MPEG2 and MPEG4 have LONG been supported by ffmpeg, mplayer, xine, and vlc. As for Windows media, libavcodec in mplayer has supported decoding Windows Media 7 and 8 natively for some time now, and just recently support was added for WMV9 (aka VC-1, the latest Windows Media codec used on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) using, again, a fully open-source decoder.
I preordered my copy of the Burning Crusade, and showed up at the store at about 10:30 (I was the 5th person there). I spoke to the fine people of Taverncast, chatted with other gamers about raid strategies, and shuffled around as we formed Alliance and Horde cliques (not really on that last one). After I got my copy at 12:01 (it payed to show up early. There were about ~200 people behind me in line) I rushed home and installed.
I must say, the process was amazingly smooth. I had no delay upgrading my account, and although the client required a patch out of the box, the patch files were already downloaded. Last weekend, my guild transferred over to the new Sisters of Elune server, and it's held up incredibly well. I played from midnight to 6 AM, and there were no crashes or lag spikes.
As for the content, my guildies and I ran through the dark portal and started questing around Hellfire peninsula. Immediately, we were greeted with the beautiful, surreal vista of Hellfire peninsula, where a massive battle is being waged between Alliance and Horde forces in uneasy truce against the Burning Legion (with hordes of demons and giant mechs called Fel Reavers). This conflict feels very dynamic and intense (partly because the front has just opened), but the scale of warfare on Hellfire peninsula really puts all the ongoing "battles" in Azeroth to shame. Within the first hour or two, you'll have the opportunity to sabotage the Legion war machine and fly an armored Gryphon (or I assume a Wyvern if you're Horde) on a bombing run (which is extremely fun). Obviously, I haven't had a chance to try out new raids or venture beyond Hellfire peninsula, but so far, Burning Crusade is gorgeous, massive, and intense. Good job, Blizzard!
A DRM scheme which allows full legitimate usage is no longer a DRM scheme. DRM can only regulate technical actions, but whether or not an action is legitimate depends on human factors. If a DRM scheme allows me to change formats and move content to any device I want, then I should be able to view content on Linux, re-encode to XViD/Ogg Vorbis, put the files up on my home server, and stream them to the PCs around my apartment. I should also be able to ssh in from work or school and pull down a few songs to listen to at my desk. All of this is legal fair use, because I paid for the content in the first place. If DRM doesn't restrict these actions, then I really don't see how it can hope to restrict doing the same re-encoding and sticking the files on some P2P network.
DRM as it is today is like buying a car with a governor that keeps the speed locked below 20 miles per hour, so that no matter where you drive you'll never be speeding. It can get you around your neighborhood, but by not trusting the user, it prevents you from doing things that you really ought to be able to. If the governor were set to 70 miles per hour, I would still find it distasteful, because the system is still setting parameters on exactly what I'm able to do with it, and the parameters continue to stifle legitimate use (for example, I can drive as fast as I want on a private road).
Basically, it boils down to this: either a DRM system must lock down uses which are perfectly legal, if rare, in order to stop piracy, or the system must be so weak as to be essentially nonexistent and allow everything (including piracy). Trying to design a system which lets you have your cake and eat it too, so to speak, is like trying to design bullets that only hurt the bad people.
Basically this is a good idea, but by hiding the internal RISC core, the internal instruction set can be changed with every new processor revision. Exposing the internal instruction set would, essentially, entail ANOTHER backwards-compatibility requirement.
There's no doubt that x86 is an ugly, hacked-together architecture whose life has been extended far beyond reason by various extensions which were hobbled by having to maintain backwards compatibility. x86 was designed nearly 30 years ago as an entry level processor for the technology of the day. It was originally built as a 16-bit architecture, then extended to 32-bit, and recently 64-bit (compare to PowerPC, designed for 64-bit and, for the earlier models, scaled back to 32-bit with forward-looking design features). Even the major x86 hardware vendors, Intel and AMD, have long since stopped implementing x86 in hardware, choosing instead to design decoders which rapidly translate x86 instructions to the native RISC instruction set used by the cores.
So why the hell do we use x86? A major reason is inertia. The PC is centered around the x86, and there are mountains and mountains of legacy software in use that depend on it. For those of us in the open-source world, it's not to difficult to recompile and maintain a new binary architecture, but for all of the software out there that's only available in binary form, emulation remains the only option. And although binary emulation of x86 is always improving, it remains much slower than native code, even with translation caches. Emulation is, at this point, fine for applications that aren't computationally intensive, but the overhead is such that the clocks-per-instruction and performance-per-watt advantages of better-designed architectures disappears.
A side effect of the enormous inertia behind x86 is that a vast volume of sales goes to Intel and AMD, which in turn funds massive engineering projects to improve x86. All things being equal, the same investment of engineer man-hours would bear more performance fruit on MIPS, SPARC, POWER, ARM, Alpha, or any of a number of other more modern architectures, but because of the huge volumes the x86 manufacturers deal in, they can afford to spend the extra effort improving the x86. Nowadays, x86 has gotten fast enough that there are basically only 2 competing architectures left for general-purpose computing (the embedded space is another matter, though): SPARC and POWER. SPARC, in the form of the Niagra, has a very high-throughput multithreaded processor design great for server work, but it's very lackluster for low-latency and floating-point workloads. POWER has some extremely nice designs powering next-generation consoles (Xenon and the even more impressive Cell), but the Cell in particular is so radically different from a standard processor design that it requires changes in coding practice to really take advantage of it. So, even though the Cell can mop the floor with a Core 2 or an Opteron when fully optimized code is used, it's easier (right now at least) to develop code that uses an x86 well than code which fully utilizes the Cell.
Today I went to a local EB and a Gamestop, and the word seems to be that they'll get a new batch of Wiis on Friday. This sounded good, until I realized just what Friday this Friday is. I'm debating over whether it's worth fighting an army of irate grandmothers to get mine this week.
If somebody wants to spend that much cash to get an in-game trinket, one which has NO EFFECT on gameplay, I say let them. If you really want fireworks, you can go buy some for about 20 copper each in tinker town, and if you buy gold (shame on you) and stay logged in 24 hours a day, just buying and launching fireworks, I doubt you'll ever get to the point where it's worth your money to get the fireworks trinket.
As for the other two items (the one which disguises you as an ogre and the turtle mount), they also have no effect on gameplay (riding the turtle is actually no faster than running on foot). They might possibly work into your roleplay stories, but there are a plethora of items already in-game that are probably more interesting for that purpose, like all the hollow's end costumes that you can get for free right now by talking to any innkeeper and saying "trick or treat".
This would be a very different matter if the cards conferred special armor or weapons, especially if they were of epic quality. That would be breaking the game such that the greatest rewards no longer result from effort, skill, and teamwork, but from real-world cash. And THAT would suck. As it stands, if I see someone riding a turtle through Ironforge, I'll just say "hey, neat" and hop on the gryphon to head to another raid.
I agree with the general consensus among slashdoters that voting machine schematics and source code must be open to the public for inspection. I also think that we can improve election security, while still retaining an anonymous ballot, by allowing voters to check to make sure that their own vote was properly counted. Here's my plan:
To begin with, the regular voter verification process happens at the door. You go into the polling booth, select all your options, and a confirmation screen comes up for you to check and make sure you selected everything properly. When you confirm, a small piece of paper is printed out that has a serial number and a dynamically generated decryption key on it. Your vote is then sent along to a tabulation server. Your unencrypted vote is added up with the other votes, and the pair of your serial number and your encrypted vote is stored at the same time.
Later in the day, you can go home, and log onto a special government website. You enter your serial number, along with your decryption key, and the verification server shows your vote back to you. The only identifier attached to each vote is a serial number, and it requires the proper decryption key to view the vote. Nevertheless, it allows individual voters to check to make sure that their vote was counted. As long as source-code can be publicly inspected, we can verify that counting is not being "faked" by saving an individual user's vote for verification purposes but not actually adding it to the overall tabulation, thus preventing fraud by under-voting.
To prevent fraud by over-voting, the tabulation server will keep track of the total number of votes it receives from each machine. Local election officials will keep a hand-tally of the number of voters who visit each poll. At the end of the day, the hand tally is checked against the server's tally to make sure there is no discrepancy.
Keeping in mind that we're talking about games we return to for comfort, not those that we necessarily go to for maximum excitement, I'd have to say Katamari Damacy and the sequel We Love Katamari top my list. I may spend more time raid-healing during intense boss fights in World of Warcraft, or popping holes in my roommates and neighbors in UT 2004, but when I've had a tough day, no game makes me feel quite as good as Katamari.
The story and dialogue is quirky and funny, and the gameplay is simple and satisfying (rolling through a forest of trees and picking all of them up in rapid succession just feels great). Above all, the art direction and the upbeat music make Katamari seem like an artifact from the sunny, rainbows-and-unicorns world of early childhood. I've played a few games in my life that have made me laugh, but only Katamari Damacy and its sequel have made me giggle with giddy joy.
After telling an old girlfriend (a fellow lover of Japanese pop culture) about Katamari, I bought the games for her as a Valentine's Day gift. All that winter, when she'd come home from a stressful day of class, miserable from the gray, dreary Michigan winter, we'd share a pint of ice cream and pop the disc in the PlayStation 2, taking turns rolling up our stress and unhappiness, leaving just a shimering star in the sky.
To be honest, I've had drives from every major manufacturer die. By far the best warranty coverage came from Maxtor, however, who would send out a replacement drive before requiring the old drive back (for a drive which was starting to show bad sectors, I would take it offline, wait for the replacement, then transfer my data over directly). As long as you send the defective drive back within a month, you're golden.
In my case, the new drives were always actually new, and performed very well. Recieving them basically "reset" the warranty to day 0, as well. Finally, the RMA process is completely automated, not requiring you to wait on a phone line. Just download and run a little diagnostic tool which will give you an error code, enter it in on the website, and you can handle the whole business without having to talk to anyone at a call center.
In short, having a drive die sucks, and as I said, it's happened to me with most major manufacturers (Western Digital, Seagate, IBM, Toshiba, Hitachi all come to mind), but Maxtor had by far the best warranty coverage.
It should be noted that most things are more expensive in Japan. The minimum wage and median salary are also higher. In general, the standard of living in Japan and the US is comparable, even though prices in Japan seem somewhat higher, it's generally balanced by higher wages. Relative scarcity makes some things (like fruit and real estate) much more expensive in Japan, but prices on a lot of consumer goods (particularly those produced domestically, like video games) generally scale with Japan's higher average wages.
Occasionally, you can get crazy bargains in Japan as well. At a hyaku-en (100 yen store) a couple of years ago, I got an 8-pack of the longest-lasting double-A batteries I've ever used for under $1.
We regret to inform you, Mr. Cox, that since you were operating with an unsupported software configuration (i.e. Linux) we can not offer you support in regards to your issue (spontaneous incendiary explosion). Thank you for purchasing an IBM thinkpad.
Let's be clear, here. Although the creators of lonelygirl wound up being represented by CAA, a professional talent agency, they are nevertheless a bunch of young amateurs. The videos don't promote any product (except for purple monkey hand puppets, maybe), and the only sort of cross-marketing involved is, perhaps, the use of CAA-represented indie bands for background music. All in all the music is pretty unobtrusive and tasteful, and is far from the main point of the videos.
Lonelygirl is, at its heart, a series about an extremely compelling character, and her video diary makes people feel an intimate connection with her. I have to say, the series was even more enjoyable when one could believe that Bree was a real girl, seriptitiously posting her thoughts, colored by her signature humor and innocence, from her bedroom. Now that she's been "outed" as an actress, the "show" is a little more conventional, but when you're willing to suspend your disbelief, it's still wonderfully fun to watch.
In short, Lonelygirl is damn good television, except that it's not on television.
Actually, the Blood Elves were formerly a part of the Alliance. During the third war (the Scourge Invasion), the High Elven kingdom of Quel'Thellas was overrun by the undead, and the high elven population was decimated. In the process, the relatively "safe" source of the elves' magic, the Sunwell, was desecrated and destroyed.
The remaining High Elves, who were addicted to magic but now without a stable source of magical energy, began desperately searching for anything to sate their thirst for magical power, eventually turning to dark demonic magics. These remaining Elves also underwent major cultural changes, calling themselves Blood Elves in honor of their many fallen brethren. They remained in the Alliance for a while, but were basically left for dead by the racist human Marshall Garithos. They left the Alliance, and in the WoW expansion will be joining the Horde. The explanation for their ability to play the Paladin class is that they have actually managed to imprison and enslave a being of light and "steal" the ability to use the Holy power of the Paladin.
The Dranei, on the other hand, peacefully shared the world of Draenor with the Orcs until the Orcs were corrupted by the demonic burning legion. The orcs, now slaves to demon masters, were used to settle an old score against the Dranei (who refused to follow the other branch of the Eredar race in joining the legion). Infused with demonic bloodlust, the Orcs wiped out most of the Dranei race, and many of the survivors were themselves devolved and deformed by the spreading demonic corruption. Even though the Orcs have since managed to free themselves from demonic corruption, the genocide of the Dranei remains an extremely sore spot between the races. The Dranei, incidentally, worship the Light, and thus have a religious affinity with the Humans and Dwarves of the Alliance.
My girlfriend (whom I met first in real life) and I both play WoW. I play a holy/discipline priest, which I suppose says that I'm nurturing, focused, a team player, and can't fight for crap. My girlfriend is a fire mage, which says to me that she's a potentially unstable pyromaniac. Uh... uh-oh, better hide the matches.
The predictions of doom surrounding the PS3 (especially with regards to the very high launch price) are, of course, flooding the Internet. Nevertheless, I think they are very premature.
In a historical context, the PS3 is somewhat like the Neo-Geo home system, or the 3DO: It is a console with vastly more raw processing and graphics power than its contemporaries, but also a significantly higher price tag (although, it must be said that 50% over the 360 pales in comparison the the massive price difference between, say, the 3DO and a Super Nintendo). The Neo-Geo and the 3DO were, for all their technological superiority, failures. SNK, the makers of the Neo-Geo, only had experience in the arcade market prior to the introduction of their home system, and were used to selling very expensive arcade boards, since a steady stream of quarters could be counted on to offset the initial purchase cost (unless you charge your friends to come over and play, this model doesn't work for a home console). Although SNK supported the Neo-Geo with a number of excellent first-party titles, their history as a proprietary arcade supplier and tendency to keep the system's design very close to their chest meant a dirth of third party developers interested in writing games for the console. The 3DO, on the other hand, was made by a group of licensors with little to no background in the video games industry, and only a few publishers made any effort at bringing a few games to the system. Many 3DO games simply weren't very good, and of those handful that were, several were ported from the PC, or were later ported to more mature systems that followed like the Saturn and the original Playstation.
I believe, however, that Sony has the ability to avoid the collapse suffered by the Neo-Geo and the 3DO. Those two systems were the first home consoles from the companies who made them, who had no prior relations with 3rd party developers whatsoever (and in the case of 3DO, no first party development studio and no street cred with gamers, either).
Sony, on the other hand, is right about their own momentum. They did not come out the clear victors in 2 console generations by luck: they did it with games. Even then, I'm hard pressed to remember many launch titles from either system that really stand out as excellent. But, over the lifetime of PS1 and PS2, a library of thousands of games, most from 3rd party developers, and hundreds of them excellent, built up. The reason for this, in the beginning, was that Sony gave developers what they wanted: a CD-ROM drive offering vastly more storage space and multimedia capabilities than the competitors, and a good C-based API for writing games (and an assembly-based devkit later on to really max out the system). Sony managed to woo away many developers from Nintendo and Sega by providing them with a better canvas on which to create their visions, and the accumulation of amazing titles on the PS1 caused gamers to purchase it in droves.
Fast forward to the PS2: it's a more parallelized system, it's a bit harder to program for, but on the other hand, it has a DVD drive (just when consumer interest in DVD movies was skyrocketing), and is backwards-compatible with almost all PS1 games. The PS2 managed to sell extremely well even without any truly great launch titles, if only because people were drooling over a device that would play a library of hit PS1 games AND the hot new movie format. In the meantime, developers who had witnessed the runaway success of the PS1 were already writing a new generation of games, banking on similar success for the PS2. And they were right: the PS2 was a great success, and their investment paid off (and their games also helped to drive sales of the PS2, an example of success driving success). Stellar third-party titles in series like Fin
Getting Started
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Learning to DJ?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Welcome to the wonderful world of mixing. The first thing you're going to need is gear. Absolutely essential are 2 good direct-drive turntables (direct drive is essential, belt-drive won't have nearly the torque you need). The industry standard is the Technics SL-1200 (the MK2 is the normal baseline model, the MK5G is an updated version with selectable +/- 8/16 % pitch adjust and updated styling). Some other acceptable models (which are themselves heavily influence by the 1200) are the Stanton ST-100 and STR8-100, the NuMark TT1600 and TTX series.
Now, I know you're saying "Turntables? Vinyl?!! Are these the dark ages here?" Well, the fact is that most dance music is released primarily to vinyl, for DJs just like you. The good thing is that, since LPs are an analog technology, incremental improvements in quality are possible without breaking compatibility. In fact, record mastering is an art which has advanced considerably even after the invention of the CD, and well-taken-care-of LPs played back with professional-quality cartridges blow the sound quality of CDs away. Believe it.
Speaking of cartridges, that brings us to the next set of kit. There are a wide range of pickup cartridges, ranging from $20 entry-level models to the superior Ortofon Concorde at over $100. Honestly, get the Concordes. The cartridge itself is extremely high quality and delivers amazing sound quality without distortion, and the actual needle tips are replaceable (for much less that the cost of new cartridges), and can even be swapped out with different styli for different purposes (ultra high-fidelity vs. scratching, etc.).
The next piece of gear is the mixer. Here's another area where there is a vast range in price. The extremely expensive models feature loads of inputs, multi-band equalizers, full banks of filters, several effects loops (and possibly some integrated effects), quadraphonic mixing, optical faders, and maybe even full-digital mixing. The truth is, you probably don't need all those feature while you're starting out. The important features you want are a seperate 3-band EQ on EACH CHANNEL, nice smooth (and user-servicable) faders, and maybe an adjustable curve on the cross-fader. I use a Stanton mixer with these features, and an optical scratch fader, and it set me back only about $250 new.
Now, I know I said earlier that Vinyl is the DJ's medium of choice. That has been the case for several decades, but to be perfectly honest, there ARE some viable alternatives now. Stanton's Final Scratch system is a pretty amazing box that plugs into your existing DJ setup and your PC, and allows the playback of MP3s which are controlled by real, physical specially-encoded Vinyl. There is a slight latency involved with playback of the special discs, which is fine for mixing and even light scratching, but more complex scratches aren't really possible. Even then, the system is truly amazing, and it hooks in with the excellent digital DJ software package Traktor from Native Instruments.
CD turntables are also a major new technology. This field was pioneered by Pioneer with their CDJ-1000. The first model featured a large mechanical jog wheel that can be used to manipulate CD tracks like Vinyl (the platter doesn't spin on its own however, so it is slightly more limited than Vinyl). Since the introduction of this product, Technics and NuMark have both introduced their own CD turntables with full 12" platters that actually rotate. If you must use CDs, there are some good options out there (be aware that they are very expensive, however).
OK, by now, you're presumably kitted out and you've bought a couple dozen records that you like. Now, h
The PS3 has 512M of memory by default. It is half Rambus XDR and half GDDR3, but both segments of memory can be addressed by both the processor and the GPU.
After reading the commentary on 1UP, Gamespy, and elsewhere, it seems like the controller's orientation detection system is actually very robust, responsive, and accurate. The reaction to the tech demos seems to be generally positive, and the use of regular hand motions that translate directly into equivalent movements on the screen is probably the most intuitive game control scheme yet. Two actual action buttons (one for thumb and one for trigger finger) are a bit sparse by modern standards... but then again, the controller, right out of the box, can detect both translational & rotational movement in 3 dimensions, for a total of 6 degrees of freedom (compare to 2 degrees of freedom per analog stick on conventional controllers, which are considerably more clumsy than just picking up an object and moving it through space).
The addition of the plug-in thumbstick controller with 2 additional triggers increases the control possibilities, and with enough polish it seems like using the analog stick with one's left hand for movement while simply pointing with the controller in one's right hand (or vice-versa for the lefties) could be an even more accurate and satisfying control method for first-person shooters than the mouse and keyboard or DS touch screen (and certainly light-years ahead of two analog sticks).
The key with this radically different controller really is, you guessed it, control schemes. If we didn't have the position and orientation sensors, then 2 action buttons would be paltry and anemic for anything but a turn-based strategy or RPG game, or a simple puzzler or platformer. Certainly a modern fighting, action, or sports game would suffer. BUT, using the revolution controller, motion becomes much more important than button mashing. Swinging the controller through the air like the hilt of a sword would reproduce than sword stroke in the game. Or, imagine playing a basketball game where you use just one of the revolution's buttons to hold onto the ball. You lift the controller up, move your hand to make the shot, put a little spin on it and release at just the right moment... how much would that kick the ass of any other sports game?
One issue that arises, however, is that it becomes very non-trivial to port titles from other platforms. The Revolution's controller doesn't just enable radically different control schemes... it basically necessitates them, as there aren't enough analog sticks and buttons to map a conventional control scheme on to (unless a newer Revolution game were to make use of an older gamecube controller). Nintendo will probably have to lead the way on the system with strong first-party titles.
Actually, one can look at the history of the DS as a good reference point for this: in the very beginning, we had some games that were built like glorified tech-demos. They showed off the possibilities of the new interface, but they were little more than software novelties, and there wasn't a whole lot of game underneath. Over time, however, the system built up a library of first-rate ports (Super Mario 64 DS), innovative and fun re-inventions of classic genres like the platformer (Kirby: Canvas Curse), widely appealing non-games (Nintendogs), and extremely solid games for hardcore gamers where the touchscreen and dual screens are a natural and organic part of the gaming experience (Advance Wars: Dual Strike). Now, there are dozens of great-looking DS titles on the horizon, and Internet gaming is set to take off on the system.
I think we might be looking at something similar on the Revolution. We start off with very gimmicky titles designed to get people comfortable with the new controller and wow passers-by at the local electronics store. After a while, a next-gen Mario and Zelda will start to show how old-school genres can be transformed into a new, fun experience with the new controls. Meanwhile, something like Metroid Prime 3 will hit and add a new and brilliant control scheme to the mechanics of the shooter and possibly impress a lot of hard core gamers. Seeing
I recall watching [adult swim] just this last week and seeing a bump (if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's clear you don't watch AS) listing things that definitely WON'T be coming to Adult Swim in the future. One of those things listed was free streaming video on Friday nights. I only wish I could remember what some of the other items on that list were, as it seems the people at Williams Street are pulling another sneaky maneuver like they did with their famous "Aqua Teen Cancellation".
Designing interfaces for visually impaired users was a topic of my own research for a couple of years at ISEF and affiliated fairs while I was in high school. As far as interfaces go, I experimented with a braile keyboard (tried and true) and voice recognition (ammount of success varies depending on possible input vocabulary). One tool I found particularly useful for designing interactive voice interfaces using both speech synthesis and recognition was VoiceXML, which defines a markup language with basic scripting logic for quickly building voice interfaces. During my junior year of High School, I implemented a perl module for automagically generating voice interfaces (my ultimate goal was to create a replacement for the integrated cgi modules for live internet-aware voice apps), and showed it off by designing a basic newsreader app that pulled data from NewsBlaster (this was back in the day before Google News).
My research experiences taught me several things. Firstly, it is important to offer auditory feedback for blind users. With voice recognition on a limited vocabulary, this isn't really a problem, as the user always knows what they said. With a broader range of input vocabulary, or with keyboard input, it's important to verify what has been entered at least every sentence or so, as there is naturally no way to provide visual feedback. Secondly, you must realize that all data being transmitted to the user is necessarily in a totally linear format. That means that, in any interface you are designing fresh, you should keep the interface as slim as possible. When you are reading out information that was originally intended for sighted users, some sort of adaptive content filtering is a must. If a blind user goes to slashdot, chances are "image, image, image, image, image, image, username, preferences, subscribe, journal, etc..." is not the first thing they want to hear.
As much as I like to see Microsoft lose one, I'd say this case is actually, on balance, a bad sign. Let's review: A patent is awarded covering data portability between two microsoft products, Microsoft is sued when they actually implement this pretty obvious idea. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking maybe I should grab a patent on the idea of using a PSP to wirelessly control a home game console (the PS3) and suing Sony just in time for Christmas 2006 so that I can afford to buy one of each.
Anyway, the end result of this is that yet another frivolous patent is financially rewarded, at a cost which is a mere pittance for a company the size of Microsoft. The damage that is done is that software patents which are both general and trivial have another piece of judicial precedent to bolster them. In the end, companies with stores of thousands of patents (companies just like Microsoft) can exploit this imbalance in the judicial system for a quick buck (pretty trivial on the balance sheet, though) and, more importantly, to force much smaller potential competitors straight out of business by offering them the choice to go to court and have their coffers drained by legal fees and possibly by damages awarded, or to settle under terms which require them to cease their competitive activity.
Actually, as far as I know, Doom3 is a multithreaded engine. I have an opteron-based system, running 64-bit linux (but a 32-bit linux binary, as id won't release a 64-bit one). I went from 1 to 2 processors and saw a 25% increase in framerate. AND keep in mind that I run at a resolution (1280x1024x32 with all effects enabled) where graphics tend to be more GPU bound (in my case a stock GeForce 6800) than CPU bound.
Anyway, the cell will hopefully drive forward the adoption of multithreaded game engines (for that matter, the XBox 360's 3-core processor will help in this regard as well) just as multicore CPUs start to arrive on the PC market in earnest. Considering that major next-generation engines (Unreal Engine 3, for example, which had functional demos on X360 in the form of Gears of War and PS3 with UT2007 at E3) are shooting to cover all 3 of these platforms, it's probably safe to bet that a fair amount of development time is going to be invested into making game engines highly parallelized in order to realize maximum performance.
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MPEG2 and MPEG4 have LONG been supported by ffmpeg, mplayer, xine, and vlc. As for Windows media, libavcodec in mplayer has supported decoding Windows Media 7 and 8 natively for some time now, and just recently support was added for WMV9 (aka VC-1, the latest Windows Media codec used on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) using, again, a fully open-source decoder.
I preordered my copy of the Burning Crusade, and showed up at the store at about 10:30 (I was the 5th person there). I spoke to the fine people of Taverncast, chatted with other gamers about raid strategies, and shuffled around as we formed Alliance and Horde cliques (not really on that last one). After I got my copy at 12:01 (it payed to show up early. There were about ~200 people behind me in line) I rushed home and installed.
I must say, the process was amazingly smooth. I had no delay upgrading my account, and although the client required a patch out of the box, the patch files were already downloaded. Last weekend, my guild transferred over to the new Sisters of Elune server, and it's held up incredibly well. I played from midnight to 6 AM, and there were no crashes or lag spikes.
As for the content, my guildies and I ran through the dark portal and started questing around Hellfire peninsula. Immediately, we were greeted with the beautiful, surreal vista of Hellfire peninsula, where a massive battle is being waged between Alliance and Horde forces in uneasy truce against the Burning Legion (with hordes of demons and giant mechs called Fel Reavers). This conflict feels very dynamic and intense (partly because the front has just opened), but the scale of warfare on Hellfire peninsula really puts all the ongoing "battles" in Azeroth to shame. Within the first hour or two, you'll have the opportunity to sabotage the Legion war machine and fly an armored Gryphon (or I assume a Wyvern if you're Horde) on a bombing run (which is extremely fun). Obviously, I haven't had a chance to try out new raids or venture beyond Hellfire peninsula, but so far, Burning Crusade is gorgeous, massive, and intense. Good job, Blizzard!
A DRM scheme which allows full legitimate usage is no longer a DRM scheme. DRM can only regulate technical actions, but whether or not an action is legitimate depends on human factors. If a DRM scheme allows me to change formats and move content to any device I want, then I should be able to view content on Linux, re-encode to XViD/Ogg Vorbis, put the files up on my home server, and stream them to the PCs around my apartment. I should also be able to ssh in from work or school and pull down a few songs to listen to at my desk. All of this is legal fair use, because I paid for the content in the first place. If DRM doesn't restrict these actions, then I really don't see how it can hope to restrict doing the same re-encoding and sticking the files on some P2P network.
DRM as it is today is like buying a car with a governor that keeps the speed locked below 20 miles per hour, so that no matter where you drive you'll never be speeding. It can get you around your neighborhood, but by not trusting the user, it prevents you from doing things that you really ought to be able to. If the governor were set to 70 miles per hour, I would still find it distasteful, because the system is still setting parameters on exactly what I'm able to do with it, and the parameters continue to stifle legitimate use (for example, I can drive as fast as I want on a private road).
Basically, it boils down to this: either a DRM system must lock down uses which are perfectly legal, if rare, in order to stop piracy, or the system must be so weak as to be essentially nonexistent and allow everything (including piracy). Trying to design a system which lets you have your cake and eat it too, so to speak, is like trying to design bullets that only hurt the bad people.
Basically this is a good idea, but by hiding the internal RISC core, the internal instruction set can be changed with every new processor revision. Exposing the internal instruction set would, essentially, entail ANOTHER backwards-compatibility requirement.
There's no doubt that x86 is an ugly, hacked-together architecture whose life has been extended far beyond reason by various extensions which were hobbled by having to maintain backwards compatibility. x86 was designed nearly 30 years ago as an entry level processor for the technology of the day. It was originally built as a 16-bit architecture, then extended to 32-bit, and recently 64-bit (compare to PowerPC, designed for 64-bit and, for the earlier models, scaled back to 32-bit with forward-looking design features). Even the major x86 hardware vendors, Intel and AMD, have long since stopped implementing x86 in hardware, choosing instead to design decoders which rapidly translate x86 instructions to the native RISC instruction set used by the cores.
So why the hell do we use x86? A major reason is inertia. The PC is centered around the x86, and there are mountains and mountains of legacy software in use that depend on it. For those of us in the open-source world, it's not to difficult to recompile and maintain a new binary architecture, but for all of the software out there that's only available in binary form, emulation remains the only option. And although binary emulation of x86 is always improving, it remains much slower than native code, even with translation caches. Emulation is, at this point, fine for applications that aren't computationally intensive, but the overhead is such that the clocks-per-instruction and performance-per-watt advantages of better-designed architectures disappears.
A side effect of the enormous inertia behind x86 is that a vast volume of sales goes to Intel and AMD, which in turn funds massive engineering projects to improve x86. All things being equal, the same investment of engineer man-hours would bear more performance fruit on MIPS, SPARC, POWER, ARM, Alpha, or any of a number of other more modern architectures, but because of the huge volumes the x86 manufacturers deal in, they can afford to spend the extra effort improving the x86. Nowadays, x86 has gotten fast enough that there are basically only 2 competing architectures left for general-purpose computing (the embedded space is another matter, though): SPARC and POWER. SPARC, in the form of the Niagra, has a very high-throughput multithreaded processor design great for server work, but it's very lackluster for low-latency and floating-point workloads. POWER has some extremely nice designs powering next-generation consoles (Xenon and the even more impressive Cell), but the Cell in particular is so radically different from a standard processor design that it requires changes in coding practice to really take advantage of it. So, even though the Cell can mop the floor with a Core 2 or an Opteron when fully optimized code is used, it's easier (right now at least) to develop code that uses an x86 well than code which fully utilizes the Cell.
Today I went to a local EB and a Gamestop, and the word seems to be that they'll get a new batch of Wiis on Friday. This sounded good, until I realized just what Friday this Friday is. I'm debating over whether it's worth fighting an army of irate grandmothers to get mine this week.
If somebody wants to spend that much cash to get an in-game trinket, one which has NO EFFECT on gameplay, I say let them. If you really want fireworks, you can go buy some for about 20 copper each in tinker town, and if you buy gold (shame on you) and stay logged in 24 hours a day, just buying and launching fireworks, I doubt you'll ever get to the point where it's worth your money to get the fireworks trinket.
As for the other two items (the one which disguises you as an ogre and the turtle mount), they also have no effect on gameplay (riding the turtle is actually no faster than running on foot). They might possibly work into your roleplay stories, but there are a plethora of items already in-game that are probably more interesting for that purpose, like all the hollow's end costumes that you can get for free right now by talking to any innkeeper and saying "trick or treat".
This would be a very different matter if the cards conferred special armor or weapons, especially if they were of epic quality. That would be breaking the game such that the greatest rewards no longer result from effort, skill, and teamwork, but from real-world cash. And THAT would suck. As it stands, if I see someone riding a turtle through Ironforge, I'll just say "hey, neat" and hop on the gryphon to head to another raid.
I agree with the general consensus among slashdoters that voting machine schematics and source code must be open to the public for inspection. I also think that we can improve election security, while still retaining an anonymous ballot, by allowing voters to check to make sure that their own vote was properly counted. Here's my plan:
To begin with, the regular voter verification process happens at the door. You go into the polling booth, select all your options, and a confirmation screen comes up for you to check and make sure you selected everything properly. When you confirm, a small piece of paper is printed out that has a serial number and a dynamically generated decryption key on it. Your vote is then sent along to a tabulation server. Your unencrypted vote is added up with the other votes, and the pair of your serial number and your encrypted vote is stored at the same time.
Later in the day, you can go home, and log onto a special government website. You enter your serial number, along with your decryption key, and the verification server shows your vote back to you. The only identifier attached to each vote is a serial number, and it requires the proper decryption key to view the vote. Nevertheless, it allows individual voters to check to make sure that their vote was counted. As long as source-code can be publicly inspected, we can verify that counting is not being "faked" by saving an individual user's vote for verification purposes but not actually adding it to the overall tabulation, thus preventing fraud by under-voting.
To prevent fraud by over-voting, the tabulation server will keep track of the total number of votes it receives from each machine. Local election officials will keep a hand-tally of the number of voters who visit each poll. At the end of the day, the hand tally is checked against the server's tally to make sure there is no discrepancy.
Who needs a condom, I've always got my T610 in my jeans' pocket.
Keeping in mind that we're talking about games we return to for comfort, not those that we necessarily go to for maximum excitement, I'd have to say Katamari Damacy and the sequel We Love Katamari top my list. I may spend more time raid-healing during intense boss fights in World of Warcraft, or popping holes in my roommates and neighbors in UT 2004, but when I've had a tough day, no game makes me feel quite as good as Katamari.
The story and dialogue is quirky and funny, and the gameplay is simple and satisfying (rolling through a forest of trees and picking all of them up in rapid succession just feels great). Above all, the art direction and the upbeat music make Katamari seem like an artifact from the sunny, rainbows-and-unicorns world of early childhood. I've played a few games in my life that have made me laugh, but only Katamari Damacy and its sequel have made me giggle with giddy joy.
After telling an old girlfriend (a fellow lover of Japanese pop culture) about Katamari, I bought the games for her as a Valentine's Day gift. All that winter, when she'd come home from a stressful day of class, miserable from the gray, dreary Michigan winter, we'd share a pint of ice cream and pop the disc in the PlayStation 2, taking turns rolling up our stress and unhappiness, leaving just a shimering star in the sky.
To be honest, I've had drives from every major manufacturer die. By far the best warranty coverage came from Maxtor, however, who would send out a replacement drive before requiring the old drive back (for a drive which was starting to show bad sectors, I would take it offline, wait for the replacement, then transfer my data over directly). As long as you send the defective drive back within a month, you're golden.
In my case, the new drives were always actually new, and performed very well. Recieving them basically "reset" the warranty to day 0, as well. Finally, the RMA process is completely automated, not requiring you to wait on a phone line. Just download and run a little diagnostic tool which will give you an error code, enter it in on the website, and you can handle the whole business without having to talk to anyone at a call center.
In short, having a drive die sucks, and as I said, it's happened to me with most major manufacturers (Western Digital, Seagate, IBM, Toshiba, Hitachi all come to mind), but Maxtor had by far the best warranty coverage.
It should be noted that most things are more expensive in Japan. The minimum wage and median salary are also higher. In general, the standard of living in Japan and the US is comparable, even though prices in Japan seem somewhat higher, it's generally balanced by higher wages. Relative scarcity makes some things (like fruit and real estate) much more expensive in Japan, but prices on a lot of consumer goods (particularly those produced domestically, like video games) generally scale with Japan's higher average wages.
Occasionally, you can get crazy bargains in Japan as well. At a hyaku-en (100 yen store) a couple of years ago, I got an 8-pack of the longest-lasting double-A batteries I've ever used for under $1.
We regret to inform you, Mr. Cox, that since you were operating with an unsupported software configuration (i.e. Linux) we can not offer you support in regards to your issue (spontaneous incendiary explosion). Thank you for purchasing an IBM thinkpad.
Sincerely,
IBM Tech Support
Let's be clear, here. Although the creators of lonelygirl wound up being represented by CAA, a professional talent agency, they are nevertheless a bunch of young amateurs. The videos don't promote any product (except for purple monkey hand puppets, maybe), and the only sort of cross-marketing involved is, perhaps, the use of CAA-represented indie bands for background music. All in all the music is pretty unobtrusive and tasteful, and is far from the main point of the videos.
Lonelygirl is, at its heart, a series about an extremely compelling character, and her video diary makes people feel an intimate connection with her. I have to say, the series was even more enjoyable when one could believe that Bree was a real girl, seriptitiously posting her thoughts, colored by her signature humor and innocence, from her bedroom. Now that she's been "outed" as an actress, the "show" is a little more conventional, but when you're willing to suspend your disbelief, it's still wonderfully fun to watch.
In short, Lonelygirl is damn good television, except that it's not on television.
The most terrifying words ever uttered: "There are a lot of Jack Thompsons out there."
Actually, the Blood Elves were formerly a part of the Alliance. During the third war (the Scourge Invasion), the High Elven kingdom of Quel'Thellas was overrun by the undead, and the high elven population was decimated. In the process, the relatively "safe" source of the elves' magic, the Sunwell, was desecrated and destroyed.
The remaining High Elves, who were addicted to magic but now without a stable source of magical energy, began desperately searching for anything to sate their thirst for magical power, eventually turning to dark demonic magics. These remaining Elves also underwent major cultural changes, calling themselves Blood Elves in honor of their many fallen brethren. They remained in the Alliance for a while, but were basically left for dead by the racist human Marshall Garithos. They left the Alliance, and in the WoW expansion will be joining the Horde. The explanation for their ability to play the Paladin class is that they have actually managed to imprison and enslave a being of light and "steal" the ability to use the Holy power of the Paladin.
The Dranei, on the other hand, peacefully shared the world of Draenor with the Orcs until the Orcs were corrupted by the demonic burning legion. The orcs, now slaves to demon masters, were used to settle an old score against the Dranei (who refused to follow the other branch of the Eredar race in joining the legion). Infused with demonic bloodlust, the Orcs wiped out most of the Dranei race, and many of the survivors were themselves devolved and deformed by the spreading demonic corruption. Even though the Orcs have since managed to free themselves from demonic corruption, the genocide of the Dranei remains an extremely sore spot between the races. The Dranei, incidentally, worship the Light, and thus have a religious affinity with the Humans and Dwarves of the Alliance.
My girlfriend (whom I met first in real life) and I both play WoW. I play a holy/discipline priest, which I suppose says that I'm nurturing, focused, a team player, and can't fight for crap. My girlfriend is a fire mage, which says to me that she's a potentially unstable pyromaniac. Uh... uh-oh, better hide the matches.
The predictions of doom surrounding the PS3 (especially with regards to the very high launch price) are, of course, flooding the Internet. Nevertheless, I think they are very premature.
In a historical context, the PS3 is somewhat like the Neo-Geo home system, or the 3DO: It is a console with vastly more raw processing and graphics power than its contemporaries, but also a significantly higher price tag (although, it must be said that 50% over the 360 pales in comparison the the massive price difference between, say, the 3DO and a Super Nintendo). The Neo-Geo and the 3DO were, for all their technological superiority, failures. SNK, the makers of the Neo-Geo, only had experience in the arcade market prior to the introduction of their home system, and were used to selling very expensive arcade boards, since a steady stream of quarters could be counted on to offset the initial purchase cost (unless you charge your friends to come over and play, this model doesn't work for a home console). Although SNK supported the Neo-Geo with a number of excellent first-party titles, their history as a proprietary arcade supplier and tendency to keep the system's design very close to their chest meant a dirth of third party developers interested in writing games for the console. The 3DO, on the other hand, was made by a group of licensors with little to no background in the video games industry, and only a few publishers made any effort at bringing a few games to the system. Many 3DO games simply weren't very good, and of those handful that were, several were ported from the PC, or were later ported to more mature systems that followed like the Saturn and the original Playstation.
I believe, however, that Sony has the ability to avoid the collapse suffered by the Neo-Geo and the 3DO. Those two systems were the first home consoles from the companies who made them, who had no prior relations with 3rd party developers whatsoever (and in the case of 3DO, no first party development studio and no street cred with gamers, either).
Sony, on the other hand, is right about their own momentum. They did not come out the clear victors in 2 console generations by luck: they did it with games. Even then, I'm hard pressed to remember many launch titles from either system that really stand out as excellent. But, over the lifetime of PS1 and PS2, a library of thousands of games, most from 3rd party developers, and hundreds of them excellent, built up. The reason for this, in the beginning, was that Sony gave developers what they wanted: a CD-ROM drive offering vastly more storage space and multimedia capabilities than the competitors, and a good C-based API for writing games (and an assembly-based devkit later on to really max out the system). Sony managed to woo away many developers from Nintendo and Sega by providing them with a better canvas on which to create their visions, and the accumulation of amazing titles on the PS1 caused gamers to purchase it in droves.
Fast forward to the PS2: it's a more parallelized system, it's a bit harder to program for, but on the other hand, it has a DVD drive (just when consumer interest in DVD movies was skyrocketing), and is backwards-compatible with almost all PS1 games. The PS2 managed to sell extremely well even without any truly great launch titles, if only because people were drooling over a device that would play a library of hit PS1 games AND the hot new movie format. In the meantime, developers who had witnessed the runaway success of the PS1 were already writing a new generation of games, banking on similar success for the PS2. And they were right: the PS2 was a great success, and their investment paid off (and their games also helped to drive sales of the PS2, an example of success driving success). Stellar third-party titles in series like Fin
Welcome to the wonderful world of mixing. The first thing you're going to need is gear. Absolutely essential are 2 good direct-drive turntables (direct drive is essential, belt-drive won't have nearly the torque you need). The industry standard is the Technics SL-1200 (the MK2 is the normal baseline model, the MK5G is an updated version with selectable +/- 8/16 % pitch adjust and updated styling). Some other acceptable models (which are themselves heavily influence by the 1200) are the Stanton ST-100 and STR8-100, the NuMark TT1600 and TTX series.
Now, I know you're saying "Turntables? Vinyl?!! Are these the dark ages here?" Well, the fact is that most dance music is released primarily to vinyl, for DJs just like you. The good thing is that, since LPs are an analog technology, incremental improvements in quality are possible without breaking compatibility. In fact, record mastering is an art which has advanced considerably even after the invention of the CD, and well-taken-care-of LPs played back with professional-quality cartridges blow the sound quality of CDs away. Believe it.
Speaking of cartridges, that brings us to the next set of kit. There are a wide range of pickup cartridges, ranging from $20 entry-level models to the superior Ortofon Concorde at over $100. Honestly, get the Concordes. The cartridge itself is extremely high quality and delivers amazing sound quality without distortion, and the actual needle tips are replaceable (for much less that the cost of new cartridges), and can even be swapped out with different styli for different purposes (ultra high-fidelity vs. scratching, etc.).
The next piece of gear is the mixer. Here's another area where there is a vast range in price. The extremely expensive models feature loads of inputs, multi-band equalizers, full banks of filters, several effects loops (and possibly some integrated effects), quadraphonic mixing, optical faders, and maybe even full-digital mixing. The truth is, you probably don't need all those feature while you're starting out. The important features you want are a seperate 3-band EQ on EACH CHANNEL, nice smooth (and user-servicable) faders, and maybe an adjustable curve on the cross-fader. I use a Stanton mixer with these features, and an optical scratch fader, and it set me back only about $250 new.
Now, I know I said earlier that Vinyl is the DJ's medium of choice. That has been the case for several decades, but to be perfectly honest, there ARE some viable alternatives now. Stanton's Final Scratch system is a pretty amazing box that plugs into your existing DJ setup and your PC, and allows the playback of MP3s which are controlled by real, physical specially-encoded Vinyl. There is a slight latency involved with playback of the special discs, which is fine for mixing and even light scratching, but more complex scratches aren't really possible. Even then, the system is truly amazing, and it hooks in with the excellent digital DJ software package Traktor from Native Instruments.
CD turntables are also a major new technology. This field was pioneered by Pioneer with their CDJ-1000. The first model featured a large mechanical jog wheel that can be used to manipulate CD tracks like Vinyl (the platter doesn't spin on its own however, so it is slightly more limited than Vinyl). Since the introduction of this product, Technics and NuMark have both introduced their own CD turntables with full 12" platters that actually rotate. If you must use CDs, there are some good options out there (be aware that they are very expensive, however).
OK, by now, you're presumably kitted out and you've bought a couple dozen records that you like. Now, h
The PS3 has 512M of memory by default. It is half Rambus XDR and half GDDR3, but both segments of memory can be addressed by both the processor and the GPU.
After reading the commentary on 1UP, Gamespy, and elsewhere, it seems like the controller's orientation detection system is actually very robust, responsive, and accurate. The reaction to the tech demos seems to be generally positive, and the use of regular hand motions that translate directly into equivalent movements on the screen is probably the most intuitive game control scheme yet. Two actual action buttons (one for thumb and one for trigger finger) are a bit sparse by modern standards... but then again, the controller, right out of the box, can detect both translational & rotational movement in 3 dimensions, for a total of 6 degrees of freedom (compare to 2 degrees of freedom per analog stick on conventional controllers, which are considerably more clumsy than just picking up an object and moving it through space).
The addition of the plug-in thumbstick controller with 2 additional triggers increases the control possibilities, and with enough polish it seems like using the analog stick with one's left hand for movement while simply pointing with the controller in one's right hand (or vice-versa for the lefties) could be an even more accurate and satisfying control method for first-person shooters than the mouse and keyboard or DS touch screen (and certainly light-years ahead of two analog sticks).
The key with this radically different controller really is, you guessed it, control schemes. If we didn't have the position and orientation sensors, then 2 action buttons would be paltry and anemic for anything but a turn-based strategy or RPG game, or a simple puzzler or platformer. Certainly a modern fighting, action, or sports game would suffer. BUT, using the revolution controller, motion becomes much more important than button mashing. Swinging the controller through the air like the hilt of a sword would reproduce than sword stroke in the game. Or, imagine playing a basketball game where you use just one of the revolution's buttons to hold onto the ball. You lift the controller up, move your hand to make the shot, put a little spin on it and release at just the right moment... how much would that kick the ass of any other sports game?
One issue that arises, however, is that it becomes very non-trivial to port titles from other platforms. The Revolution's controller doesn't just enable radically different control schemes... it basically necessitates them, as there aren't enough analog sticks and buttons to map a conventional control scheme on to (unless a newer Revolution game were to make use of an older gamecube controller). Nintendo will probably have to lead the way on the system with strong first-party titles.
Actually, one can look at the history of the DS as a good reference point for this: in the very beginning, we had some games that were built like glorified tech-demos. They showed off the possibilities of the new interface, but they were little more than software novelties, and there wasn't a whole lot of game underneath. Over time, however, the system built up a library of first-rate ports (Super Mario 64 DS), innovative and fun re-inventions of classic genres like the platformer (Kirby: Canvas Curse), widely appealing non-games (Nintendogs), and extremely solid games for hardcore gamers where the touchscreen and dual screens are a natural and organic part of the gaming experience (Advance Wars: Dual Strike). Now, there are dozens of great-looking DS titles on the horizon, and Internet gaming is set to take off on the system.
I think we might be looking at something similar on the Revolution. We start off with very gimmicky titles designed to get people comfortable with the new controller and wow passers-by at the local electronics store. After a while, a next-gen Mario and Zelda will start to show how old-school genres can be transformed into a new, fun experience with the new controls. Meanwhile, something like Metroid Prime 3 will hit and add a new and brilliant control scheme to the mechanics of the shooter and possibly impress a lot of hard core gamers. Seeing
I recall watching [adult swim] just this last week and seeing a bump (if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's clear you don't watch AS) listing things that definitely WON'T be coming to Adult Swim in the future. One of those things listed was free streaming video on Friday nights. I only wish I could remember what some of the other items on that list were, as it seems the people at Williams Street are pulling another sneaky maneuver like they did with their famous "Aqua Teen Cancellation".
Designing interfaces for visually impaired users was a topic of my own research for a couple of years at ISEF and affiliated fairs while I was in high school. As far as interfaces go, I experimented with a braile keyboard (tried and true) and voice recognition (ammount of success varies depending on possible input vocabulary). One tool I found particularly useful for designing interactive voice interfaces using both speech synthesis and recognition was VoiceXML, which defines a markup language with basic scripting logic for quickly building voice interfaces. During my junior year of High School, I implemented a perl module for automagically generating voice interfaces (my ultimate goal was to create a replacement for the integrated cgi modules for live internet-aware voice apps), and showed it off by designing a basic newsreader app that pulled data from NewsBlaster (this was back in the day before Google News).
My research experiences taught me several things. Firstly, it is important to offer auditory feedback for blind users. With voice recognition on a limited vocabulary, this isn't really a problem, as the user always knows what they said. With a broader range of input vocabulary, or with keyboard input, it's important to verify what has been entered at least every sentence or so, as there is naturally no way to provide visual feedback. Secondly, you must realize that all data being transmitted to the user is necessarily in a totally linear format. That means that, in any interface you are designing fresh, you should keep the interface as slim as possible. When you are reading out information that was originally intended for sighted users, some sort of adaptive content filtering is a must. If a blind user goes to slashdot, chances are "image, image, image, image, image, image, username, preferences, subscribe, journal, etc..." is not the first thing they want to hear.
As much as I like to see Microsoft lose one, I'd say this case is actually, on balance, a bad sign. Let's review: A patent is awarded covering data portability between two microsoft products, Microsoft is sued when they actually implement this pretty obvious idea. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking maybe I should grab a patent on the idea of using a PSP to wirelessly control a home game console (the PS3) and suing Sony just in time for Christmas 2006 so that I can afford to buy one of each.
Anyway, the end result of this is that yet another frivolous patent is financially rewarded, at a cost which is a mere pittance for a company the size of Microsoft. The damage that is done is that software patents which are both general and trivial have another piece of judicial precedent to bolster them. In the end, companies with stores of thousands of patents (companies just like Microsoft) can exploit this imbalance in the judicial system for a quick buck (pretty trivial on the balance sheet, though) and, more importantly, to force much smaller potential competitors straight out of business by offering them the choice to go to court and have their coffers drained by legal fees and possibly by damages awarded, or to settle under terms which require them to cease their competitive activity.
Sorry folks, but this is not a win.
Actually, as far as I know, Doom3 is a multithreaded engine. I have an opteron-based system, running 64-bit linux (but a 32-bit linux binary, as id won't release a 64-bit one). I went from 1 to 2 processors and saw a 25% increase in framerate. AND keep in mind that I run at a resolution (1280x1024x32 with all effects enabled) where graphics tend to be more GPU bound (in my case a stock GeForce 6800) than CPU bound.
Anyway, the cell will hopefully drive forward the adoption of multithreaded game engines (for that matter, the XBox 360's 3-core processor will help in this regard as well) just as multicore CPUs start to arrive on the PC market in earnest. Considering that major next-generation engines (Unreal Engine 3, for example, which had functional demos on X360 in the form of Gears of War and PS3 with UT2007 at E3) are shooting to cover all 3 of these platforms, it's probably safe to bet that a fair amount of development time is going to be invested into making game engines highly parallelized in order to realize maximum performance.