Yeah, okay, that sounds good. Different feel to the game, but yeah, so much of the game play is overlapping that they really do belong in the same genre.
Yes, the first person perspective and the shooting threw the rest of us off.
Actually, yes, that's my whole point. There's more to the FPS genre than the superficial interface and whether your character has a gun. It's about gameplay, emphasis, probably intensity. Genre lines are blurry, but I think misclassifying this game does it a disservice.
Those are good points -- Metroid does cross a lot of boundaries. I think the reason I'd put Metroid and Zelda in different genres is that there's a lot more emphasis in Metroid on how to get from point A to point B -- navigating platforms, in fact, as well as ledges and tracks and things. Aside from that distinction, though, they do have similar gameplay; the distinction is fuzzy, and probably a matter of taste. I could be convinced.
I wish people would quit calling the Metroid Prime series a "First Person Shooter". It's not. It's actually a very faithful 3D rendition of the platform jumper genre, but with the first-person POV, highly unusual in that genre -- it's a FPPV, not an FPS. (I actually hate FPSs, but Metroid Prime is my favourite Gamecube game.)
There are two reasons this mislabelling bugs me. First, it could easily scare off the target audience; I know people who had no intention of playing the game until they saw me playing for a while and realized what it was really about, and now they love it. (Judging by the Metroid Prime franchise success, though, this isn't a big issue.) Second, it winds up getting compared to games like Halo. They're completely different. A better comparison would be to something like Mario Sunshine.
Don't ask if MPIII is going to be "FPS of the year"; rather ask if it'll be "Platformer of the year".
(This doesn't seem to be a problem with some other genres. Windwaker and Sunshine are usually considered different genres (Action Adventure and Platformer, respectively) and are rarely compared (AFAIK), even though their interfaces are superficially similar. I suspect it's just because FPPs are rare -- are there any first-person platformers out there besides the Metroid Prime series?)
Actually, nobody at CERN is storing antimatter -- yet.[1] The project planning to attempt this is called ALPHA. They plan to build upon previous experiments that produced antihydrogen in quantity[2], only this time they plan to try to trap the stuff, hopefully long enough to do spectroscopy on it.
Note that nobody's planning to make rockets out of this stuff any time soon...
[1] At least not if you're referring to stuff like antihydrogen. There are lots and lots of antiprotons produced, and they're "stored" by swinging them around and around the collider ring until they hit something (which is the reason they're produced in the first place).
[2] Of course, "in quantity" in this case means basically "more than one atom". I'm not sure just how many atoms they plan to store at a time, but it's certainly not nearly enough to do anything useful with (except possibly for spectroscopy). I mean, they purge the antihydrogen trap by turning off the fields and letting the antihydrogen annihilate against the trap walls. Poof! With little to no effect on the trap walls themselves (aside from probably accumulating the usual radiation damage that high-energy detectors like these have to put up with over time, of course).
Yeah, I've been getting those repeatedly ever since I started grad school, pretty much. I've mentioned it to a prof or three, and they laughed and said I won't be able to get rid of these guys, so just ignore them. I'm not doing work even remotely related to what they're discussing, and I don't even have my PhD yet, so I have no idea where they got my name. And I've asked them repeatedly (as per their instructions, on another version of the email) to leave me alone, and the spam keeps coming. Shows they're not being terribly picky about who they get at these conferences...
I was surprised to read about a randomly-generated paper getting accepted, until I found out it was these guys accepting it.
A lot of times the kind of merchant you're talking about is a local one. They don't have the chain to do their marketting and get name-recognition out there, so they have to make it up on service and (usually) price. Most of their marketting is word-of-mouth. Probably won't hurt the big boys much, but it gives me the consumer a better time (better, knowledgeable service, and usually lower prices).
Hard Data, for example, is such a retailer -- in Edmonton, Alberta. Some of the guys there are active on the ELUG Linux mailing list, and certainly know what they're doing -- and encourage their customers to, as well.
Um, what does RAD mean? Is it something like an IDE (Integrated Development Environment -- editing, compliling, debugging, etc. all rolled into a single (usually graphical) interface; very handy)?
(Would it really be so hard for submitters to at least briefly explain their jargon? (Or at least expand their TLAs.;) "If you have to ask, you don't need to know" doesn't always apply, you know.)
I took typing courses in school (required), but I never really got anything out of them, or at least I never felt like I did. I did the required assignment (barely) and went back to hunting and pecking. But as I continued through school, and used the computer more and more, I started using more fingers to peck with -- if my index finger of my right hand was on the T and I needed to hit the O I'd use another finger. Eventually I realized that I had naturally developed the use of Standard Typing Practices -- except I had some of the central letters switched (hitting the B with my right hand for example). I even found my hands hovering over the "Home Keys" and using the little key nipples to align by. Now I use a split keyboard most of the time, and most of my friends are surprised at how fast I can type. (I haven't checked in a while, but last time I did I was over 45 wpm; not insanely fast, but respectable, and I'm a little faster now I'm sure.)
Of course, I use backspace a lot, so my accuracy probably isn't at 99% or anything, but I'm pretty quick with the backspace too.:)
...and, depending on how long you let it steep, you can control how much caffeine it has.
Actually, according to the Tea FAQ from rec.food.drink.tea, caffeine is one of the most readily-dissolved materials in the tea, and most of it makes it into the water in the first 20-30 seconds of steeping.
Are you equating "strong" with "caffinated"? That's a pretty common misconception; a lot of time something tastes stronger but actually has less caffeine in it. Compare dark to light roast coffee, for example; the caffeine in coffee is partially destroyed during roasting, so the longer you roast the less caffeine you get, so there's actually slightly *less* caffeine in dark coffee. But it tastes a little stronger, and looks darker, so it's assumed to give you more buzz; I assume this is because the other way to get darker coffee is to use more grounds (but that's dark in a different way!).
A friend and I modded one of these back in high school (way before we'd heard the term "mod" for "modify"). We clipped the Nintendo plug off the end and wired it up to a printer cable, following some instructions we'd got off of a BBS or something. Plug it into the parallel port, and it worked beautifully for a VR program my friend had. I don't know if he ever did much with it, but it was a fun project.
And I might add that whatever software this VR program was using to work out the glove position etc, it worked way better than Nintendo's own stuff. It was pretty much useless for playing Nintendo games.
"Although research has proven the banner works, we are tired of it being referred to as the 'much-maligned' banner," said Greg Stuart...
Sounds rather petty. Translation: "We know the existing advertising format works, but people are calling us names. Well, fine. Now they'll learn the true meaning of 'much maligned'!"
This is actually interesting for several reasons. There are basically three types of neutrino experiments: "solar neutrino" experiments like SNO, which look at the number of neutrinos of various types coming from the sun and compare that to our (pretty successful) theories on how the sun generates neutrinos; "atmospheric neutrino" experiments like Kamiokande, Super Kamiokande, and the upcoming Hyper Kamiokande (I kid you not), which look at neutrinos generated in the atmosphere from cosmic rays; and "accellerator neutrino" experiments which look at neutrino "beams" from accellerators (or reactors, in this case).
These have three basic length scales, and they're all quite different. As I understand it (and there may be more to it than what I'm saying), the neutrino oscillation theories say that there should be *some* characteristic length to the oscillations. But all three types of experiments show oscillations! That's weird!
I think that's weird, anyway.;) But they are all independent measurements of things, in any case.
For one thing, they all look at neutrinos coming from different processes, so they're less sensitive to our understanding of how they're produced. They're also all looking at different types of neutrinos. Solar neutrinos are mostly associated with electrons. Atmospheric neutrinos are mostly muon neutrinos (and I *think* they get a lot of muon antineutrinos, too). Accellerator/reactor neutrinos would be either electron or muon neutrinos/antineutrinos, according to the design of the experiment.
Turning off Javascript let me read their "test page", but I went to look at some of their samples from their home page, like their "protecting your code" sample. That's what I was referring to; do those work for you?
Did you see the "people who bought this also bought" list on that PaperPalm page? Harry Potter, and books on the Atkins Diet and some expose' on media bias and stuff. The only connection I can see with all that is that they were all featured on/.. Heh.
Ah, now I understand. They "protect" stuff by doing their little javascript check, then replacing all the actual stuff on your website by javascript calls to their site. The calls check if you've got an 'approved' setup, then returns the actual HTML and stuff if it likes you enough.
So I guess turning off javascript wasn't a workaround to everything.:(
The test site does nothing interesting if you turn off Javascript. I've blocked their cookies and everything, but without Javascript their code never gets the chance to check anything, apparently.
Aren't there browsers that can block Javascript on a site-by-site basis? That would be nice...
Only on/. would you find someone refer to Pine as "cuddly".;)
I agree totally, of course. I haven't tried mutt, but I find Pine much easier to use than any other mail program, including webmail. I'll have to check out mutt some time. Can it import pine's address book, by any chance?
So they were derived from observations of the natural world. Which is the case for all theories.
Okay, I think we're using the word "derive" differently. I mean derived from ideas about where those observations come from. F=ma is more a fit to the data than anything else. It's assumed to be true when doing any (non-relativistic) Physics. Relativity -- all the effects on time and space and mass and stuff -- was "derived" from a few basic postulates and observations, notably that c=constant. (Well, technically I guess that one was predicted by EM theory, which was "derived" from other observations, but I digress.)
So I'm saying that a "Law" is little more than a fit to data. "Well, apparently things work this way." And a "Theory" is a prediction based on some model of how things work.
I'm not 100% sure that's really a distinction, but you haven't convinced me otherwise.
They are contradicted; the difference in results between the two theories is just very, very small, so as to have no practical effect on everyday life.
They are still very, very real.
I disagree with this last statement. When things are moving slowly relative to the speed of light, and gravity isn't "too" strong, there is no difference between Newton's and Einstein's versions of things. Newton's Laws are not contradicted in these circumstances; they describe things perfectly to any precision you care to measure with (because all measurements are finite, and any differences are tiny).
(Put another way, nobody has proven that Newton's laws are in fact wrong at low energy, even given infinite precision! This is because nobody's made an experiment with infinite precision. So we assume Einstein's theory holds at low energy because it's ugly to switch theories just because you changed energy, but at the same time we use Newton's stuff because it's also right and is easier to use.)
I'm trying to make two points here. First of all, Einstein's stuff and Newton's stuff are the same at low energies (low speed, low gravity), because all the scary looking bits become zero at low energy to any precision you care to measure at. They predict the same behaviour. They work the same. They look the same. They are the same.
Which brings me to my next point: pretty much all of Physics is approximations. We approximate anything we can as long as (a) we're careful about the approximations to make sure we know when they're valid, and just how valid they are, and (b) it makes the math easier.:) We call a theory or law "true" but most of them have points where they break down. The distinction between "correct" and "so close we can't see the difference" isn't really there, or at least isn't worth worrying about.
Newton wasn't wrong. He wrote down three "laws" to describe what he saw, and he succeeded precisely. It's the people who tried to use his theories to describe high-energy stuff that were wrong, as they quickly found out.:)
Looking back, I see that this is basically a very long way of restating your other comment, so that's cool.:) But just as you say you hate it when people say "relativity is wrong", I hate it when people say "Newton was wrong."
Newton's Laws are correct for certain conditions: they are exactly what you get when you take Einstein's relativity stuff and slow everything down to small speeds (where v/c is effectively zero). Newton's Laws are not contradicted at low speeds.
Generally in Physics, "correct" and "close enough" mean the same thing. Just about everything in Physics is an approximation; the only question is whether it's a "good" approximation, in which case it's considered "correct" (or "correct enough", at least). (As a friend of mine points out, there are two kinds of Physics theories: "wrong" and "less wrong".)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, okay, that sounds good. Different feel to the game, but yeah, so much of the game play is overlapping that they really do belong in the same genre.
Wow. How the heck did that get modded "troll"? Did I stumble on some kind of holy war?
Actually, yes, that's my whole point. There's more to the FPS genre than the superficial interface and whether your character has a gun. It's about gameplay, emphasis, probably intensity. Genre lines are blurry, but I think misclassifying this game does it a disservice.
Looks like Wikipedia agrees with you, too.
There are two reasons this mislabelling bugs me. First, it could easily scare off the target audience; I know people who had no intention of playing the game until they saw me playing for a while and realized what it was really about, and now they love it. (Judging by the Metroid Prime franchise success, though, this isn't a big issue.) Second, it winds up getting compared to games like Halo. They're completely different. A better comparison would be to something like Mario Sunshine.
Don't ask if MPIII is going to be "FPS of the year"; rather ask if it'll be "Platformer of the year".
(This doesn't seem to be a problem with some other genres. Windwaker and Sunshine are usually considered different genres (Action Adventure and Platformer, respectively) and are rarely compared (AFAIK), even though their interfaces are superficially similar. I suspect it's just because FPPs are rare -- are there any first-person platformers out there besides the Metroid Prime series?)
Note that nobody's planning to make rockets out of this stuff any time soon...
[1] At least not if you're referring to stuff like antihydrogen. There are lots and lots of antiprotons produced, and they're "stored" by swinging them around and around the collider ring until they hit something (which is the reason they're produced in the first place).
[2] Of course, "in quantity" in this case means basically "more than one atom". I'm not sure just how many atoms they plan to store at a time, but it's certainly not nearly enough to do anything useful with (except possibly for spectroscopy). I mean, they purge the antihydrogen trap by turning off the fields and letting the antihydrogen annihilate against the trap walls. Poof! With little to no effect on the trap walls themselves (aside from probably accumulating the usual radiation damage that high-energy detectors like these have to put up with over time, of course).
For a dose of perspective, 33 million is about the current population of Canada...
I was surprised to read about a randomly-generated paper getting accepted, until I found out it was these guys accepting it.
Hard Data, for example, is such a retailer -- in Edmonton, Alberta. Some of the guys there are active on the ELUG Linux mailing list, and certainly know what they're doing -- and encourage their customers to, as well.
Fantastic -- thanks!
(Would it really be so hard for submitters to at least briefly explain their jargon? (Or at least expand their TLAs. ;) "If you have to ask, you don't need to know" doesn't always apply, you know.)
(And no, RAD doesn't appear in the Jargon File.)
Of course, I use backspace a lot, so my accuracy probably isn't at 99% or anything, but I'm pretty quick with the backspace too. :)
Actually, according to the Tea FAQ from rec.food.drink.tea, caffeine is one of the most readily-dissolved materials in the tea, and most of it makes it into the water in the first 20-30 seconds of steeping.
Are you equating "strong" with "caffinated"? That's a pretty common misconception; a lot of time something tastes stronger but actually has less caffeine in it. Compare dark to light roast coffee, for example; the caffeine in coffee is partially destroyed during roasting, so the longer you roast the less caffeine you get, so there's actually slightly *less* caffeine in dark coffee. But it tastes a little stronger, and looks darker, so it's assumed to give you more buzz; I assume this is because the other way to get darker coffee is to use more grounds (but that's dark in a different way!).
Richard Feynmann also put it well:
And I might add that whatever software this VR program was using to work out the glove position etc, it worked way better than Nintendo's own stuff. It was pretty much useless for playing Nintendo games.
"Although research has proven the banner works, we are tired of it being referred to as the 'much-maligned' banner," said Greg Stuart...
Sounds rather petty. Translation: "We know the existing advertising format works, but people are calling us names. Well, fine. Now they'll learn the true meaning of 'much maligned'!"
These have three basic length scales, and they're all quite different. As I understand it (and there may be more to it than what I'm saying), the neutrino oscillation theories say that there should be *some* characteristic length to the oscillations. But all three types of experiments show oscillations! That's weird!
I think that's weird, anyway. ;) But they are all independent measurements of things, in any case.
For one thing, they all look at neutrinos coming from different processes, so they're less sensitive to our understanding of how they're produced. They're also all looking at different types of neutrinos. Solar neutrinos are mostly associated with electrons. Atmospheric neutrinos are mostly muon neutrinos (and I *think* they get a lot of muon antineutrinos, too). Accellerator/reactor neutrinos would be either electron or muon neutrinos/antineutrinos, according to the design of the experiment.
Turning off Javascript let me read their "test page", but I went to look at some of their samples from their home page, like their "protecting your code" sample. That's what I was referring to; do those work for you?
Did you see the "people who bought this also bought" list on that PaperPalm page? Harry Potter, and books on the Atkins Diet and some expose' on media bias and stuff. The only connection I can see with all that is that they were all featured on /.. Heh.
So I guess turning off javascript wasn't a workaround to everything. :(
Aren't there browsers that can block Javascript on a site-by-site basis? That would be nice...
I agree totally, of course. I haven't tried mutt, but I find Pine much easier to use than any other mail program, including webmail. I'll have to check out mutt some time. Can it import pine's address book, by any chance?
Okay, I think we're using the word "derive" differently. I mean derived from ideas about where those observations come from. F=ma is more a fit to the data than anything else. It's assumed to be true when doing any (non-relativistic) Physics. Relativity -- all the effects on time and space and mass and stuff -- was "derived" from a few basic postulates and observations, notably that c=constant. (Well, technically I guess that one was predicted by EM theory, which was "derived" from other observations, but I digress.)
So I'm saying that a "Law" is little more than a fit to data. "Well, apparently things work this way." And a "Theory" is a prediction based on some model of how things work.
I'm not 100% sure that's really a distinction, but you haven't convinced me otherwise.
They are still very, very real.
I disagree with this last statement. When things are moving slowly relative to the speed of light, and gravity isn't "too" strong, there is no difference between Newton's and Einstein's versions of things. Newton's Laws are not contradicted in these circumstances; they describe things perfectly to any precision you care to measure with (because all measurements are finite, and any differences are tiny).
(Put another way, nobody has proven that Newton's laws are in fact wrong at low energy, even given infinite precision! This is because nobody's made an experiment with infinite precision. So we assume Einstein's theory holds at low energy because it's ugly to switch theories just because you changed energy, but at the same time we use Newton's stuff because it's also right and is easier to use.)
I'm trying to make two points here. First of all, Einstein's stuff and Newton's stuff are the same at low energies (low speed, low gravity), because all the scary looking bits become zero at low energy to any precision you care to measure at. They predict the same behaviour. They work the same. They look the same. They are the same.
Which brings me to my next point: pretty much all of Physics is approximations. We approximate anything we can as long as (a) we're careful about the approximations to make sure we know when they're valid, and just how valid they are, and (b) it makes the math easier. :) We call a theory or law "true" but most of them have points where they break down. The distinction between "correct" and "so close we can't see the difference" isn't really there, or at least isn't worth worrying about.
Newton wasn't wrong. He wrote down three "laws" to describe what he saw, and he succeeded precisely. It's the people who tried to use his theories to describe high-energy stuff that were wrong, as they quickly found out. :)
Looking back, I see that this is basically a very long way of restating your other comment, so that's cool. :) But just as you say you hate it when people say "relativity is wrong", I hate it when people say "Newton was wrong."
Newton's Laws are correct for certain conditions: they are exactly what you get when you take Einstein's relativity stuff and slow everything down to small speeds (where v/c is effectively zero). Newton's Laws are not contradicted at low speeds.
Generally in Physics, "correct" and "close enough" mean the same thing. Just about everything in Physics is an approximation; the only question is whether it's a "good" approximation, in which case it's considered "correct" (or "correct enough", at least). (As a friend of mine points out, there are two kinds of Physics theories: "wrong" and "less wrong".)