Well, not all game types would benefit from even perfect motion controls - twitch games are right out, as are pointer-based games (because of gorilla arm). Motion control makes sense when controlling a vaguely humanoid avatar in some first person/over the shoulder view where your motions have some natural relationship to the avatar's motions. It's just a bad controller choice for other game styles.
But as far as your other concern, your motions don't need to be 1-to-1, they need to be representative. Just like first person shooters on a console are simply designed around the lack the of precise aim of a mouse, moving your lightsaber in the right general direction of an incoming projectile can result in a very precise block on screen. (And as far as super-human reflexes, that was solved long ago by simply taking the game into slow motion to represent that).
The big challenge I see with motion control is movement. Games "on rails" are just tired and not much fun. We need some gestures as universal as WASD has become, that all games recognize to move around the landscape. But I could enjoy a game where you fight/interact with your dominant hand, move short distances by moving your body, and move more than a step or two by well-known gestures with your offhand.
Big-budget titles aren't, though. They really are technical exercises - they exist to show off the skills of the artists and animators, and the technical skill of the players in whatever arbitrary challenges the game presents.
There are games today that are just a clever and interesting, though they can be hard to find among all the well-marketed dross. Indie games are mostly crap, but the best are as good as anything from previous eras.
I'm not sure which way to count PvZ, since popcap isn't exactly the little guy, buy the game itself is a shining example of art that's appealing instead of high-tech, a real sense of whimsy over focus-group tuning. And gameplay that's fun and rewards a thoughtful approach.
Don't Starve has a similar appeal, and while it's just the sort of game I hate, nethack fans will probably enjoy its "learn by dying" approach.
Though the pattern I do see that's scares me for the future of PC gaming is that all of the best new small titles are very much tablet-style games, even though they're still being written for the PC! Simple controls that would work well with touch, artwork that, while detailed, uses tiles and sprites that are each a fair chunk of screen real-estate, and so would look great on a 7" screen. Hopefully we'll have a few more years of good PC games before these studios discover they've been writing tablet games all along.
If you're lucky, you'll be allowed generously to pay for them again so that you can play them on your new machine
Well, to be fair there are many games I've bought on CD, then bought again on Steam or GOG (or first on Steam and then later on GOG, because Steam is starting to piss me off).
Where I see the real distinction is that the PC has fully embraced digital distribution, and consoles haven't even started (the Xbone's attempt to take a step in that direction was shouted down by gamers, sadly). I do expect stuff I buy on GOG to be around forever.
Good motion controls (haven't seen this yet) would be real progress, though. It a worthwhile goal. And you get good motion controls by shipping less-than-good and learning what you can from that effort.
IMO, consoles just don't have precise controls to begin with - if you want precise, use a mouse - but that doesn't stop games from being fun. Motions controls aren't inherently bad, just insufficiently advanced. Give it time - we'll have a real lightsaber game eventually.
Well, that was really my point. Modern malware has nothing to do with looking for an open port with a vulnerable service listening on it, and hasn't for quite some time. The malware uses port 80/443 in the sense that the "vulnerable services" are now browser plug-ins, and users who download and run stuff.
Heck, the continuous hassle of negotiating with IT over ports has moved most legitimate enterprise software onto only ports 80 and 443 as well. On reason why "everything's a web service" now is to get IT out of the way of the software you write, whether legitimate or otherwise.
Ports used to be a helpful indicator of what software was communicating, but the unending inability of IT guys to distinguish between security and denial-of-own-service put an end to that. Oh, and remember to change your password today, on each of our 37 intranet apps with conflicting password policies, it's been at least a week since the last change.
Well, people mostly confuse "wealthy" and "high income", which is a good way to never become wealthy. It's easy to same the same of top-tier CEOs, pro sports stars, or actors "these guys can't possibly be worth millions a year", but you can't actually hire them for less.
Wait, I don't follow. You seem to object to the notion that "only those who own a press have free speech", yet also to the contrary notion that "also those who can afford to buy an ad have free speech".
So which way would you have it - limit political speech to only those who can buy an entire newspaper company, or open it to anyone who can buy just an ad in someone else's paper?
The only problem with the Surface Pro is price - it's a fine tablet and actually has software, since it's easy to port normal Windows stuff. It's the RT that has the limited system library, and so only new apps.
Right, the answer is a vast conspiracy, I should have known. Regardless, the occupoopers showed they had no actual political power, and could be dismissed out of hand. The Tea Party won several primaries against GOP incumbents and a few elections. It's possible they're sufficiently in the fold now to stop making primary challenges, but they do seem to have some influence - about what you'd expect from a significant minority in a coalition. Far from a dominant force, but they clearly have some power.
That's the secret on the world stage: no one cares what you think, or what you say, or how nice you are(n't), but only about the power you wield - and here that's a matter of active participation in ground-level politics.
Sure, but the total dividends paid by all stocks are tiny by comparison. The entire value of all stocks is roughly equal to 1 year's GDP. Total wages are vastly higher than total dividends (or even total capital gains).
I know some people believe "the rich" are hoarding sources of passive income so vast that it would give everyone a minimum survival income if only it were "fairly" distributed, but that's very far from true: for example, the total of all dividends is less than 3% of the total of all wages. We're far from everyone being able to set down their tools.
That right there is the worst part of the NSA stuff. You can't dismiss any tinfoil hat conspiracy theory out of hand any more. It's really frustrating. Did Obama have trouble producing a birth certificate because he's really a shape-shifting Reptoid from Mars?... probably not? But if so, I'd only really be shocked that NASA was in on it, at this point.
Trust in government - trust that they're individually somewhat dishonest for personal gain, but not collectively conspiring against the people - is so valuable to society, and is being quickly eroded here.
Indeed! Neither are those new-fangled train drivers. You're not a real engineer unless you roll your petard up to the castle gate. But kids these days know nothing about being doused with flaming oil and then exploding!
My apartment in Washington State costs 10% more than my apartment in Silicon Valley did. It's all about your commute and what you're close to.
The tax difference is quite significant though - CA is 7%, but that's 7% of gross, so more like 10% of what would have been your take home in WA or TX. Plus here in WA I can legally get plastic bags in the grocery store if I like - so there's that (I just didn't realize how intrusive CA laws were into my daily life until I left - it was like a weight lifted).
Walmart is a top-tier employer in vary large scale computing. They're just as happy for folks not to know about the billion dollar data centers (bunkers really - they're quite ready for the Walmart riots).
Every company (well, most) pays as little as possible, just as every employee (well, most) wants as much as possible - far the quality they'll settle for.
Walmart has the best logistics of any company in the world. That's simply not possible without being in the lead on "big data". And that means paying enough to get top quality engineers to live in AR.
How so? We're much closer to everything basic to survival being done by robots than to most people figuring out how to invest! Sad commentary on human nature, really.
Save $2k/month? That's off. When I lived in Silly Valley this year my rent was less than $2k, and I had a nice modern 2-bedroom (and no roommate). Of course, that was with a bit of a commute - close in it would have been 2200 or so.
It's amazing what people can find to spend their money on. Live cheap until you're independently wealthy - your freedom is by far the best gift to yourself.
Overall, Tea Party member are better educated and wealthier than the average American.
If you shed your prejudice, this shouldn't surprise you at all. Politically active people in general tend to be so either because they're interested in the mechanics of politics, or because they have a significant stake in the system.
That's in noticeable contrast to those who show up at "rallies", but don't vote, don't volunteer for a candidate come election season, and wonder why they're ignored by politics even though they're shouting just as loud.
The Tea Party gets press every week. Remember those "occupy" guys - yeah, neither does the press. There's a reason for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not all game types would benefit from even perfect motion controls - twitch games are right out, as are pointer-based games (because of gorilla arm). Motion control makes sense when controlling a vaguely humanoid avatar in some first person/over the shoulder view where your motions have some natural relationship to the avatar's motions. It's just a bad controller choice for other game styles.
But as far as your other concern, your motions don't need to be 1-to-1, they need to be representative. Just like first person shooters on a console are simply designed around the lack the of precise aim of a mouse, moving your lightsaber in the right general direction of an incoming projectile can result in a very precise block on screen. (And as far as super-human reflexes, that was solved long ago by simply taking the game into slow motion to represent that).
The big challenge I see with motion control is movement. Games "on rails" are just tired and not much fun. We need some gestures as universal as WASD has become, that all games recognize to move around the landscape. But I could enjoy a game where you fight/interact with your dominant hand, move short distances by moving your body, and move more than a step or two by well-known gestures with your offhand.
Big-budget titles aren't, though. They really are technical exercises - they exist to show off the skills of the artists and animators, and the technical skill of the players in whatever arbitrary challenges the game presents.
There are games today that are just a clever and interesting, though they can be hard to find among all the well-marketed dross. Indie games are mostly crap, but the best are as good as anything from previous eras.
I'm not sure which way to count PvZ, since popcap isn't exactly the little guy, buy the game itself is a shining example of art that's appealing instead of high-tech, a real sense of whimsy over focus-group tuning. And gameplay that's fun and rewards a thoughtful approach.
Don't Starve has a similar appeal, and while it's just the sort of game I hate, nethack fans will probably enjoy its "learn by dying" approach.
Though the pattern I do see that's scares me for the future of PC gaming is that all of the best new small titles are very much tablet-style games, even though they're still being written for the PC! Simple controls that would work well with touch, artwork that, while detailed, uses tiles and sprites that are each a fair chunk of screen real-estate, and so would look great on a 7" screen. Hopefully we'll have a few more years of good PC games before these studios discover they've been writing tablet games all along.
If you're lucky, you'll be allowed generously to pay for them again so that you can play them on your new machine
Well, to be fair there are many games I've bought on CD, then bought again on Steam or GOG (or first on Steam and then later on GOG, because Steam is starting to piss me off).
Where I see the real distinction is that the PC has fully embraced digital distribution, and consoles haven't even started (the Xbone's attempt to take a step in that direction was shouted down by gamers, sadly). I do expect stuff I buy on GOG to be around forever.
Good motion controls (haven't seen this yet) would be real progress, though. It a worthwhile goal. And you get good motion controls by shipping less-than-good and learning what you can from that effort.
IMO, consoles just don't have precise controls to begin with - if you want precise, use a mouse - but that doesn't stop games from being fun. Motions controls aren't inherently bad, just insufficiently advanced. Give it time - we'll have a real lightsaber game eventually.
walk into the bathroom of any engineering facility and take a sheet of toilet paper. You are now a doctorate of psychology.
Stop taunting education majors with the impressive academic pedigree of psychology majors!
Much better to think in terms of servers you want to run but don't want to be accessed from the outside.
Well, that was really my point. Modern malware has nothing to do with looking for an open port with a vulnerable service listening on it, and hasn't for quite some time. The malware uses port 80/443 in the sense that the "vulnerable services" are now browser plug-ins, and users who download and run stuff.
Heck, the continuous hassle of negotiating with IT over ports has moved most legitimate enterprise software onto only ports 80 and 443 as well. On reason why "everything's a web service" now is to get IT out of the way of the software you write, whether legitimate or otherwise.
Ports used to be a helpful indicator of what software was communicating, but the unending inability of IT guys to distinguish between security and denial-of-own-service put an end to that. Oh, and remember to change your password today, on each of our 37 intranet apps with conflicting password policies, it's been at least a week since the last change.
All malware today uses ports 80 and 443. Port-based firewalling is a meaningless ritual from the previous century.
Well, people mostly confuse "wealthy" and "high income", which is a good way to never become wealthy. It's easy to same the same of top-tier CEOs, pro sports stars, or actors "these guys can't possibly be worth millions a year", but you can't actually hire them for less.
Bah, any uses of "octopuses" would be the subject of an edit war and 3000 reverts over the proper plural.
Your imaginary perfect world met the real world and the real world won. No one else was surprised.
Outside of /. he's probably more well known as Denny Crane. What's my name? Denny Crane.
Wait, I don't follow. You seem to object to the notion that "only those who own a press have free speech", yet also to the contrary notion that "also those who can afford to buy an ad have free speech".
So which way would you have it - limit political speech to only those who can buy an entire newspaper company, or open it to anyone who can buy just an ad in someone else's paper?
That's pretty much half the posts on /. these days -"the government has been corrupted by companies: we need more government!"
The only problem with the Surface Pro is price - it's a fine tablet and actually has software, since it's easy to port normal Windows stuff. It's the RT that has the limited system library, and so only new apps.
Right, the answer is a vast conspiracy, I should have known. Regardless, the occupoopers showed they had no actual political power, and could be dismissed out of hand. The Tea Party won several primaries against GOP incumbents and a few elections. It's possible they're sufficiently in the fold now to stop making primary challenges, but they do seem to have some influence - about what you'd expect from a significant minority in a coalition. Far from a dominant force, but they clearly have some power.
That's the secret on the world stage: no one cares what you think, or what you say, or how nice you are(n't), but only about the power you wield - and here that's a matter of active participation in ground-level politics.
That's the marginal rate, though. It does ramp up fast, so the total rate is high (7% is from memory, could be off).
Sure, but the total dividends paid by all stocks are tiny by comparison. The entire value of all stocks is roughly equal to 1 year's GDP. Total wages are vastly higher than total dividends (or even total capital gains).
I know some people believe "the rich" are hoarding sources of passive income so vast that it would give everyone a minimum survival income if only it were "fairly" distributed, but that's very far from true: for example, the total of all dividends is less than 3% of the total of all wages. We're far from everyone being able to set down their tools.
That right there is the worst part of the NSA stuff. You can't dismiss any tinfoil hat conspiracy theory out of hand any more. It's really frustrating. Did Obama have trouble producing a birth certificate because he's really a shape-shifting Reptoid from Mars? ... probably not? But if so, I'd only really be shocked that NASA was in on it, at this point.
Trust in government - trust that they're individually somewhat dishonest for personal gain, but not collectively conspiring against the people - is so valuable to society, and is being quickly eroded here.
programing is not engineering.
Indeed! Neither are those new-fangled train drivers. You're not a real engineer unless you roll your petard up to the castle gate. But kids these days know nothing about being doused with flaming oil and then exploding!
My apartment in Washington State costs 10% more than my apartment in Silicon Valley did. It's all about your commute and what you're close to.
The tax difference is quite significant though - CA is 7%, but that's 7% of gross, so more like 10% of what would have been your take home in WA or TX. Plus here in WA I can legally get plastic bags in the grocery store if I like - so there's that (I just didn't realize how intrusive CA laws were into my daily life until I left - it was like a weight lifted).
Walmart is a top-tier employer in vary large scale computing. They're just as happy for folks not to know about the billion dollar data centers (bunkers really - they're quite ready for the Walmart riots).
Every company (well, most) pays as little as possible, just as every employee (well, most) wants as much as possible - far the quality they'll settle for.
Walmart has the best logistics of any company in the world. That's simply not possible without being in the lead on "big data". And that means paying enough to get top quality engineers to live in AR.
How so? We're much closer to everything basic to survival being done by robots than to most people figuring out how to invest! Sad commentary on human nature, really.
Save $2k/month? That's off. When I lived in Silly Valley this year my rent was less than $2k, and I had a nice modern 2-bedroom (and no roommate). Of course, that was with a bit of a commute - close in it would have been 2200 or so.
It's amazing what people can find to spend their money on. Live cheap until you're independently wealthy - your freedom is by far the best gift to yourself.
Overall, Tea Party member are better educated and wealthier than the average American.
If you shed your prejudice, this shouldn't surprise you at all. Politically active people in general tend to be so either because they're interested in the mechanics of politics, or because they have a significant stake in the system.
That's in noticeable contrast to those who show up at "rallies", but don't vote, don't volunteer for a candidate come election season, and wonder why they're ignored by politics even though they're shouting just as loud.
The Tea Party gets press every week. Remember those "occupy" guys - yeah, neither does the press. There's a reason for that.