Actually, you seem to have missed the point of the parent post. I tend to agree with him, but I'll phrase it differently.
Yes, physical media is a serious problem. However, TFA is not talking about physical media. TFA is talking about encodings. There's no reason why email shouldn't be readable in 2090, provided we take the time to progressively archive it on modernized media. Now that backups are automated, this isn't nearly as big a problem as when we're dealing with storage devices that Kirk would have had.
GIF is not going to disappear. The idea that we'll have trouble unwrapping LZW in a hundred years is just nonsense. You want to maintain your data? Fire up your backup program, and replace those eighty cent DVDs once every five years.
Given the cost is $10/meg, Id love to see where you got $2 from
A 64MB Matrix memory card will sell for about $10, Matrix said
Okay, that's a reasonable error to make, I guess. First, that's the wrong kind of memory - that's 2d writable memory, and 3d ROM is much cheaper. Second, that article is five years old. Prices have come way down since.
Don't confuse application lag with load time
Have you even played the game? It was specially labelled "LOADING"
Unfortunately, NDA prevents me from giving out the data I have; this is typical of the gaming industry. That said, if you can't see how $10 for writable five years ago might be $2 for nonwritable today, well, I don't know what to say.
links to the 4 gigabytes
I've already given them several times. Two are in this reply alone.
dont demand proof from me
Why not? You're the one calling me a liar, and making absurd claims on guesses.
when your numbers can just as easily be made up
Sure, except that they aren't. It's relatively easy to find GBA cart prices at $2.14, and it's relatively easy to find Nintendo claiming that they switched to MS3DFR for cost. Do the math.
Making things up to defend calling someone else a liar is simply craven
Then you're craven, cause you're guilty of it
When you don't have the sense to even check what year your prices are coming from, much less that you got the right device, you really need to stop calling people in the industry liars. You're out in left field calling people who do this for a living idiots.
Does it occur to you how that makes you look to the people around you?
The DS cart is Matrix Semiconductor 3d FRAM, and the block mechanism allows a theoretical limit of 4 gigabytes
No, it doesnt. 4 gigabits wouldve been beleivable, but 4 giabytes is a blatant lie
Maybe you should learn what you're talking about before you start calling people liars. It's a 20-bit addressing mechanism where the blocks are 4k. It's simple mathematics.
At a cost of $10 per 64 megabytes according to Matrix No publisher will ever pay that much for a game that large
1) I said that's what the device could hold. Whether anyone will actually do it remains to be seen.
2) Given that the cost of producing a cart is currently hovering around $2, I'd love to hear where you pulled this $10/64 meg number. Hell, GBA carts were less than a third that price, and one of the major reasons Big N switched to MS3DF was cost. Please provide a link to your numbers, so that people aren't able to accuse you of making things up.
Actually there is load time. Ive played Star Wars ep 3 on a DS with 6 seconds of load time.
Don't confuse application lag with load time. The load time on the DS cart is less than six cycles. You don't think that fast, but even if you did, the screen doesn't update anywhere near that fast. To the end user, there is literally no percievable effect, because no output device refreshes fast enough to have its behavior changed.
I figured Id explain you lied.
Yes, based on your made up numbers and lack of technical knowedge. Real easy to say something like that when you don't feel you have to back yourself up, isn't it? Links to $10/64meg please.
(By the way, considering as how MS3D FRAM claims a 50% cost reduction over flash, and considering as how I can get 64 meg flash cards including shipping, the manufacturer's profit and the store's profit for $9, I think you're going to have a damn hard time defending that made up number. Nintendo charges the publisher $1.81 for 64 meg. Making things up to defend calling someone else a liar is simply craven.)
Take away the loading screens and the PSP will have to resort to spinning the disc.
Ahem. No, like I said, DISC CACHING is easy. The idea is, you load what you're going to want in fifteen seconds now, then spin the drive down like you would have. Generally there's no reason to fill RAM.
For that matter, I'm very surprised Astraware and Popcap haven't been porting their Palm titles to the DS.
Most developers for PC shovelhouses are absolute assclowns. That's why games like Jewel Quest lag on your pentium 4, when they would run without lag on the NES. Popcap doesn't have actual domain control over their games; they just publish what people sell to them.
Besides, writing embedded games isn't easy, especially for people who can't make trivial PC games perform.
Regardless, Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Pokemon Puzzle Challenge could probably fair well. Can anyone explain what makes this different from Yoshi's Cookie?
It's called branding. When you want to move a game from Console A to Console B, you have three options.
1) Port the game directly, and get a ton of "boo hiss." In rare cases like Tetris, this is the best answer, because of name recognition, but there's a reason you almost never see this happen.
2) Make a sequel. As the Bust a Move series has shown us, all this means is adding a few powerups, making some new puzzle-mode levels, and getting new box art. Fans adore this port method when it's not abused - that is, when what's added to the game is significant.
3) Rebrand the game. This is the most common porting strategy, because not only will you carry over old fans, but you'll bring in new fans from existing franchises. That's why excellent games like Panel de Pon get rebranded to several high-adoption franchises - in this case, three of Nintendo's most valuable, the Mario, Pokemon and Tetris franchises - as they move system to system.
To wit, someone I used to live with picked that game up for the SNES for their little brother because they knew the Tetris name, got totally addicted, picked up the N64 game and has now begun buying Pokemon games, because she likes cutesy things.
Sega did this a lot too; remember how Puyo Puyo quickly became Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, to tie into Sonic fans.
is there any difference from Diamond Mine/Bejeweled?
Well, the other chain is legitimate - people paid money for the rights. Diamond Mine is a ripoff.
I'm not talking anything extremely fancy, but why are they taking so long with launching this sort of software?
Because the last time they tried that, it was a sales nightmare. Granted the Workboy required custom hardware, which a DS version wouldn't, which in turn totally changes the reasonability of such a device; still, Nintendo does not like to retake failed risks, even when the situation has changed.
While it is a gaming machine, adding support for these features would have been trivial.
Because of the way Nintendo works, no, it actually wouldn't. Nintendo refuses to half-ass anything. They would have had to invest a full software development effort, which in DS terms including everything - testing, manuals, etc - is about $400,000.
Chances are, Nintendo just doesn't believe the market would make that money back. I suspect they're wrong, but then, they've made a lot more money on games than I have, so what do I know?
since it is Nintendo calling the shots.
I've never understood this belief. All Nintendo does is set a threshhold for acceptable material, and the famous days of taking blood out of Mortal Kombat are long since gone. The DS has games whose goal is to seduce women, if you need evidence of change.
Imagine the kind of image they could have crafted for their system if they took the time to develop these tools for launch, or at least shortly after.
Actually, chances are Sony Marketing would have thrown in some spin about how Nintendo wasn't in the wholly gaming market anymore because they knew they'd lose, or some crap like that; Sony's done that sort of thing several times in the past.
Unfortunately, that sort of thing works.
Well I guess I have to be satisfied with built in novelty chat client and an interface that can't even set the clock without rebooting the machine.
You can set the clock just fine without rebooting the machine. It's just that Metroid doesn't seem to think you'll want to. By the way, there's a good reason that the config menu hard-boots the machine when it's done - it's a security issue, to protect their firmware. If they hadn't done that, we would have had passme a week sooner than we actually did.
I just hope that the wireless revolution they're planning on launching is well thought out and not a pile of novelty shit that most Japanese companies produce.
And you're comparing this to American efforts like Sega Channel and Fairchild Channel F? Cough.
The DS cart is Matrix Semiconductor 3d FRAM, and the block mechanism allows a theoretical limit of 4 gigabytes. That's roughly three times the size of UMD, with no load time. Your supposition that more storage space translates to a better game, of course, falls apart once you actually look at the two systems' game catalogues, but I figured I'd at least explain to you that UMD is the smaller, not the larger, of the two storage systems.
Starcraft's system requirements included a Pentium CPU at 90 MHz.
Primarily because Blizzard's coders aren't efficiency focussed. Total Annihilation was able to get much more out of much less CPU. The amount of work done by Doom2 is much higher than that performed by Starcraft, and Doom2 runs on a 386.
at a size of 32 MiB (256 "megabits").
MiB means megabits. You're looking for MB.
Current Nintendo DS games are up to 64 MiB in size.
If I assume you mean megabytes there, you used to be correct; that said, there are a few games now at 128 MB. If you mean megabits, sorry - there are no games smaller than 64 megabits. At all.
How big was the spawn install of Starcraft for PC?
32 megabytes, or eight times the size of DS ram. The comparison is in the DS' favor, however - most of that space is graphics and audio, which would be scaled down in resolution for the alternate hardware anyway.
so you can probably get away with some form of lossy waveform compression on the audio.
Eats up too much CPU time, especially since the hardware does ADPCM.
NOW LOADING is not gaming.
That's not the PSP's fault. That's the fault of PSP developers. Disc caching is easy, especially when you have as much RAM to throw around as the PSP does. If the PSP had clueful developers, you'd never see that screen again.
1) It's a portable console with built-in wifi. Yeah, sony has it too, and there is even better support for infrastructure mode on the PSP, but you know that's a me-too after seeing the DS.
The first major console to offer WiFi - and by major I mean "sold at Walmart" - as a standard feature was the Cybiko. The WonderSwan Crystal and the Game Park 32 also beat Nintendo/Sony to this particular punch, as did the Zodiac.
Depending on how you look at it, the Gizmodo might have - the Gizmodo announced it in its stats before the DS or PSP had been announced, but the Gizmodo didn't come out until after the DS/PSP, so take that as you will.
Then, if you consider adapters, the whole thing just busts right open...
3) It has a microphone and a decent speech api which enables simple recognition. Again, even set-top boxes aren't there yet.
Actually, it's the exact same software that the N64 Pokemon game with the microphone used. That said, there being a hardware microphone present by default is indeed a very big deal.
In the meantime, you missed what is in my opinion the single most important and least discussed feature of the DS - that it has two card slots, one of which is directly in the memory bus. As GBA can attest, that slot gets major use as a peripheral slot already, before you even consider that using it as a peripheral slot makes software unavailable on the GBA. Now that that's no longer the case, things are going to get damned interesting.
Someone hasn't looked at Nintendo's catalog. For all the innovation, half of the games available for the platform - including the current bundled game, Super Mario 64 DS - are ports.
It's perfectly intuitive, if you ever bothered to read the manual, even once.
What's that? Can't pull every single answer out of your ass magically? Want something that's literally hundreds of millions of lines of source to be painfully obvious to the least educated or adventurous of users at the drop of a hat?
Bah, ignore me. I thought you were replying to me, but I was mistaken; you beat me to the punch. I walked the wrong part of the reply tree; entirely my fault. Need to pay more attention when I'm writing.
Sorry about the exceptionally nasty reply I gave you to point A.
b) Shortened words and acronyms can optionally have apostrophes before the 's', but many people frown on the use and thus it's not a universally accepted usage. So no, there's no "require", just an "optional, but not widely approved".
That's funny: the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, the Cambridge Guide to English Usage and the Princeton English Survey all disagree with you. From where are you getting your information again?
Yeah, that's cute and all, but no, the phrase is "to wit," meaning "indicative of knowledge well applied."
The word "whit" means "a tiny amount of something." Pray tell, what would "to whit" mean?
Unfortunately, there's a certain caliber of person which simply blindly believes whatever they were raised on, and chooses to look down on anyone which says otherwise. It's most common that they claim popularity (typically mispercieved) as their justification; let me head you off at the pass.
Impressive, though. Few people's arrogant and erroneous attempts at snide rebuttal develop googlefight results as stilted as 90k versus 2mil.
To wit, it is also common... to confuse "wit" and "whit", apparently. You consider yourself to be the former, and you're half right.
Buhuhu. Nice try, but you've yet to even make it to the halfwit mark, so pots and kettles and all that jazz.
I should have put this in the first reply, but it didn't occur to me until afterwards that to explain the behavior of gerunds would help people not make this mistake in the future. It is, after all, a remarkably sensible rule.
The fundamental problem is that in the gerund, one is presented with the description of an action - that is to say, it's reflection on a verb. This can be done in several subtly different ways, however. I feel this is best explained by example.
Consider the case of the gerund "shooting." The general question is of immediacy. In this, you also see something rare - a holdover of Old English. It used to be the case that we used apostrophes to indicate half-length letter pauses in words. These days, we generally use an 'e;' what is now "stuffed" would then have been "stuff'd" (or earlier still, stuff't.)
In the case of the gerund, this rule still applies in one of the three cases; you'll hear it done correctly by national news correspondants, who will also reinflect the 's' in another of the cases. I chose the gerund "shooting" because there's an obvious seperation for the three cases of immediacy, which is relatively rare; this is generally a very subtle issue.
Gerunds can either apply to an immediate event - that is to say, a specific event already under discussion, to groups of an event, or generalizations of events.
Consider first the case of the news discussing a shooting which had happened earlier that day. In specific, should the newscaster wish to refer to a characteristic of the shooting - say, its brutality - then one uses the behavior you suggest. The dino's resembling a chick in this case would refer to the specific dino in question; since this is a generalization, that is not in fact how this would be done.
The generalization case is the case which would be correctly use here. In example, the phrase should be "the dinos' resembling," since it's a reference to dinosaurs in general. The same written method would apply to the group case.
I mention the group and generalization cases seperately because they're pronounced differently (one in an inobvious fashion.) Whereas the group case behaves as most people expect - to convert the 's' to a 'z,' "di' - no z," the generalization case is actually correctly pronounced the way many people who are accused of slang say it - to replace the 's' with "z -iz," rendering "di -nO'z -(e)z," easier read "dinoeziz." That is, you'd pronounce what you'd expect as had you read "dinos's."
In this way, we can make the following otherwise difficult case clear. Consider the case of one of the archaeologists digging up this mentioned new site wherein there were dozens of well preserved specimen, some apparently better so than others. Supposing that a scientist is referring to one particular dino (we'll say it's the best preserved one,) then how should the scientist phrase a comparison of the quality of that dinosaur to each the rest of the dinosaurs on site and to dinosaurs as typically found?
Written is for once less clear than spoken, but if you ignore the sensible answer of phrasing around it and insist on using inflection, the proper phrasing is:
"This dino's deterioration is less awful than the other dinos' deterioration, and not nearly as bad as general dinos' deterioration."
Note that the first is pronounced "dinoze," the second "dino' -(e)z," and the third "dinos's." Hopefully that'll help clear up this issue.
I like No. 4, but No. 2 is wrong -- dino's is most definitely correct. Gerunds require the possessive.
Well, that'd be a neat trick and all, with exception taken to that all gerunds end in " -ing ". This, therefore, is no gerund.
I do find it amusing, however, that you've not noted that opposition #1 is in error. To capitalize a sentence is correct when the word is a simple word. However, it has long since been held that specific proper nouns may reject an initial capital, or replace the capital stricture structure (huhu,) both of which you see in iPod. To wit, it is also common to reduce poster caps titles to pure lowercase rather than sentence case when rendering into prose, and one notes that timesonline renders its own logo in poster caps; therefore, though I'm sure it's happy coincidence (a polite way of saying dumb luck,) the original poster was in fact correct to leave pure lowercase in place.
Hey Zonk, April Fools' Day isn't in September. During the rest of the year, try not to make articles from The Onion look like news, huh? Some of us are tired of listening to the idiots spin their conspiracy theories based on your inability to seperate news from a fairly bland sense of humor.
But because it uses the GBA socket, it has to stay in GBA mode.
This isn't actually true, though. There are several known scenarios under which the DS will attempt to boot from the GBA slot in DS mode, under which in the boot menu you will see the phrase "DS Expansion Pak."
We don't know how to intentionally invoke that yet, but that doesn't mean that it can't be dome.
The M3 uses a passme-type device.
Ahem. The passme is a FPGA or CPLD which sits between the DS slot and a DS cart, allowing the DS cart to perform authentication, then stepping in and injecting a branch to the GBA cart. You by definition cannot have a passme in the GBA slot. The M3 uses the DS Expansion Pak mode to inject the jump command. The technique is similar to, but significantly different from, the Passme.
Any decent player can spot a bot in ten hands or less.
The thing is, if you couldn't spot them, you'd never know.
And a key thing is they never chat.
That's funny, game bots on IRC do all the time. Elizas are extremely easy to write, and there are toolkits out there for them. You can derive them from logs, and the output quality is high enough that people often just don't realize they're talking to bots.
If the same player has been at the table for a long time, enters few pots and usually wins those pots thats a good indication.
That's also extremely easy to circumvent; just change tables every so often.
If you have something like Deep Blue or Gene
You don't need a supercomputer to search a ply tree as short as Texas Hold'Em 's.
and are already a master poker player with more than a few bracelets
Admittedly I know little about poker, but many techniques for generating agents do not require skill; consider reading the book "Blondie24 - Playing at the Edge of AI." It will open your eyes.
and know how to program better than most programmers,
Ply trees are not at all difficult to write. mtd(f) and NegaScout are a little bit of a hassle, but the reasonable programmer can muddle through them. You don't need much else.
then yeah maybe you can put up a bot that can consistantly win
I renew my invitation for you to play a bot I would create for money. I'm quite confident you've direly underestimated the potential involved for automatic players.
Please stop confusing the sickness of Iran with the sickness of Islam. As a religion, Islam is extremely peacefully oriented. These leaders are no more Islamic than David Korresh was Christian.
Society didn't do that. A small group of sociopaths did. Sociopathy is a mental disease. Society is not the cause of sociopathic behavir.
To pretend that having murderers in our midst is equivalent to a broad and accepted policy of execution of people due to their sexual orientation is simply disgusting. It is important to face the human rights crimes of a government; they execute people for simple speech on a regular basis.
Yes, we have murderers; all societies do. We have not condoned the killing of people for any but the most serious of crimes, and even for that we are lambasted.
There is absolutely no comparison between a government willfully executing people over preferences, and a few bigots killing a man because they're too stupid to seperate bias from morals.
Even an intermediate player who can spot a bot can bust that bot.
And this is based on your comparisons against all those bots nobody can notice, I guess?
Bots aren't smart, they follow set logic based on hand strength, player betting patterns, and general statistics.
I've seen a whole lot of this sentiment on this chat log. I'm beginning to think I should set up a poker bot and invite people to play it for money. It wasn't so long ago people were saying the same things about chess.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you seem to have missed the point of the parent post. I tend to agree with him, but I'll phrase it differently.
Yes, physical media is a serious problem. However, TFA is not talking about physical media. TFA is talking about encodings. There's no reason why email shouldn't be readable in 2090, provided we take the time to progressively archive it on modernized media. Now that backups are automated, this isn't nearly as big a problem as when we're dealing with storage devices that Kirk would have had.
GIF is not going to disappear. The idea that we'll have trouble unwrapping LZW in a hundred years is just nonsense. You want to maintain your data? Fire up your backup program, and replace those eighty cent DVDs once every five years.
It's just not that hard.
Good catch. Shame on me. :D
Maybe you should learn what you're talking about before you start calling people liars.
Maybe you should quote what Nintendo themselves have, 1 gigabit. Your number is 32 times bigger than Nintendo's. Not plausable
4k blocks and 20 bits is clear as day. Where are you getting your random numbers?
Given the cost is $10/meg, Id love to see where you got $2 from
A 64MB Matrix memory card will sell for about $10, Matrix said
Okay, that's a reasonable error to make, I guess. First, that's the wrong kind of memory - that's 2d writable memory, and 3d ROM is much cheaper. Second, that article is five years old. Prices have come way down since.
Don't confuse application lag with load time
Have you even played the game? It was specially labelled "LOADING"
I don't have to. I write software for the platform. It could say "beaming data from Mars;" it still wouldn't be true. It's six cycles, no matter what you read in some game.
Then links to the $2
Unfortunately, NDA prevents me from giving out the data I have; this is typical of the gaming industry. That said, if you can't see how $10 for writable five years ago might be $2 for nonwritable today, well, I don't know what to say.
links to the 4 gigabytes
I've already given them several times. Two are in this reply alone.
dont demand proof from me
Why not? You're the one calling me a liar, and making absurd claims on guesses.
when your numbers can just as easily be made up
Sure, except that they aren't. It's relatively easy to find GBA cart prices at $2.14, and it's relatively easy to find Nintendo claiming that they switched to MS3DFR for cost. Do the math.
Making things up to defend calling someone else a liar is simply craven
Then you're craven, cause you're guilty of it
When you don't have the sense to even check what year your prices are coming from, much less that you got the right device, you really need to stop calling people in the industry liars. You're out in left field calling people who do this for a living idiots.
Does it occur to you how that makes you look to the people around you?
The DS cart is Matrix Semiconductor 3d FRAM, and the block mechanism allows a theoretical limit of 4 gigabytes
No, it doesnt. 4 gigabits wouldve been beleivable, but 4 giabytes is a blatant lie
Maybe you should learn what you're talking about before you start calling people liars. It's a 20-bit addressing mechanism where the blocks are 4k. It's simple mathematics.
At a cost of $10 per 64 megabytes according to Matrix
No publisher will ever pay that much for a game that large
1) I said that's what the device could hold. Whether anyone will actually do it remains to be seen.
2) Given that the cost of producing a cart is currently hovering around $2, I'd love to hear where you pulled this $10/64 meg number. Hell, GBA carts were less than a third that price, and one of the major reasons Big N switched to MS3DF was cost. Please provide a link to your numbers, so that people aren't able to accuse you of making things up.
Actually there is load time. Ive played Star Wars ep 3 on a DS with 6 seconds of load time.
Don't confuse application lag with load time. The load time on the DS cart is less than six cycles. You don't think that fast, but even if you did, the screen doesn't update anywhere near that fast. To the end user, there is literally no percievable effect, because no output device refreshes fast enough to have its behavior changed.
I figured Id explain you lied.
Yes, based on your made up numbers and lack of technical knowedge. Real easy to say something like that when you don't feel you have to back yourself up, isn't it? Links to $10/64meg please.
(By the way, considering as how MS3D FRAM claims a 50% cost reduction over flash, and considering as how I can get 64 meg flash cards including shipping, the manufacturer's profit and the store's profit for $9, I think you're going to have a damn hard time defending that made up number. Nintendo charges the publisher $1.81 for 64 meg. Making things up to defend calling someone else a liar is simply craven.)
Take away the loading screens and the PSP will have to resort to spinning the disc.
Ahem. No, like I said, DISC CACHING is easy. The idea is, you load what you're going to want in fifteen seconds now, then spin the drive down like you would have. Generally there's no reason to fill RAM.
For that matter, I'm very surprised Astraware and Popcap haven't been porting their Palm titles to the DS.
Most developers for PC shovelhouses are absolute assclowns. That's why games like Jewel Quest lag on your pentium 4, when they would run without lag on the NES. Popcap doesn't have actual domain control over their games; they just publish what people sell to them.
Besides, writing embedded games isn't easy, especially for people who can't make trivial PC games perform.
Regardless, Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Pokemon Puzzle Challenge could probably fair well. Can anyone explain what makes this different from Yoshi's Cookie?
It's called branding. When you want to move a game from Console A to Console B, you have three options.
1) Port the game directly, and get a ton of "boo hiss." In rare cases like Tetris, this is the best answer, because of name recognition, but there's a reason you almost never see this happen.
2) Make a sequel. As the Bust a Move series has shown us, all this means is adding a few powerups, making some new puzzle-mode levels, and getting new box art. Fans adore this port method when it's not abused - that is, when what's added to the game is significant.
3) Rebrand the game. This is the most common porting strategy, because not only will you carry over old fans, but you'll bring in new fans from existing franchises. That's why excellent games like Panel de Pon get rebranded to several high-adoption franchises - in this case, three of Nintendo's most valuable, the Mario, Pokemon and Tetris franchises - as they move system to system.
To wit, someone I used to live with picked that game up for the SNES for their little brother because they knew the Tetris name, got totally addicted, picked up the N64 game and has now begun buying Pokemon games, because she likes cutesy things.
Sega did this a lot too; remember how Puyo Puyo quickly became Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, to tie into Sonic fans.
is there any difference from Diamond Mine/Bejeweled?
Well, the other chain is legitimate - people paid money for the rights. Diamond Mine is a ripoff.
I'm not talking anything extremely fancy, but why are they taking so long with launching this sort of software?
Because the last time they tried that, it was a sales nightmare. Granted the Workboy required custom hardware, which a DS version wouldn't, which in turn totally changes the reasonability of such a device; still, Nintendo does not like to retake failed risks, even when the situation has changed.
While it is a gaming machine, adding support for these features would have been trivial.
Because of the way Nintendo works, no, it actually wouldn't. Nintendo refuses to half-ass anything. They would have had to invest a full software development effort, which in DS terms including everything - testing, manuals, etc - is about $400,000.
Chances are, Nintendo just doesn't believe the market would make that money back. I suspect they're wrong, but then, they've made a lot more money on games than I have, so what do I know?
since it is Nintendo calling the shots.
I've never understood this belief. All Nintendo does is set a threshhold for acceptable material, and the famous days of taking blood out of Mortal Kombat are long since gone. The DS has games whose goal is to seduce women, if you need evidence of change.
Imagine the kind of image they could have crafted for their system if they took the time to develop these tools for launch, or at least shortly after.
Actually, chances are Sony Marketing would have thrown in some spin about how Nintendo wasn't in the wholly gaming market anymore because they knew they'd lose, or some crap like that; Sony's done that sort of thing several times in the past.
Unfortunately, that sort of thing works.
Well I guess I have to be satisfied with built in novelty chat client and an interface that can't even set the clock without rebooting the machine.
You can set the clock just fine without rebooting the machine. It's just that Metroid doesn't seem to think you'll want to. By the way, there's a good reason that the config menu hard-boots the machine when it's done - it's a security issue, to protect their firmware. If they hadn't done that, we would have had passme a week sooner than we actually did.
I just hope that the wireless revolution they're planning on launching is well thought out and not a pile of novelty shit that most Japanese companies produce.
And you're comparing this to American efforts like Sega Channel and Fairchild Channel F? Cough.
The DS cart is Matrix Semiconductor 3d FRAM, and the block mechanism allows a theoretical limit of 4 gigabytes. That's roughly three times the size of UMD, with no load time. Your supposition that more storage space translates to a better game, of course, falls apart once you actually look at the two systems' game catalogues, but I figured I'd at least explain to you that UMD is the smaller, not the larger, of the two storage systems.
So, you were saying?
Starcraft's system requirements included a Pentium CPU at 90 MHz.
Primarily because Blizzard's coders aren't efficiency focussed. Total Annihilation was able to get much more out of much less CPU. The amount of work done by Doom2 is much higher than that performed by Starcraft, and Doom2 runs on a 386.
at a size of 32 MiB (256 "megabits").
MiB means megabits. You're looking for MB.
Current Nintendo DS games are up to 64 MiB in size.
If I assume you mean megabytes there, you used to be correct; that said, there are a few games now at 128 MB. If you mean megabits, sorry - there are no games smaller than 64 megabits. At all.
How big was the spawn install of Starcraft for PC?
32 megabytes, or eight times the size of DS ram. The comparison is in the DS' favor, however - most of that space is graphics and audio, which would be scaled down in resolution for the alternate hardware anyway.
so you can probably get away with some form of lossy waveform compression on the audio.
Eats up too much CPU time, especially since the hardware does ADPCM.
NOW LOADING is not gaming.
That's not the PSP's fault. That's the fault of PSP developers. Disc caching is easy, especially when you have as much RAM to throw around as the PSP does. If the PSP had clueful developers, you'd never see that screen again.
1) It's a portable console with built-in wifi. Yeah, sony has it too, and there is even better support for infrastructure mode on the PSP, but you know that's a me-too after seeing the DS.
The first major console to offer WiFi - and by major I mean "sold at Walmart" - as a standard feature was the Cybiko. The WonderSwan Crystal and the Game Park 32 also beat Nintendo/Sony to this particular punch, as did the Zodiac.
Depending on how you look at it, the Gizmodo might have - the Gizmodo announced it in its stats before the DS or PSP had been announced, but the Gizmodo didn't come out until after the DS/PSP, so take that as you will.
Then, if you consider adapters, the whole thing just busts right open...
3) It has a microphone and a decent speech api which enables simple recognition. Again, even set-top boxes aren't there yet.
Actually, it's the exact same software that the N64 Pokemon game with the microphone used. That said, there being a hardware microphone present by default is indeed a very big deal.
In the meantime, you missed what is in my opinion the single most important and least discussed feature of the DS - that it has two card slots, one of which is directly in the memory bus. As GBA can attest, that slot gets major use as a peripheral slot already, before you even consider that using it as a peripheral slot makes software unavailable on the GBA. Now that that's no longer the case, things are going to get damned interesting.
Someone hasn't looked at Nintendo's catalog. For all the innovation, half of the games available for the platform - including the current bundled game, Super Mario 64 DS - are ports.
It's perfectly intuitive, if you ever bothered to read the manual, even once.
What's that? Can't pull every single answer out of your ass magically? Want something that's literally hundreds of millions of lines of source to be painfully obvious to the least educated or adventurous of users at the drop of a hat?
Too bad. Ain't possible. RTFM.
Bah, ignore me. I thought you were replying to me, but I was mistaken; you beat me to the punch. I walked the wrong part of the reply tree; entirely my fault. Need to pay more attention when I'm writing.
Sorry about the exceptionally nasty reply I gave you to point A.
a) "dino's" isn't a gerund.
Way to repeat what I said.
b) Shortened words and acronyms can optionally have apostrophes before the 's', but many people frown on the use and thus it's not a universally accepted usage. So no, there's no "require", just an "optional, but not widely approved".
That's funny: the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, the Cambridge Guide to English Usage and the Princeton English Survey all disagree with you. From where are you getting your information again?
Yeah, that's cute and all, but no, the phrase is "to wit," meaning "indicative of knowledge well applied."
... to confuse "wit" and "whit", apparently. You consider yourself to be the former, and you're half right.
The word "whit" means "a tiny amount of something." Pray tell, what would "to whit" mean?
Unfortunately, there's a certain caliber of person which simply blindly believes whatever they were raised on, and chooses to look down on anyone which says otherwise. It's most common that they claim popularity (typically mispercieved) as their justification; let me head you off at the pass.
Impressive, though. Few people's arrogant and erroneous attempts at snide rebuttal develop googlefight results as stilted as 90k versus 2mil.
To wit, it is also common
Buhuhu. Nice try, but you've yet to even make it to the halfwit mark, so pots and kettles and all that jazz.
I should have put this in the first reply, but it didn't occur to me until afterwards that to explain the behavior of gerunds would help people not make this mistake in the future. It is, after all, a remarkably sensible rule.
The fundamental problem is that in the gerund, one is presented with the description of an action - that is to say, it's reflection on a verb. This can be done in several subtly different ways, however. I feel this is best explained by example.
Consider the case of the gerund "shooting." The general question is of immediacy. In this, you also see something rare - a holdover of Old English. It used to be the case that we used apostrophes to indicate half-length letter pauses in words. These days, we generally use an 'e;' what is now "stuffed" would then have been "stuff'd" (or earlier still, stuff't.)
In the case of the gerund, this rule still applies in one of the three cases; you'll hear it done correctly by national news correspondants, who will also reinflect the 's' in another of the cases. I chose the gerund "shooting" because there's an obvious seperation for the three cases of immediacy, which is relatively rare; this is generally a very subtle issue.
Gerunds can either apply to an immediate event - that is to say, a specific event already under discussion, to groups of an event, or generalizations of events.
Consider first the case of the news discussing a shooting which had happened earlier that day. In specific, should the newscaster wish to refer to a characteristic of the shooting - say, its brutality - then one uses the behavior you suggest. The dino's resembling a chick in this case would refer to the specific dino in question; since this is a generalization, that is not in fact how this would be done.
The generalization case is the case which would be correctly use here. In example, the phrase should be "the dinos' resembling," since it's a reference to dinosaurs in general. The same written method would apply to the group case.
I mention the group and generalization cases seperately because they're pronounced differently (one in an inobvious fashion.) Whereas the group case behaves as most people expect - to convert the 's' to a 'z,' "di' - no z," the generalization case is actually correctly pronounced the way many people who are accused of slang say it - to replace the 's' with "z -iz," rendering "di -nO'z -(e)z," easier read "dinoeziz." That is, you'd pronounce what you'd expect as had you read "dinos's."
In this way, we can make the following otherwise difficult case clear. Consider the case of one of the archaeologists digging up this mentioned new site wherein there were dozens of well preserved specimen, some apparently better so than others. Supposing that a scientist is referring to one particular dino (we'll say it's the best preserved one,) then how should the scientist phrase a comparison of the quality of that dinosaur to each the rest of the dinosaurs on site and to dinosaurs as typically found?
Written is for once less clear than spoken, but if you ignore the sensible answer of phrasing around it and insist on using inflection, the proper phrasing is:
"This dino's deterioration is less awful than the other dinos' deterioration, and not nearly as bad as general dinos' deterioration."
Note that the first is pronounced "dinoze," the second "dino' -(e)z," and the third "dinos's." Hopefully that'll help clear up this issue.
I like No. 4, but No. 2 is wrong -- dino's is most definitely correct. Gerunds require the possessive.
Well, that'd be a neat trick and all, with exception taken to that all gerunds end in " -ing ". This, therefore, is no gerund.
I do find it amusing, however, that you've not noted that opposition #1 is in error. To capitalize a sentence is correct when the word is a simple word. However, it has long since been held that specific proper nouns may reject an initial capital, or replace the capital stricture structure (huhu,) both of which you see in iPod. To wit, it is also common to reduce poster caps titles to pure lowercase rather than sentence case when rendering into prose, and one notes that timesonline renders its own logo in poster caps; therefore, though I'm sure it's happy coincidence (a polite way of saying dumb luck,) the original poster was in fact correct to leave pure lowercase in place.
Nice try, though.
Some lovely parting gifts.
You seem to just be repeating my other posts, what exactly do you consider worth modding down?
The part where you say software on a GBA cart cannot be run in DS mode.
Hey Zonk, April Fools' Day isn't in September. During the rest of the year, try not to make articles from The Onion look like news, huh? Some of us are tired of listening to the idiots spin their conspiracy theories based on your inability to seperate news from a fairly bland sense of humor.
But because it uses the GBA socket, it has to stay in GBA mode.
This isn't actually true, though. There are several known scenarios under which the DS will attempt to boot from the GBA slot in DS mode, under which in the boot menu you will see the phrase "DS Expansion Pak."
We don't know how to intentionally invoke that yet, but that doesn't mean that it can't be dome.
The M3 uses a passme-type device.
Ahem. The passme is a FPGA or CPLD which sits between the DS slot and a DS cart, allowing the DS cart to perform authentication, then stepping in and injecting a branch to the GBA cart. You by definition cannot have a passme in the GBA slot. The M3 uses the DS Expansion Pak mode to inject the jump command. The technique is similar to, but significantly different from, the Passme.
Mod parent down.
'The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people.'
Somebody should tell this guy about IRC.
Any decent player can spot a bot in ten hands or less.
The thing is, if you couldn't spot them, you'd never know.
And a key thing is they never chat.
That's funny, game bots on IRC do all the time. Elizas are extremely easy to write, and there are toolkits out there for them. You can derive them from logs, and the output quality is high enough that people often just don't realize they're talking to bots.
If the same player has been at the table for a long time, enters few pots and usually wins those pots thats a good indication.
That's also extremely easy to circumvent; just change tables every so often.
If you have something like Deep Blue or Gene
You don't need a supercomputer to search a ply tree as short as Texas Hold'Em 's.
and are already a master poker player with more than a few bracelets
Admittedly I know little about poker, but many techniques for generating agents do not require skill; consider reading the book "Blondie24 - Playing at the Edge of AI." It will open your eyes.
and know how to program better than most programmers,
Ply trees are not at all difficult to write. mtd(f) and NegaScout are a little bit of a hassle, but the reasonable programmer can muddle through them. You don't need much else.
then yeah maybe you can put up a bot that can consistantly win
I renew my invitation for you to play a bot I would create for money. I'm quite confident you've direly underestimated the potential involved for automatic players.
Oh, and the sickness of Islam doesn't end there.
Please stop confusing the sickness of Iran with the sickness of Islam. As a religion, Islam is extremely peacefully oriented. These leaders are no more Islamic than David Korresh was Christian.
This, my dear boy, is called predjudice.
Society didn't do that. A small group of sociopaths did. Sociopathy is a mental disease. Society is not the cause of sociopathic behavir.
To pretend that having murderers in our midst is equivalent to a broad and accepted policy of execution of people due to their sexual orientation is simply disgusting. It is important to face the human rights crimes of a government; they execute people for simple speech on a regular basis.
Yes, we have murderers; all societies do. We have not condoned the killing of people for any but the most serious of crimes, and even for that we are lambasted.
There is absolutely no comparison between a government willfully executing people over preferences, and a few bigots killing a man because they're too stupid to seperate bias from morals.
Even an intermediate player who can spot a bot can bust that bot.
And this is based on your comparisons against all those bots nobody can notice, I guess?
Bots aren't smart, they follow set logic based on hand strength, player betting patterns, and general statistics.
I've seen a whole lot of this sentiment on this chat log. I'm beginning to think I should set up a poker bot and invite people to play it for money. It wasn't so long ago people were saying the same things about chess.