I never saw the appeal of single player monkey ball. Like, AT ALL. Just the crap I have to play over and over to unlock party games, with a L-shaped difficulty curve.
I guess it might be an ok wireless game, monkey target, race, and dogfight...eh, still I think it's a better console game overall.
I consider Tetris Attack and Pokemon Puzzle League to be pretty much interchangable. The difference in gameplay is neglible, PPL has a bit more sounds and best out of 5 is probably friendlier than best out of 3, Tetris Attack has mascots doing more interesting things.
The real tragedy is that they never brought the GC Puzzle Collection to the USA, with 4 player versions of the game, and some others...I'd even play the super fairy-riffic "panel de pon" original version if saved me having to carry my SNES around along with the GC...
No, I was saying even *good* speech recognition would be tough to use for a full day -- hard on the throat, so unless there's some subvocalization thing going on...same with all the chatter in a noisy office, might not be nice to work there.
Also, why couldn't you say "Audio Up 20" or "Audio Down 50 Percent"? Though I agree tactile things can be great. (On the other hand I'm not crazy about the increasing number of multimedia control doodads on keyboards)
I wonder if your car is designed to tune out its own audio in its input? Could you have a CD that says "Stereo Off!" and so the rest of the CD can't be played on it?
While actually having speech recognition might be problematic (dry sore throats, noisy offices), I often wondered why not combine a Inform/Zork parser with a command line interface. It might be a lot easier than traditional scripting. And a lot more fun.
"solid scientific testing" depends on making the right assumptions and setting the right test. Saving a few milliseconds of movement with the mouse might be outweighed by the amount of time it takes to remember to click there.
And of course these days, with big screens, it can be quiet a journey to get to the edge.
I think people who do HCI with a stopwatch are missing an important point, that A. initial friendliness to newbies, ideally to let them ramp up and B. "mental load" for experienced users, how much they have to keep in their head, are both as or more important than an extra millisecond.
One random addition to this discussion:
"If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. *A lousy interface would mean a lousy life.*" --Myron Krueger
Of all the old Nintendo franchises, I thought Zelda made the easiest leap to 3D...because a 2D overhead view is kind of 3D already, it just has limited "Z" movement (come to think of it, thanks to that harsh mistress gravity, I only have limited "Z" movement as well, I always need stairs or an elevator, except for some trivial jumps.)
"what good is a free wireless when you have no power". Depends on your laptop battery life I suppose.
Though overall this seems much less important a communications opening then cellphones and landlines...not to mention every other form of utility from basic sanitation to water to electricity.
To me, the interesting part of this is the implication that FINALLY a business and distribution model has emerged. Apparently not quite "micropayments", but it's interesting that games can get the attention they need, and then get people to fork over some dough......besides the spur of Internet distribution via fancy websites, is the model much different than what Id used back in the day, here are some levels, pay us for more?
I know it's not the same thing, but judging by some of the screenshots, it looks like some of the design made its way to Monkey Ball 2, especially the dogfight party game...
Sigh, Alien Front Online...if that game had a split screen mode it would be GREAT...there hasn't been a good splitscreen multiplayer tank game since "Battle Tanx: Global Assault"
I was bummed out that StarCon never made it, but I thought SC3 was a far cry from "real hugest disappointment ever". It didn't advance the series, and was even a step back in a few ways, but it was another helping of the game I loved so well.
Nintendo has a great puzzle set with Panel de Pon (Yoshi-rebranded as Tetris Attack here), Dr. Mario, and Yoshi's Cookie. For gamecube, with four player modes for each. Which THEY AREN'T SELLING HERE. Seems like they could pretty easily recoup any translation costs, even if they had to redo the exceedingly fairy Panel de Pon as Tetris Attack.
Jerks. I still gotta drag my SNES around to my friends so we can play the old 2 player version.
Yeah, sometimes it's tough picking an item to track inflation with, because other factors can interfere...I wouldn't be shocked if paperback books are a declining market. Or some other issue interfering, or just people being greedy jerks.
And then somethings, like computer equipment...well, I'd say advances in technolgy have balanced inflation pretty well in the case of the C=64...$600 is a fair price for a computer system these days as well.
Commodore 64 - $1207.04 (originally valued at $595
Wow...do things cost twice as much as they did in 1982 on average? It seems so hard to believe, the way prices sneak up on you, but then when I think of the particulars, what I pay for a candy bar or soda, what I've heard houses go for, what a paperback book costs...I guess I have to believe it.
It's a lot more complicated than "10 lines of perl" to interpret instructions written in English, especially if the verbage varies, along with the sentence structure.
Right, but as difficult as it is to *parse* that kind of sentence (at least if you have no idea of its structure) it's even more difficult to GENERATE that kind of sentence (unless you follow a simple formula or two or three or ten.)
See what I mean? A catchpa-generator would have to be SUPER sophisticated to come up with a new style of instructions by itself, like "sort these numbers, but alphabetically by their english name". Basically, to come up with a lot of those, you'd have solved a *tough* AI problem. You can slightly confuse things by substuting different words for the instructions (" all these numbers" "all the digits" "all these figures" "all this" "these" etc) but still a few hours of work and you can decode this. 10 lines of Perl.
Tell me, in a high level way, how you're going to generate NEW instruction types and forms, and I'll either tell you how the 10 lines of perl would basically work, or say "you've just described the computer HAL making the problems", or admit I'm wrong.
So what? If this becomes popular, a human sits down, reloads your captcha w/ instructions plus sentences 20-30 times, finds out all or most of the instruction patterns, and writes the 10 lines of Perl to perform the instructions on a given sentence.
So if the software can get the text out of the captcha, it's then only a smidge harder to follow some instructions then to just bounce the text back to the form. Therefore, this isn't much more protection than a normal captcha. If used on a small number of sites it will probably be secure, but once it moves out to the outside world would only be about as strong as its graphic encoding.
This is assuming you don't have some wacky AI finding always new ways of expressing the instructions that a human can usually understand but need super complex parsing...I'm guessing most implementations would be simple "madlibs" style Nth letters from Mth word stuff.
Yeah, but how many variants of "first X this" and "last Y that" and "first Wth letters of the Zth" word would you code in? Someone could probably see all the "sentences" you coded in after reloading 10-20 times, and have a script deal with each case. It's only one thin layer better than a traditional captcha image, not "many times more difficult". (So it will probably work if you homebrew it and do it all yourself, but if it gets popular someone will spread the countermeasure.)
Lots of token- or javascript-based authenticator ideas make similar mistakes...the people suggesting tokens assume that the form is only loaded once, but a spammer might as well get a fresh form each time. And they might as well run clever form-building javascript through a javascript engine.
So finally, I used the blogspammers own copiousness idiocy (hundreds of thousands of the same F'in links, not for human viewing but just to crank up googlejuice) against them:
If you don't have http:/// in your comment, no problem, your post goes through. If you do, you can't use one of a list of "forbidden words", mosty pharmaceutical and gambling based.
In theory content based filtering goes against the free speech grain, but in practice the combo of badword PLUS link doesn't seem to block real stuff too much, and a human gets a clear explanation and can try again. Over the last month and a half its had a low false-positive rate and a perfect success rate.
I know RSS has forked, and I don't use it much myself but I know others have asked for an RSS feed...is there a simple guide to outputting my content in an RSS kind of way?
Also, if I wanted to mirror my content on an LJ, would it be easier to automate the LJ postings and get an RSS feed off of that, or vice versa, or are they completely indpendent tasks?
It can be argued that once we know something can be programmed we stop thinking of it AI. A few years ago many would have claimed that a computer really should have achieved something intelligent when it beats a grandmaster at chess. Now, after the fact, we only think of it as a clever search routine.
There's some truth to that, but I think people want AI to be done the "right" way, like a chess program that was an outgrowth of a general purpose intelligence rather than a specialized one-trick-wonder.
If Deep Blue (or whatever the latest champion is) could also pick out a face in a variety of lighting conditions, have a half-acceptable conversation, or even learn to play a decent game of Checkers or Stratego (all using the same basic ideas that let it play chess so well not just bolt-on independent programs), then we'd have Artificial Intelligence, not just Artificial Idiot Savants.
Or if something like Cyc could LEARN to play a decent game of chess after being told the rules. (Heh...actually in some ways Atari 2600 Chess with its habit of rearranging the board (during the screenblanking "thinking" period) when under "stressful" situations almost seems more human than something like Deep Blue.)
What's also interesting is reading about how the human grandmasters deal with high end programs. Humans play chess by "chunking" the pieces on the board and applying pattern recognition. Similarly, humans can kind of "chunk" the strategies that specific AIs fall into, and try to counter them, even though it's still damned hard to do so. Conversely, I'm not sure if we have a serious AI that could even take things to the metalevel like that.
Have people started taking notes in class on laptop?
I was in school from 92-96, and by the end of that time laptops were pretty common sites in libraries, but I was about the only one geek enough to drag one to class...an ancient Tandy (no hard drive, but decent large gameboy-style CGA screen and a nice text editor hardwired in) and then a cheapy 486 so I could finally copy sketches without resorting to ASCII art...
From a non-network-geek kind of view it seems that the standard security systems are seriously missing in options and tough to configure. It seems like there isn't a good option for "no authentication, but encrypt everything please" (kind of akin to https) or simple password/phrase authentication, as opposed to asking people to type in these massive hex strings or handcoding in their MAC addresses.
So even beyond the fact the encryption ain't much good, open networks tend to win out because everything else is so painful to setup.
Slashdot Mirror
With the right decoding mechanism, any block of data is porn content...
I never saw the appeal of single player monkey ball. Like, AT ALL. Just the crap I have to play over and over to unlock party games, with a L-shaped difficulty curve.
I guess it might be an ok wireless game, monkey target, race, and dogfight...eh, still I think it's a better console game overall.
I consider Tetris Attack and Pokemon Puzzle League to be pretty much interchangable. The difference in gameplay is neglible, PPL has a bit more sounds and best out of 5 is probably friendlier than best out of 3, Tetris Attack has mascots doing more interesting things.
The real tragedy is that they never brought the GC Puzzle Collection to the USA, with 4 player versions of the game, and some others...I'd even play the super fairy-riffic "panel de pon" original version if saved me having to carry my SNES around along with the GC...
No, I was saying even *good* speech recognition would be tough to use for a full day -- hard on the throat, so unless there's some subvocalization thing going on...same with all the chatter in a noisy office, might not be nice to work there.
Also, why couldn't you say "Audio Up 20" or "Audio Down 50 Percent"? Though I agree tactile things can be great. (On the other hand I'm not crazy about the increasing number of multimedia control doodads on keyboards)
I wonder if your car is designed to tune out its own audio in its input? Could you have a CD that says "Stereo Off!" and so the rest of the CD can't be played on it?
Maybe turn off autohide, and then manually shove it out of the way? I find alt-tab faster for most things anyway.
While actually having speech recognition might be problematic (dry sore throats, noisy offices), I often wondered why not combine a Inform/Zork parser with a command line interface. It might be a lot easier than traditional scripting. And a lot more fun.
"solid scientific testing" depends on making the right assumptions and setting the right test. Saving a few milliseconds of movement with the mouse might be outweighed by the amount of time it takes to remember to click there.
And of course these days, with big screens, it can be quiet a journey to get to the edge.
Good point about the corners.
I think people who do HCI with a stopwatch are missing an important point, that A. initial friendliness to newbies, ideally to let them ramp up and B. "mental load" for experienced users, how much they have to keep in their head, are both as or more important than an extra millisecond.
One random addition to this discussion:
"If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. *A lousy interface would mean a lousy life.*"
--Myron Krueger
Of all the old Nintendo franchises, I thought Zelda made the easiest leap to 3D...because a 2D overhead view is kind of 3D already, it just has limited "Z" movement (come to think of it, thanks to that harsh mistress gravity, I only have limited "Z" movement as well, I always need stairs or an elevator, except for some trivial jumps.)
I guess none of the groups relax the 56-day-minimum, even for biggish guys who (I would guess) could spare an extra pint or so?
Course my blood is B positive anyway, not as useful as most other types.
"what good is a free wireless when you have no power".
Depends on your laptop battery life I suppose.
Though overall this seems much less important a communications opening then cellphones and landlines...not to mention every other form of utility from basic sanitation to water to electricity.
To me, the interesting part of this is the implication that FINALLY a business and distribution model has emerged. Apparently not quite "micropayments", but it's interesting that games can get the attention they need, and then get people to fork over some dough... ...besides the spur of Internet distribution via fancy websites, is the model much different than what Id used back in the day, here are some levels, pay us for more?
I know it's not the same thing, but judging by some of the screenshots, it looks like some of the design made its way to Monkey Ball 2, especially the dogfight party game...
Sigh, Alien Front Online...if that game had a split screen mode it would be GREAT...there hasn't been a good splitscreen multiplayer tank game since "Battle Tanx: Global Assault"
I was bummed out that StarCon never made it, but I thought SC3 was a far cry from "real hugest disappointment ever". It didn't advance the series, and was even a step back in a few ways, but it was another helping of the game I loved so well.
Nintendo has a great puzzle set with Panel de Pon (Yoshi-rebranded as Tetris Attack here), Dr. Mario, and Yoshi's Cookie. For gamecube, with four player modes for each. Which THEY AREN'T SELLING HERE. Seems like they could pretty easily recoup any translation costs, even if they had to redo the exceedingly fairy Panel de Pon as Tetris Attack.
Jerks. I still gotta drag my SNES around to my friends so we can play the old 2 player version.
Yeah, sometimes it's tough picking an item to track inflation with, because other factors can interfere...I wouldn't be shocked if paperback books are a declining market. Or some other issue interfering, or just people being greedy jerks.
And then somethings, like computer equipment...well, I'd say advances in technolgy have balanced inflation pretty well in the case of the C=64...$600 is a fair price for a computer system these days as well.
Commodore 64 - $1207.04 (originally valued at $595
Wow...do things cost twice as much as they did in 1982 on average? It seems so hard to believe, the way prices sneak up on you, but then when I think of the particulars, what I pay for a candy bar or soda, what I've heard houses go for, what a paperback book costs...I guess I have to believe it.
It's a lot more complicated than "10 lines of perl" to interpret instructions written in English, especially if the verbage varies, along with the sentence structure.
Right, but as difficult as it is to *parse* that kind of sentence (at least if you have no idea of its structure) it's even more difficult to GENERATE that kind of sentence (unless you follow a simple formula or two or three or ten.)
See what I mean? A catchpa-generator would have to be SUPER sophisticated to come up with a new style of instructions by itself, like "sort these numbers, but alphabetically by their english name". Basically, to come up with a lot of those, you'd have solved a *tough* AI problem. You can slightly confuse things by substuting different words for the instructions (" all these numbers" "all the digits" "all these figures" "all this" "these" etc) but still a few hours of work and you can decode this. 10 lines of Perl.
Tell me, in a high level way, how you're going to generate NEW instruction types and forms, and I'll either tell you how the 10 lines of perl would basically work, or say "you've just described the computer HAL making the problems", or admit I'm wrong.
So what?
If this becomes popular, a human sits down, reloads your captcha w/ instructions plus sentences 20-30 times, finds out all or most of the instruction patterns, and writes the 10 lines of Perl to perform the instructions on a given sentence.
So if the software can get the text out of the captcha, it's then only a smidge harder to follow some instructions then to just bounce the text back to the form. Therefore, this isn't much more protection than a normal captcha. If used on a small number of sites it will probably be secure, but once it moves out to the outside world would only be about as strong as its graphic encoding.
This is assuming you don't have some wacky AI finding always new ways of expressing the instructions that a human can usually understand but need super complex parsing...I'm guessing most implementations would be simple "madlibs" style Nth letters from Mth word stuff.
Yeah, but how many variants of "first X this" and "last Y that" and "first Wth letters of the Zth" word would you code in? Someone could probably see all the "sentences" you coded in after reloading 10-20 times, and have a script deal with each case. It's only one thin layer better than a traditional captcha image, not "many times more difficult". (So it will probably work if you homebrew it and do it all yourself, but if it gets popular someone will spread the countermeasure.)
Lots of token- or javascript-based authenticator ideas make similar mistakes...the people suggesting tokens assume that the form is only loaded once, but a spammer might as well get a fresh form each time. And they might as well run clever form-building javascript through a javascript engine.
So finally, I used the blogspammers own copiousness idiocy (hundreds of thousands of the same F'in links, not for human viewing but just to crank up googlejuice) against them:
If you don't have http:/// in your comment, no problem, your post goes through. If you do, you can't use one of a list of "forbidden words", mosty pharmaceutical and gambling based.
You can see the words and further thoughts on my site:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2005.07.15
In theory content based filtering goes against the free speech grain, but in practice the combo of badword PLUS link doesn't seem to block real stuff too much, and a human gets a clear explanation and can try again. Over the last month and a half its had a low false-positive rate and a perfect success rate.
I have a homebrew-ed backend weblog, http://kisrael.com/
I know RSS has forked, and I don't use it much myself but I know others have asked for an RSS feed...is there a simple guide to outputting my content in an RSS kind of way?
Also, if I wanted to mirror my content on an LJ, would it be easier to automate the LJ postings and get an RSS feed off of that, or vice versa, or are they completely indpendent tasks?
It can be argued that once we know something can be programmed we stop thinking of it AI. A few years ago many would have claimed that a computer really should have achieved something intelligent when it beats a grandmaster at chess. Now, after the fact, we only think of it as a clever search routine.
There's some truth to that, but I think people want AI to be done the "right" way, like a chess program that was an outgrowth of a general purpose intelligence rather than a specialized one-trick-wonder.
If Deep Blue (or whatever the latest champion is) could also pick out a face in a variety of lighting conditions, have a half-acceptable conversation, or even learn to play a decent game of Checkers or Stratego (all using the same basic ideas that let it play chess so well not just bolt-on independent programs), then we'd have Artificial Intelligence, not just Artificial Idiot Savants.
Or if something like Cyc could LEARN to play a decent game of chess after being told the rules. (Heh...actually in some ways Atari 2600 Chess with its habit of rearranging the board (during the screenblanking "thinking" period) when under "stressful" situations almost seems more human than something like Deep Blue.)
What's also interesting is reading about how the human grandmasters deal with high end programs. Humans play chess by "chunking" the pieces on the board and applying pattern recognition. Similarly, humans can kind of "chunk" the strategies that specific AIs fall into, and try to counter them, even though it's still damned hard to do so. Conversely, I'm not sure if we have a serious AI that could even take things to the metalevel like that.
Have people started taking notes in class on laptop?
I was in school from 92-96, and by the end of that time laptops were pretty common sites in libraries, but I was about the only one geek enough to drag one to class...an ancient Tandy (no hard drive, but decent large gameboy-style CGA screen and a nice text editor hardwired in) and then a cheapy 486 so I could finally copy sketches without resorting to ASCII art...
It was nice, I always had notes I could read...
From a non-network-geek kind of view it seems that the standard security systems are seriously missing in options and tough to configure. It seems like there isn't a good option for "no authentication, but encrypt everything please" (kind of akin to https) or simple password/phrase authentication, as opposed to asking people to type in these massive hex strings or handcoding in their MAC addresses.
So even beyond the fact the encryption ain't much good, open networks tend to win out because everything else is so painful to setup.