of CD tracks, you can have the playlist progress slowly through genres, thus not having massive mood changes during the playlist, unless you have set it up as such.
I know there are programs that can generated weighted playlists from your input , such as LongPlayer, but this only looks at your ratings, and doesn't try to do anything tricky on the list otherwise.
Mind you, the way current MP3 players work, this would most likely be done by generating a playlist from your current song selection, which you then feed to winamp or whatever. A plugin that does this dynamically would be best, but I don't think a lot of these mp3 players have that type of ability builtin, and instead, you have programs like LongPlayer that call out to WinAmp to only play the song, LPlayer doing the playlist selection.
Does anyone know if such projects exist yet, or is this even something the community would be interested in?
Of course, that's the 9th Circuit (CA, WA, and OR), meaning that that precident has little effect on what appears to be an East Coast battle. It can be used as evidence, but it can't be used as a rules-setting precident. However, I do agree that the conditions w.r.t. to the spammer case in the main story are very similar, and the tactics, though not initiated by the web page author, that basically boil down to harassment and threats, are going to be the thorn in this case.
My next computer purchase for a linux box, I plan to get a mid-range chip, then underclock it a few notches as to reduce it's operating temperature and thus extend the reliability of the chip. I don't want to spend a fortune and worry my hair out over whether my CPU is running too hot or not. While I can understand Intel's concern with resellers of their CPUs falsing advertizing faster chips but in reality selling overclocked ones, I hope Intel realizes that it's better to allow consumers to be able to over/underclock the CPU, and instead pursue legal actions against resellers that fake CPU speeds, instead of going for an overpreventative hardware solution.
More so, I'm finding that there's not a lot of shareware authors interested in the Windows market. It may be the case where the market suffers from two problems: it's so potentally large that it's hard to let people know you have a new game and secondly, there's more people on the Windows side that I would think would look for cracks and codes to avoid the registration than there are on the Mac side (mostly due to numbers again, mac users generally have some sort of loyality to those that develop good software for the platform). So having more choices for shareware games is a good thing. Sure, you can argue that a lot of good games can be found via Flash or JAva, but Flash and Java still has some limits that can't faithfully be used to make the same type of games that you can do on the native system programs.
So here's to good luck to Ambrosia for success in this venture.
I'd also like to see something on the order for computer and video game software. Again, everything tied to the ISBN with some necessary database details to file in.
Unfortunately, this would be an increase in the size of the database (up to, but probably not, 3times larger), and probably would only be used by a fraction of the /. readership.
(most likely, they're talking about the DVD set of the classic Ape movies, rather than the poorly done remake of the last few years...)
In general, using existing gaming engines as a starting point has 2 issues to consider particularly in ChE:
First is the modelling of the plant or whatever you want to see. This is rather easy since most of these engines can give you a realistic design without necessarily a lot of detail, making these engines ideally suited for the purpose (as opposed to starting from scratch with new 3d modelling program).
The other aspect is getting the "actions", specifically the chemical and physical phenomenia, correctly working. Sure, one can create a map file that has a scripted action such that it follows the physical world counterpart exactly, because you've scripted the path that way. Much more interesting, however, is to actually build in physical and chemical models into the map and let the user and other events cause objects to follow these models. For example, it's very easy to model simple chemical reactions via a finite difference forward partial differential equation method in real time, such that one can have the output of a reactor unit change in response to a change that the user makes in the flow concentration, say by using the game engine to interact with an upstream valve, or such. It would take some effort to build that into the BSP map as opposed to modifying the game engine, but it could be done and would give a much wider range of varied situations than having a number of preset input variables with a fixed number of output possibilities.
Now, do consider if a 3d medium is entirely appropriate for such things; in the case of the reactor example above, 3d is probably overkill to some extent, as that could also be handled by a simple Tk/scripted GUI interface or with something like LabView or Excel, even. But the poster's other example of a crstal cell is something that works right in 3d, so is entirely appropriate.
Another thing to consider is that the older engines (Q2, HL, and Unreal) will work much better on the typical computer equipment that universities will have compared to the newer engines of Q3A, UT2003, and Doom3. You should be able to do all the same physical/chemical modelling in these engines, but the amount of detail you can get from the latter ones is probably overkill for a teaching aide. And since most non-first-tier universities are probably working with machines in the 800MHz to 1.5GHz range without fast 3d cards, you'll get very poor performance out of them.
One final consideration is that some modelling might work better in the Quake-like engines, while others better in the Unreal one, mostly due to the difference in how maps are generated. A Q2 engine would NOT be good for a large outdoor area as you'd expect a chemical plant to be situated in, but Unreal should be great for that (though both will struggle if you pack the scene with polygols). On the other hand, Q2 is probably easier to use for enclosed spaces if you have such that you want to model, or if you're focused more on objects as opposed to trying to carve out a room as with Unreal.