While my knowledge and understanding is limited I think that the extra power in the light output comes from heat. So light power out is greater than electrical power in but if you consider thermal power AND electrical power then total efficiency is under 100%. Thus the first law of thermal dynamics is safe.
I'm glad you mentioned Uncharted because I think it's a perfect example of how pushing towards a movie type of story telling ruins a game. The story telling elements in Uncharted 2 was over used, forced and ultimately broke game play. For example when you first start the game and granted control: you find the main character hanging off a crashed train danging off an edge of a cliff. You start to climb upwards and then BAM a piece of the train breaks off and you loose control to a mini-scene where you watch him dangle by one hand, he watches the broken pipe fall a long ways down and you're given a scenic views of the snow covered mountains in the distance as he slowly turns himself back around and gets his other hand back on the train. You're then granted control again and this process is repeated a number of times until you finally make it onto solid ground. That ruins the game play for me, I've lost control and was interrupted not because I made a mistake but because the designers wanted it to be more like a movie. Metal Gear Solid 4 while having a million hours of cut-scenes manages not to break game play; when they take control away and show a scene it's because there's going to be a change in game play. If I sneak into a house and they start a cut-scene it's because the gameplay is shifting from sneaking past henchmen to a boss battle. Playing Uncharted 2 I felt less like playing a game with an interactive world with a story to drive that interaction and more like watching a movie that required me to push some buttons.
While a Windows 8 ARM laptop doesn't really entice me the idea of a laptop with an ARM and a x86/64 processor is something that does. In the future we could see laptops that have both a low power ARM and a high performance x86/64 processor and would switch between the two as necessary. In that respect I find Windows 8 ARM interesting, it would be out there to build up the library of programs and drivers so the next (next) version of Windows could support both ARM and x86 as one single OS. It would then have enough software to run on the ARM core to see the battery life of days but can run anything you can throw at it.
Except multiple read heads does not solve the slow hard drive read speed and is not easy. You're still limited by rotational latency and especially by how fast the actuator can move the head. That read head is physically limited. If you make it go any faster the acceleration force will break it, if you make the support arm bigger and sturdier you have the same problem. It's mass went up and now it's harder to accelerate it. Use a better material? I don't know of any better material and the ones that you can think of are probably magnitudes more expensive.
Even if you're okay with not improving the read head and slap 3 more read heads to a platter that's only a 4x performance gain. Now how much more complex is the system? How much more expensive is the system? At that point it's just cheaper to have 4 separate hard drives... which is what we do. The multiple head with independent read is already solved and implemented by RAID.
But is it really enough to just stop buying ubisoft games? I know the commonly accepted mantra is to vote with your dollars but as a consumer with concerns regarding DRM I feel like I'm a minority who will always loose the the majority popular vote of the dollar.
Most popular games have enough momentum and a fan base behind them that the people who do buy it is enough to tell companies to keep doing what they're doing. I've seen numerous complains regarding EA's origin for battlefield 3 yet I'm certain they will have massive sales for Mass Effect 3 and not care for a sale lost because of origin. There was tons of complains about secureROM with Bioshock but 2kgames still included it with Bioshock 2. People were up in arms when Blizzard announce they won't include LAN play into Starcraft 2 but it still sold well.
Do we need to expand the rhetoric to tell people to stop playing ubisoft games? If people stop buying games and resort to piracy then the wrong message is being sent, it will all just look like a sale lost to piracy and not a sale lost to their unreasonable DRM. On the totally legal side people might just get the console version and not buy the pc version since the "DRM" on a console is a result of a physical limitation rather than an added limitation like secureROM.
Even then, is it enough to just stop buy and playing ubisoft games? They just might come to the conclusion that the specific game series is no longer popular and needs to be canned. I think we need to proactively remind game companies that we don't like DRM and they're loosing a sale because of it. Maybe something like a petition, email or twitter. I'm not a big fan of twitter but if it would reduce DRM I'd get an account and send off a tweet.
I'm tired of hearing this; stop telling people to "stop buying games". The whole "voting with your dollar" idea is stupid because there's not enough information as to why a sale was lost and it's a pure democracy so the minority will always loose. Any popular game will have enough momentum and a player-base that don't care if you abuse them. Do you think EA gives a shit that origin is/was terrible and forced for Battlefield 3? Do you think Blizzard cared that a small group of people and I didn't buy Starcraft 2 because there's no LAN play? Do you think all the issues with secureROM for Bioshock stopped 2kgames from including it for Bioshock 2? No, no, no. It's even worse if you pirate the game because it's now a vote for piracy instead of a vote for "I choose not to buy the game and pirated it because I felt the DRM was too restrictive". So if you have issues with ubisoft's DRM then you need to STOP *PLAYING* UBISOFT GAMES and take further action such as petition, email, twitter or something to let them know they lost a sale to DRM.
Probably due to things like regulations and all the necessary surveys. The cost of building something in the US and more specifically California have gone up tremendously over the last century. I wouldn't be surprised if more than half the money of building a new building or rail is spent on surveys of the land regarding the environmental impact. As a California resident I'll often hear news on things like an endangered species of snails preventing the construction of a project and then the small interested group of people protesting the construction project and demanding another survey regarding if the snails can be moved and their impact on the place they're being moved.
Don't give up on the serial port. There are a large number of great USB to serial port adapters on the market and they're not too expensive either. Even if you really wanted to give up on the serial port the more modern cheaper usb chip programmers are just the old serial programmers with a FTDI chip to convert serial to usb. Even the super popular arduino uses the mentioned method. All that being said take a look at sparkfun.
With regret I must say to give up on the parallel port. The older true parallel ports with ECP/EPP were amazing for hobbyist hackers. Throw in a few buffers and bit bang anything you could ever need out of it. Stay away from those "usb to parallel port" adapters as they are not the gloried parallel port from the olden days and are just ports meant for older printers.
It's always a balance of cost, security, and access. I say back it (all) up with multiple hard drives, duplicating the drives every so many year with new harddrives. Also copy select files to share online (which also serves as a back up). Finally take a look at the sandisk memoryvault.
I'm not happy with modern games. It's not amazing and I complain. It could be because I'm THAT guy who was born in the middle of the 80's and through the golden age of gaming. I grew up watching video game genres and conventions being defined. I grew up watching communities add value to games through a legitimate moding scene. I grew up enjoying rocket jumping, saving princesses, uncovering conspiracies and saving the world from destruction (sometimes destroying it too). Now that i've grown up I see gaming genres getting mangled, removing features like a selection of 10 weapons down to 2 because you can only control that many with a controller or adding unnecessary RPG elements so that my gun can fire more accurately. Modding communities disappeared and all the small fun things replaced with DLC or micro-transactions. Now all the guns just fire bullets at different speeds and spreads, no more interesting things like firing rockets out of a crow bar or scientists out of a shotgun. Instead of working my way to 3 different endings I'm just offered the choice at the very end by pressing one of 3 buttons. Gaming is good now, it's just not as great as it used to be.
The problem with the cover based combat in Deus Ex HR is that it's awkward, especially if you're a die hard PC fps fan. Being a grizzled FPS veteran and huge fan of the first game I ignored the tutorial videos that comes up so when I first fired up the game I kept dying because i'd be doing the whole pop up and shoot, spamming the crouch buttton and A and D. You know, cover based shooting like you would in half life. The "proper" way to do cover based combat is to hold down the right click button to stick behind a wall (and go into 3rd person view) and then push in the direction you want to peek around cover from (going back to first person view). So you're holding right click and holding the W/A/D key to pop up to shoot and going back and forth between 3rd person and 1st person view. While still a great game I can't help but feel that the multiplatform release is holding it back from being a really great PC game for the ages.
You do realize formats like CDs remove inaudible frequencies? By that same logic super Audio CDs, DVD-Audio and every single recorded piece of audio has removed inaudible frequencies.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
Actually macs have a MINI displayport connector. When apple first switched to mini display port I was excited, being one of the few people who actually owned a monitor that supports a displayport (full size) connection. You would think it would be a simple mini-displayport to displayport cable like you see for micro/mini usb to usb. It took 3rd party manufactures over a year to come out with that blasted cable. Sure there was mini displayport to VGA, DVI or HDMI but no mini dislayport to displayport.
I love the D-pad and was sad to see it get ruined over the years. The NES, SNES and N64 controller got it right: nice large size, good button depth, and the area around and underneath the D pad was minimal.
The biggest problem with the xbox360 controller isn't the shape of the Dpad, it's too much plastic around and underneath it. The sega genesis controller has the same shape but it felt fine because when you held it there was a nice sized gap between the edge of the controller and the size edge of your palm and the "pinch" distance was small.
Take the SNES controller for example, the left edge of the controller to the d pad is only 18mm and the thickest part from the back of the controller to the top of the dpad is 22.3mm. The xbox260 is 36.5mm from left edge to dpad and 32mm from back to surface of dpad. That's just too much plastic to get in the way of thumb movement.
There's also the problem that the Dpad is really a giant stick. The total thickness of the plastic in the xbox dpad is something like 20mm, the SNES is 9mm (these are estimate measurements unlike the previous).
TFA article is wrong. If you look at sandisk's actual press release they say the 100 life span is "based on reliability data from internal, accelerated lifespan testing for cards stored at normal room temperature, with humidity and static protection".
I didn't RTFA but I read the link in the article and it's really interesting. It's innovative because it's a pressure sensitive resistive technology. Not only can you get a location measurement from a touch you also get pressure. It's amazing because you can use anything physical to do it, push with your finger, your noise, your toe or a chop stick and it will still register. The iPhone screen or a wacom tablet can't do that.
In terms of feeling more "real", when you write on a piece of paper it's the paper that yields to the pressure. Anyone who writes really hard will see their words indented on the next few pages. When you write with a wacom table you see the tip moves further into the stylus, which when compared to a touch screen that will yield it seems less authentic.
I'm rather puzzled by this "game". It's really unique, the screen shots look gorgeous, I find it really interesting and I want to play it. However I feel as if I'm not going to find it fun, it seems just too heavy and mature.
Maybe it's just a sign of my immaturity. The original half-life is a good example of fun in terms of character interaction. I smack a fellow scientist in the face with a crow bar and he just stands wit his best retort, "what are you doing?" and maybe get the smarts to run away after I smack him a second time. Sometimes he'll just riddle me with dialog until he's on the floor. In Heavy Rain, it seems too close to reality and I wouldn't want to do something like beat my virtual child with a light saber till he runs to his mom, the only choice is the mature adult choice and to let him win.
On the other side of the coin it could be a sign of my maturity. I am able to recognize that the game will require deep emotional involvement on my part and it's just something I don't want to invest or experience through a "game".
No, we want MS and large companies to win this. If they loose then the patent trolls will see it is profitable and continue to do so. The large companies would not lobbying for better patent laws, or try to end software patents because it is more profitable to invest the money paying the patent trolls and ensuring you get to use the patent than to risk spending money on something that might change in 10 years.
Considering that Colorado is surrounded by land on all sides and New York is about as far away as possible from the pacific ocean (while staying in the US) i'm not surprised the tuna sushi you get there is a bit off.
Unported games off the top of my head: Canon Spike, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Power Stone, Power Stone 2, Samba De Amigo and Shenmue.
You have to respect that Dreamcast was the first platform many of those games appeared on (I'm counting the NAOMI arcade hardware as dreamcast). If the dreamcast didn't have such a massive library of great games we might never never have seen ports to consoles such as GBA, DS, PS2, PSP, GC and yes even the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Companies like Antec and Seasonic have been incorporating DC-DC converters in their newer power supplies. It's even advertised in the productpages. The DC to DC design is becoming more and more widespread in PSU because they're much more efficient than the older design.
Slashdot Mirror
The carrier are not adding value, they are not removing value.
While my knowledge and understanding is limited I think that the extra power in the light output comes from heat. So light power out is greater than electrical power in but if you consider thermal power AND electrical power then total efficiency is under 100%. Thus the first law of thermal dynamics is safe.
I'm glad you mentioned Uncharted because I think it's a perfect example of how pushing towards a movie type of story telling ruins a game. The story telling elements in Uncharted 2 was over used, forced and ultimately broke game play. For example when you first start the game and granted control: you find the main character hanging off a crashed train danging off an edge of a cliff. You start to climb upwards and then BAM a piece of the train breaks off and you loose control to a mini-scene where you watch him dangle by one hand, he watches the broken pipe fall a long ways down and you're given a scenic views of the snow covered mountains in the distance as he slowly turns himself back around and gets his other hand back on the train. You're then granted control again and this process is repeated a number of times until you finally make it onto solid ground. That ruins the game play for me, I've lost control and was interrupted not because I made a mistake but because the designers wanted it to be more like a movie. Metal Gear Solid 4 while having a million hours of cut-scenes manages not to break game play; when they take control away and show a scene it's because there's going to be a change in game play. If I sneak into a house and they start a cut-scene it's because the gameplay is shifting from sneaking past henchmen to a boss battle. Playing Uncharted 2 I felt less like playing a game with an interactive world with a story to drive that interaction and more like watching a movie that required me to push some buttons.
While a Windows 8 ARM laptop doesn't really entice me the idea of a laptop with an ARM and a x86/64 processor is something that does. In the future we could see laptops that have both a low power ARM and a high performance x86/64 processor and would switch between the two as necessary. In that respect I find Windows 8 ARM interesting, it would be out there to build up the library of programs and drivers so the next (next) version of Windows could support both ARM and x86 as one single OS. It would then have enough software to run on the ARM core to see the battery life of days but can run anything you can throw at it.
Except multiple read heads does not solve the slow hard drive read speed and is not easy. You're still limited by rotational latency and especially by how fast the actuator can move the head. That read head is physically limited. If you make it go any faster the acceleration force will break it, if you make the support arm bigger and sturdier you have the same problem. It's mass went up and now it's harder to accelerate it. Use a better material? I don't know of any better material and the ones that you can think of are probably magnitudes more expensive.
Even if you're okay with not improving the read head and slap 3 more read heads to a platter that's only a 4x performance gain. Now how much more complex is the system? How much more expensive is the system? At that point it's just cheaper to have 4 separate hard drives... which is what we do. The multiple head with independent read is already solved and implemented by RAID.
But is it really enough to just stop buying ubisoft games? I know the commonly accepted mantra is to vote with your dollars but as a consumer with concerns regarding DRM I feel like I'm a minority who will always loose the the majority popular vote of the dollar. Most popular games have enough momentum and a fan base behind them that the people who do buy it is enough to tell companies to keep doing what they're doing. I've seen numerous complains regarding EA's origin for battlefield 3 yet I'm certain they will have massive sales for Mass Effect 3 and not care for a sale lost because of origin. There was tons of complains about secureROM with Bioshock but 2kgames still included it with Bioshock 2. People were up in arms when Blizzard announce they won't include LAN play into Starcraft 2 but it still sold well. Do we need to expand the rhetoric to tell people to stop playing ubisoft games? If people stop buying games and resort to piracy then the wrong message is being sent, it will all just look like a sale lost to piracy and not a sale lost to their unreasonable DRM. On the totally legal side people might just get the console version and not buy the pc version since the "DRM" on a console is a result of a physical limitation rather than an added limitation like secureROM. Even then, is it enough to just stop buy and playing ubisoft games? They just might come to the conclusion that the specific game series is no longer popular and needs to be canned. I think we need to proactively remind game companies that we don't like DRM and they're loosing a sale because of it. Maybe something like a petition, email or twitter. I'm not a big fan of twitter but if it would reduce DRM I'd get an account and send off a tweet.
I'm tired of hearing this; stop telling people to "stop buying games". The whole "voting with your dollar" idea is stupid because there's not enough information as to why a sale was lost and it's a pure democracy so the minority will always loose. Any popular game will have enough momentum and a player-base that don't care if you abuse them. Do you think EA gives a shit that origin is/was terrible and forced for Battlefield 3? Do you think Blizzard cared that a small group of people and I didn't buy Starcraft 2 because there's no LAN play? Do you think all the issues with secureROM for Bioshock stopped 2kgames from including it for Bioshock 2? No, no, no. It's even worse if you pirate the game because it's now a vote for piracy instead of a vote for "I choose not to buy the game and pirated it because I felt the DRM was too restrictive". So if you have issues with ubisoft's DRM then you need to STOP *PLAYING* UBISOFT GAMES and take further action such as petition, email, twitter or something to let them know they lost a sale to DRM.
Probably due to things like regulations and all the necessary surveys. The cost of building something in the US and more specifically California have gone up tremendously over the last century. I wouldn't be surprised if more than half the money of building a new building or rail is spent on surveys of the land regarding the environmental impact. As a California resident I'll often hear news on things like an endangered species of snails preventing the construction of a project and then the small interested group of people protesting the construction project and demanding another survey regarding if the snails can be moved and their impact on the place they're being moved.
Don't give up on the serial port. There are a large number of great USB to serial port adapters on the market and they're not too expensive either. Even if you really wanted to give up on the serial port the more modern cheaper usb chip programmers are just the old serial programmers with a FTDI chip to convert serial to usb. Even the super popular arduino uses the mentioned method. All that being said take a look at sparkfun.
With regret I must say to give up on the parallel port. The older true parallel ports with ECP/EPP were amazing for hobbyist hackers. Throw in a few buffers and bit bang anything you could ever need out of it. Stay away from those "usb to parallel port" adapters as they are not the gloried parallel port from the olden days and are just ports meant for older printers.
It's always a balance of cost, security, and access. I say back it (all) up with multiple hard drives, duplicating the drives every so many year with new harddrives. Also copy select files to share online (which also serves as a back up). Finally take a look at the sandisk memoryvault.
I'm not happy with modern games. It's not amazing and I complain. It could be because I'm THAT guy who was born in the middle of the 80's and through the golden age of gaming. I grew up watching video game genres and conventions being defined. I grew up watching communities add value to games through a legitimate moding scene. I grew up enjoying rocket jumping, saving princesses, uncovering conspiracies and saving the world from destruction (sometimes destroying it too). Now that i've grown up I see gaming genres getting mangled, removing features like a selection of 10 weapons down to 2 because you can only control that many with a controller or adding unnecessary RPG elements so that my gun can fire more accurately. Modding communities disappeared and all the small fun things replaced with DLC or micro-transactions. Now all the guns just fire bullets at different speeds and spreads, no more interesting things like firing rockets out of a crow bar or scientists out of a shotgun. Instead of working my way to 3 different endings I'm just offered the choice at the very end by pressing one of 3 buttons. Gaming is good now, it's just not as great as it used to be.
Slashdot has and continues to make me a much more informed and enriched person. Take care.
The problem with the cover based combat in Deus Ex HR is that it's awkward, especially if you're a die hard PC fps fan. Being a grizzled FPS veteran and huge fan of the first game I ignored the tutorial videos that comes up so when I first fired up the game I kept dying because i'd be doing the whole pop up and shoot, spamming the crouch buttton and A and D. You know, cover based shooting like you would in half life. The "proper" way to do cover based combat is to hold down the right click button to stick behind a wall (and go into 3rd person view) and then push in the direction you want to peek around cover from (going back to first person view). So you're holding right click and holding the W/A/D key to pop up to shoot and going back and forth between 3rd person and 1st person view. While still a great game I can't help but feel that the multiplatform release is holding it back from being a really great PC game for the ages.
You do realize formats like CDs remove inaudible frequencies? By that same logic super Audio CDs, DVD-Audio and every single recorded piece of audio has removed inaudible frequencies.
Actually macs have a MINI displayport connector. When apple first switched to mini display port I was excited, being one of the few people who actually owned a monitor that supports a displayport (full size) connection. You would think it would be a simple mini-displayport to displayport cable like you see for micro/mini usb to usb. It took 3rd party manufactures over a year to come out with that blasted cable. Sure there was mini displayport to VGA, DVI or HDMI but no mini dislayport to displayport.
but I didn't expect a story from over 4 years ago. For those of you who can read japanese the original blog post is here.
I love the D-pad and was sad to see it get ruined over the years. The NES, SNES and N64 controller got it right: nice large size, good button depth, and the area around and underneath the D pad was minimal.
The biggest problem with the xbox360 controller isn't the shape of the Dpad, it's too much plastic around and underneath it. The sega genesis controller has the same shape but it felt fine because when you held it there was a nice sized gap between the edge of the controller and the size edge of your palm and the "pinch" distance was small.
Take the SNES controller for example, the left edge of the controller to the d pad is only 18mm and the thickest part from the back of the controller to the top of the dpad is 22.3mm. The xbox260 is 36.5mm from left edge to dpad and 32mm from back to surface of dpad. That's just too much plastic to get in the way of thumb movement.
There's also the problem that the Dpad is really a giant stick. The total thickness of the plastic in the xbox dpad is something like 20mm, the SNES is 9mm (these are estimate measurements unlike the previous).
TFA article is wrong. If you look at sandisk's actual press release they say the 100 life span is "based on reliability data from internal, accelerated lifespan testing for cards stored at normal room temperature, with humidity and static protection".
I didn't RTFA but I read the link in the article and it's really interesting. It's innovative because it's a pressure sensitive resistive technology. Not only can you get a location measurement from a touch you also get pressure. It's amazing because you can use anything physical to do it, push with your finger, your noise, your toe or a chop stick and it will still register. The iPhone screen or a wacom tablet can't do that.
In terms of feeling more "real", when you write on a piece of paper it's the paper that yields to the pressure. Anyone who writes really hard will see their words indented on the next few pages. When you write with a wacom table you see the tip moves further into the stylus, which when compared to a touch screen that will yield it seems less authentic.
I'm rather puzzled by this "game". It's really unique, the screen shots look gorgeous, I find it really interesting and I want to play it. However I feel as if I'm not going to find it fun, it seems just too heavy and mature.
Maybe it's just a sign of my immaturity. The original half-life is a good example of fun in terms of character interaction. I smack a fellow scientist in the face with a crow bar and he just stands wit his best retort, "what are you doing?" and maybe get the smarts to run away after I smack him a second time. Sometimes he'll just riddle me with dialog until he's on the floor. In Heavy Rain, it seems too close to reality and I wouldn't want to do something like beat my virtual child with a light saber till he runs to his mom, the only choice is the mature adult choice and to let him win.
On the other side of the coin it could be a sign of my maturity. I am able to recognize that the game will require deep emotional involvement on my part and it's just something I don't want to invest or experience through a "game".
No, we want MS and large companies to win this. If they loose then the patent trolls will see it is profitable and continue to do so. The large companies would not lobbying for better patent laws, or try to end software patents because it is more profitable to invest the money paying the patent trolls and ensuring you get to use the patent than to risk spending money on something that might change in 10 years.
Considering that Colorado is surrounded by land on all sides and New York is about as far away as possible from the pacific ocean (while staying in the US) i'm not surprised the tuna sushi you get there is a bit off.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they built an island just for that.
They did it for an airport.
Unported games off the top of my head: Canon Spike, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Power Stone, Power Stone 2, Samba De Amigo and Shenmue.
You have to respect that Dreamcast was the first platform many of those games appeared on (I'm counting the NAOMI arcade hardware as dreamcast). If the dreamcast didn't have such a massive library of great games we might never never have seen ports to consoles such as GBA, DS, PS2, PSP, GC and yes even the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Companies like Antec and Seasonic have been incorporating DC-DC converters in their newer power supplies. It's even advertised in the product pages. The DC to DC design is becoming more and more widespread in PSU because they're much more efficient than the older design.