How does one play a game enough to give a review and not know that you're Delta squad FINDING Alpha squad in the game?
The same way in which one writes a review without running it through a spell checker ("laiden"?), grammar checker (please make sure your nouns and verbs agree on plurality), or even understanding common turns of phrase ("grippy story"? I think you mean "gripping"). I gave up halfway through because it hurt too much to keep reading.
Oh, yeah, after the first Act you end up finding Alpha squad and losing half of Delta. I guess that makes you Delpha squad for the rest of the game? Semantically, I would assume that the team is still Delta because the leader was from Delta.
sack Javascript and replace it with something better, like an iteration of Python,
There's nothing wrong with Javascript as a language. In fact, it's actually more powerful than Python, considering that Javascript really is a functional language (it's based around closures as first-class objects, where classes, functions, even variables are really nothing more than closures as far as Javascript is concerned). The problem is with the implementation of the engine inside of web browsers. The lack of proper threading is a real killer, for example. Changing the language will not solve that problem (see VBScript for an example).
make the focus more on manipulating the DOM than verifying forms
I don't know about you, but the Javascript I've been doing lately is 99% DOM manipulation, 1% form verification.
move the user authentication parts from the documents themselves (PHP, etc.) and into the web page server
Isn't that already the case? Seems to me that client-side authentication would be rife with problems, and thus all authentication methods I know of are either 100% server-side (IIS' basic auth or Apache's.htaccess, for example) or use little or no javascript client-side just for sanity-checking before sending off the credentials for server-side validation via Perl, PHP, Ruby, ASP, ASP.NET, etc.
make the network support better
I whole-heartedly agree! XMLHttpRequest is good for what it is, but it has too many problems and limitations. Granted, some of those are security-related (Same Origin Policy), but others (threading) could be solved with a better framework.
How can you include Microsoft in that sentence? They have done more to harm and impede the WWW than all other entities combined. You make them sound like they are doing something ground-breaking and cutting-edge.
If it wasn't for Microsoft, this whole "AJAX" thing never would've been possible in the first place. See, late in 1998 Microsoft released an ActiveX control called "XMLHTTP" that they used with their Outlook Web Access software that ships with Exchange to make a very compelling user interface. It was leaps and bounds ahead of all webmail software for a number of years. Later, around 2003, Opera and Firefox jumped on the bandwagon, taking the interface defined by XMLHTTP and implementing it in their browsers without the need for ActiveX. They called it XMLHttpRequest, and it's the basis for the first "A" and the "X" in "AJAX". It took Google to really publicize the availability of such coolness with Google Maps and Gmail, but that was more a failing of Microsoft's marketing department than any technical problems. Sure, developers have used hidden frames and iframes to fake asynchronous calls for years, but the essence of AJAX/Web 2.0 is the ability to easily make an asynchronous call without any hacks.
If MS could be granted one wish, they would ask for the death of "Web 2.0" and the return to static html, thus protecting their well-entrenched product line and business model.
Web 2.0 applications are not going to kill the Microsoft cash cows of Windows and Office any time soon. If anything, Microsoft is leveraging the web to make their offerings even more compelling, with rich RSS support in IE7 and Vista, the Windows and Office Live family of products, etc. They may not be the most innovative of services (though they have beaten Google to the punch several times -- Live.com gadgets and Live Favorites, for example), but it's a core area of growth at Microsoft with massive investment and potential.
If anything, how could you possibly exclude Microsoft from a list of companies making an impact with web-centric software.
(Yes, I know this sounds like a shill, so let me get my geek creds back. I've run Linux since 1997, my entire home network is managed by a Debian box, I have a Nintendo Wii as well as an Xbox 360, I've never had a virus, and I once set up a quad-boot system for a friend that switched between two different distros of Linux, NT 4.0, and Windows 98. There, that should do it...:)
Ouch! Only 197MB of system RAM (I assume the other 59MB is being used for video memory at the moment, since the RAM is shared). The PS3 may be technically better than an Xbox 360, but if anything's going to cause problems it'll be the PS3's lack of RAM. By comparison, Xbox 360 has 512MB of unified RAM, up from an originally planned 256MB when developers complained that 256MB was too little. Microsoft listened, Sony didn't.
I'm not sure how young you think I am, but your quoting of numbers does not scare me. Unless they were prime numbers...or imaginary...then I'd be creeped out just a little, as to why a guy is quoting imaginary numbers at me.
He was commenting on your extremely high Slashdot user id. Which is a little funny, considering he posted as an anonymous coward without any ID. Assuming he even has an id, it's probably at least in the high 900,000s. Anyway, his point was that with such a high id, you must either be young or very new to linux/computers/the interwebs else you would've registered on Slashdot years ago. Maybe you could purchase a low-number account on ebay after you make bank on the PS3 sale? That'd show the anonymous coward what's up!
Mind you, this is a reasonably expensive camera (Canon Powershot 3IS). Perhaps proper USB support in the peripheral makes more difference than the OS??
You don't have to go expensive for it to Just Work(tm). My 5 year old piece of crap Kodak camera that cost all of $300 (back when point-and-shoot digitals were still expensive) works just like you mentioned: Plug in the USB cable, turn on the camera, and boom -- wizard. Sure, it can be more complicated if I need to resize or retouch a photo, but I let my web upload software handle resizing on the server and I don't give a crap about retouching the photos (the cameras bad enough that there's just no point).
Thats a shame because F.E.A.R. is a great game, but I was saying it should remove Halo from it's undeserved throne without actually ever trying the console version. I just presumed it was as enjoyable to play as the PC version. What I find amazing is that Timesplitters Future Perfect never got a look in as a superior console FPS. That is a great game. I wish there was a way to remove the totally retarded aiming style from TS2 because I feel that would be an even better game without that moronic aiming. I don't know why it never bothered me much in Goldeneye, but I couldn't play much further than the helicopter in TS2 before just going crazy and returning it to the video store.
Too bad my rig is nowhere near powerful enough to handle F.E.A.R. Otherwise I'd give it a try. As for TS3, I'm pretty sure it got overlooked thanks to the craptastic aiming of TS2. I know that's why I didn't bother, though I had a friend who kept raving about it. Maybe someday I'll go back and play it... (yeah, right, "someday" just never seems to come along).
Oh yeah, and if you want good AI, there F.E.A.R. is where you want to be. I never really bothered enough with Halo 2 to see if the A.I. was any improved over the non-existant first version. I played as far as becoming a bad guy and that was enough for me.
The thing about Halo's AI is that it only becomes obvious how good it can be when you play on higher difficulty levels. At lower difficulty levels, the enemies are dumbed down to make them easier, and there are fewer of them which makes their squad tactics less-obvious (grunts getting scared and running to hide behind elites, elites pinning you down with covering fire and flanking your position, etc).
I mean, to judge console FPS by the criteria that Halo is praised - graphics, story, AI (lol, seriously guys, Halo has no AI, come on, there could be a full post written on the rose colored glasses the fanboys wear when discussing this), gunplay... right about... now F.E.A.R. should be destroying Halo and taking it's rightful place and king of the console shooters. But it's not going to happen, because while F.E.A.R. is a better game in every way, Halo is loved for it's DM/Co-OP more than the game itself.
Having played the FEAR demo on Xbox 360, I found the controls horribly bad. This is a common theme for games ported to consoles from the PC, where the game was designed around mouse/kb controls and no real effort was made to tweak the game to work well on a console beyond a bit of auto-aim. That's where Halo really shines -- from the ground up, it was built as an FPS for the console (well, after Bungie scrapped the idea of doing it as an RTS, and then as a third-person shooter, and then got purchased by Microsoft. But they had a good year or so to redefine the controls and gameplay balance of the game for the console after the Microsoft purchase). The controls are tight and responsive and while it does do auto-aim it's also quite possible to consistently headshot enemies without having to rely on the auto-aim. As a counter-example, look at Unreal Championship on the Xbox. It was essentially the exact same game as Unreal Tournament 2003 on the PC, and it suffered for that in the control department. Most anti-Halo (or really, anti-console FPS) fanboys trot out the "no kb/mouse support" argument without ever taking the time to stop and consider that a console FPS has different design criteria than a PC FPS, in terms of control and balance.
As for the AI issue, Halo 2 really did have quite good AI, for a FPS game. Sure, most encounters were based on triggers, but once the trigger fired the AI takes over. Go play a scenario in Halo 2 and you'll find that the bad guys don't always do the same things over and over again. If you hide, they flank you. If you charge right in they'll back up and take cover. If you focus on one enemey and ignore the others, they'll team up and take you out. Now go play some Gears of War, a game that's being lauded for its AI almost as much as its graphics. You'll quickly find that its AI is terribly scripted. It gets to the point that you know that an enemy will pop his head out right "here" every time. You can flank a set of enemies and they won't even turn around until you've chainsawed them to death. It's a fun game but not an example of brilliant AI. It's quite possible that there are games with better enemy AI than Halo 2 ("real" AI, not simply scripted bits to make it look "smart"), but I'd be hard-pressed to name one off the top of my head. Then again, I'm not a PC gamer when it comes to FPS. I'd rather play Civ IV or GalCiv 2 on my PC than Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R.
As the PS3 has PS2 on a chip inside it, I'd guess we'll be soon seeing another further slimmed down and cut price PS2 released.
You've got it backwards. The PS2-on-a-chip in the PS3 is not a further miniaturization of the PS2 beyond the slimline PSTwo. It is the PSTwo (or close enough). So, no, you probably won't be seeing an even smaller PSTwo. It's the same thing Sony did with the PSOne. That was released prior to the PS2 from the effort needed to miniaturize the PS1 to a single chip for backwards compatibility. There was never an even-smaller PSOne.
It's also, in true Halo style, not overly entertaining in single player while (at least in Deathrow's case) being a complete blast in multi. In SP mode the teams get ridiculously hard later on, and IIRC it was the robot team in an optional match that appeared to be virtually unbeatable. I can't deny though, it was a fun game, and I very much regret ebaying my copy back when I got sick of SP and didn't have much chance of MP.
I like to believe that's why the game died an early death. Ubi released it just months before Xbox Live debuted, which meant that its truly brilliant multiplayer gameplay could not be experienced on Live. Had they waited 6 more months for Live to launch and to implement it in the game, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up as a massively popular game with multiple sequels.
Now, though? Good luck finding a copy if you don't already have one. It might even be worth real money in a decade or so when the Xbox becomes "retro" like the SNES is today.
Not if you're listening to Agile advocates. The leaders of that movement sometimes express the opinion that unit tests can eliminate the need for real testing. After all, you've effectively tested the code in all its codepaths. Testing is a mere formality, IOW. I don't buy that, and I don't think you do either.
I think this sums it all up. We're both advocating the same thing, that the "best" way to develop software is somewhere between extremely "agile" methodologies and walled-off teams. But it's a gradient, and I think I fall a little bit farther towards "agile" than you do. IMHO, "agile" methods should never be followed to the letter. Instead, you pick a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B, and so on. Unit testing is never a replacement for full QA, but working closely with testers (by which I mean test developers) is a good form of "pair programming" (real pair programming is crap). Stand-up meetings are all well and good, but I've found that you can have a sit-down status meeting with 4-7 people and still be done in 15 minutes as long as you have good leadership and avoid rat-holing. Short release cycles are great when you only have maintenance work to do, but there's nothing wrong with bundling two or three cycles together when you have a number of big features that need to be done. And so on.
One thing that really needs to be understood by all you "best practice" guys is that test code is not a shippable product.
Code without tests is not shippable code!
And if code A is supported by test code X, Y, Z, are you also going to require that any changes to A also be accompanied by changes to X, Y, Z? What happens if A is some fundamental architectural change (or maybe simply a refactoring) that affects all tests in the test suite? You can't seriously be talking about forcing the developer to go through the entire test suite looking for compilation errors and runtime errors just because those early tests don't make sense anymore with the new code.
You can, and you should. If your build is not organized enough that each developer can do a full build (or at least a build of modified components) prior to checkin then you have some work to do. As for architectural changes and refactorings, think of this as a small barrier to entry. It prevents frivalous re-architecting when your developers should be getting on with their real work. If a new architecture or a refactoring is important enough, then it's also important enough to fix or deprecate the test suite.
Do yourself a favor and get some test developers and testers. Let them worry about the test suite and let your developers worry about the product.
I agree with the idea, but not the sentiment. Testers and test developers are there ensure QA. They have their own job to do, and it's not mopping up after lazy developers who can't be bothered that they broke a build or checked in non-functional code because they didn't unit test. Bear in mind that the advocated "developer testing" really is minimum-bar stuff -- does your code work for the mainline scenarios? Maybe you have an obscure boundary condition or off-by-one error that you missed, and that's okay. What's not okay is just checking in a bunch of code and throwing it over the wall to the test department. Your quality will suffer and your testers will hate you. An adversarial test-dev relationship benefits nobody.
Sony didn't just back BetaMax, they created it. It was just the first in a long line of media duds for Sony: BetaMax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, UMD, and soon to be Blu-Ray. Sony just doesn't learn. It's like the entire company is operating under a Kutaragi reality distortion field where they honestly believe they've won all of the past media wars.
Had his vote, and the votes he assumes had been cast for him (because his friends said they did), he still wouldn't have received enough votes to win the election. Further, it's not clear he would have received even enough votes to change the *outcome* of the election (there will be a runoff due to two other candidates having won the same vote count).
So accuracy in counting votes only matters when it could change the outcome of an election? Bullshit. How do you know whether or not the votes will change the outcome if you don't accurately track them? In a close race, especially in a small town of only 80 voters, one vote could make all the difference even if it's not cast for the two parties in contention. Besides that, voting for third parties is often used as a statement even if the percentage of votes the parties get is miniscule. Getting 5% of the vote is nowhere near enough to win an election, but it's a significant minority and is quite a bit more than 0%.
Unlike Microsoft who waits around for weeks after the patch has been made to actually distribute it.
You know, that "sitting around for weeks" part is usually called "testing", and is considered a good thing. Just because the fix might only take 5 minutes of developer time doesn't mean it's ready to ship. It's need to be verified that it fixes the original problem without compromising the gameplay or introducing other bugs in the process.
I would knock Sony for doing an immediate system update, but Xbox 360 did exactly the same thing. The hard drive shipped (and still ships, AFAIK) with an old build of the BC engine that only supports Halo 1 and 2 with no online play. To make BC even usable, you have to download the latest engine update (there was an update available at launch, and have since been several updates). If you can't get online, you can download and burn the update, or order a CD for the price of shipping, but it's still a launch-day update.
Does anyone know if FFXII will look better being played on a PS3 than on a PS2?
Unlike the PS2 and Xbox 360, the PS3 does not do any enhancements in backwards compatibility mode. How it looks on the PS2 is how it'll look on the PS3. There's no free upscaling to 720p or 1080p or free FSAA like the Xbox 360 does with Xbox games, no texture filtering like the PS2 does for PS1 games, etc. Just the same old PS2 game being played on the same old PS2 hardware embedded inside the PS3 (that's what the slim PSTwo was all about -- reduce the size of the PS2 to a single chip so it could fit inside the massive grill of the PS3).
If you really are going to buy a PS3, I'd wait to see if Squeenix is going to revamp their older titles. There was a rumor that they would remake 7/8/9 on PS3, which might be worthwhile. Whether they'll get around to X/X2/XII is anybody's guess.
It's no wonder I skip straight to the comments -- these reviews are just about the most content-free section of slashdot.
I could almost accept the contentless-ness of the "review" if it was at least readable. "Book report" is right, as this reads like it was written by a 4th grader. It's full of run-on sentences, sentence fragments, overly-repeated phrasing ("This book", "The book") and sentence structure, convoluted paragraphs covering multiple unrelated topics, minor spelling and punctuation errors, etc.
As book reports go, I'd expect this one to get a C+ or B- depending on whether we're talking about 3rd or 4th grade. As a semi-professional book review by a supposedly-educated adult, this gets an F.
The Montana farmer getting his first computer to manage his heavy equipment doesn't.
Completely off-topic, but this bit of your example is wrong. The average farmer in question probably got his first computer 20+ years ago, and was probably on the internet well before most people here. Being a farmer means manual labor, sure, but it also means being an accountant, a people manager, a stock broker, etc. To that end, every farmer I've ever known has been using computers since they became viable for home use (and some even before that, being able to justify the expense for business purposes). You think you're cutting edge because you had sat-nav in your car a couple years ago? Farmers were using GPS 10+ years ago for mapping purposes. You long for a future where cars drive themselves? Farmers already have that, with automated tractors that can plant an entire field with little to no human input.
Contrary to popular belief, the family farmer is one of the more high tech people in the world today. They're not their grandfathers, walking behind horses dragging plows.
(Note: I grew up on a farm, and I'm not making this up. Also note: This mostly applies to the indepdendent grain farmer, though I'd bet it generalizes to farming/ranching in general.)
What I want to know is when can we play something other than WMV files on the 360 media center. I realize there are tricks to do so, but my modded original xbox can play pretty much anything I throw at it without issue. Why can't a machine significantly more powerful do so?
It's not a question of power, but codecs. If the DivX/XviD/Quicktime/Real/etc codecs aren't available, it can't play those videos, period. Could the codecs be added in the future? Almost certainly. Will they? Who knows. Assuming they can get through all of the licensing issues, would you pay extra to download DivX support off of Marketplace (similar to how the iPod support can be downloaded, though that's for free)?
It probably stores a list and only retabulates it once in a while.
It enumerates every time you enter the Arcade section. My guess is that they read more data at once now, as before it seemed like it was reading one game at a time (find game on HDD/MU, make a call to get information, display it, repeat).
I have to admit this is so painfully slow at times, that this is the one feature I care about. Sad really, but it is important.
On the other hand, if such a minor thing is a major complaint, that means Microsoft has done a great job on the rest, right?:)
What I want to know is how well the framerate holds up when the resolution in cranked to 1080p. I couldn't dredge up the info on what exactly MS is requiring from developers, although they all are likely tweaking for reasonable performance at the top setting.
The Xbox 360 has 10MB of high-speed local framebuffer for the GPU that is used exclusively for the output frames (a 1920x1080@32bpp frame is 7.9MB). As well, it has a hardware scaling unit that does high quality upscaling to any resolution. The point of all of this is that games will render at a lower resolution (usually 540p or 720p) and then scale up to 1080p at output. With this update, developers now have the option to render internally at 1080p if they wish, but even PS3 games aren't rendering at 1080p. Since there are no games rendering internally at 1080p right now, why add 1080p support at all? By scaling the image in hardware on the console itself, you get a better image than if you let your TV do it (scaling before analog conversion) and you eliminate any potential lag from TVs with poor scaling hardware. That means that even though games are still rendered internally at 720p, a 1080p-native display (DLP, LCD, Plasma) will no longer have to do any conversion of its own. The quality will be similar to an up-converting DVD player from 480p to 720p, for example.
Because scaling is done in hardware, Microsoft doesn't require anything from developers. They can choose whatever size is appropriate for their internal rendering (as noted above, usually 540p or 720p) and let the scaling unit take care of upscaling or downscaling to 1080i/p or 480i/p. Obviously games will look better when rendered at a higher internal resolution. And since the game always renders at the same resolution regardless, there's no tweaking that needs to be done to accomodate different resolutions (ie, a player at 480p is not going to have more free cycles for AI than a player at 1080p, since in both cases the image is rendered at 720p and then scaled in hardware).
What does this all mean? Well, you really can't talk about a game "supporting" 720p or 1080p on 360, as all games support all resolutions. All you can really say is what resolution is native to that game, as a game with a 540p native resolution will obviously look worse than a native resolution 1080p. But then, as Slashdotters like to say, graphics aren't all that matters. A game like Lego Star Wars II has no need to use a 1080p native resolution, for example. But since the console can now support it, 1080p users can play it in the resolution native to their display. I would assume that Sony's taken a similar approach with the PS3, but I'm probably wrong.
I noticed that most of these improvements will appeal to the multiplayer crowd... which would make sense since Halo 2 also seemed to focus more attention on its multiplayer than on its single player campaign (and that shows because it was panned by critics for it).
The build-up for Halo 2 was the same way. Most previews were focused on multiplayer features because Bungie kept the single player story tightly under wraps (for example, nobody knew you played part of the game as someone other than Master Chief). I anticipate Halo 3 will be the same way. Lots of multiplayer information, but with a few holes where that info might give away the single player story, and as the game gets closer to releasing we'll get a few peeks at what's in store.
As for critics panning the single player, the biggest complaint by far was the lack of a real ending. I doubt that will happen again for Halo 3, since it's supposed to be the last in the Master Chief storyline (Bungie once said it'd be the last Halo, period, but I'm interpreting that as "last in the Master Chief/Cortana/Arbiter/Gravemind" story given the upcoming Halo Wars and other potential spin-offs). Sure, critics didn't like that the the single player story didn't spend as much time on Earth, or that they had to play as the Arbiter, but by and large the legitimate reviewers (ie, not some fanboy writing on his 1up blog) gave the story high marks except for the cliffhanger ending.
I'd have to admit that the first one wasn't that great in single player mode, and I never actually played it all the way through
The first one was great before and after the Library section. You just have to slog your way through the Library and get it over with. The game got much better once you were finally done with that section (and Bungie has gone on record as saying that the Library was crap).
Not a particularly good one (really intense but initially rushing ensures you eventually win it), so I don't know why Bungie would copy it. It'd be funny though, the (pre-Editor's Choice pack) vehicle set in UT2004 was pretty clearly copied from Halo.
I assumed they meant "Sidewinder", the big snowy map from Halo 1, but got confused.
Sony have always played it safe and in fact allowed for far more "creative freedoms".
You mean like virtually banning non-3D games on the original Playstation? Sony restricts their consoles to licensees just like Nintendo (Net Yaroze and PS2 Linux not withstanding, since you couldn't create commercial games with those anyway -- and Nintendo did have BASIC on the Famicom way back in the day). While Nintendo historically was very concerned with being family-friendly ("sweat" instead of blood in Mortal Kombat, Nazi symbols removed from Wolfenstein 3D, minor nudity and language censored from Japanese games), they've come quite a long way since then (uh... Conker, anybody?).
To top it off, Nintendo turns a blind eye to homebrew GBA and DS development while Sony actively fights against homebrew PSP development (to the point where you have to decide if you want your PSP to play retail games or homebrew games, but not both). Sure, Nintendo could jump all over the GBA/DS dev community any time they like. The fact that they haven't is encouraging.
Slashdot Mirror
The same way in which one writes a review without running it through a spell checker ("laiden"?), grammar checker (please make sure your nouns and verbs agree on plurality), or even understanding common turns of phrase ("grippy story"? I think you mean "gripping"). I gave up halfway through because it hurt too much to keep reading.
Oh, yeah, after the first Act you end up finding Alpha squad and losing half of Delta. I guess that makes you Delpha squad for the rest of the game? Semantically, I would assume that the team is still Delta because the leader was from Delta.
There's nothing wrong with Javascript as a language. In fact, it's actually more powerful than Python, considering that Javascript really is a functional language (it's based around closures as first-class objects, where classes, functions, even variables are really nothing more than closures as far as Javascript is concerned). The problem is with the implementation of the engine inside of web browsers. The lack of proper threading is a real killer, for example. Changing the language will not solve that problem (see VBScript for an example).
I don't know about you, but the Javascript I've been doing lately is 99% DOM manipulation, 1% form verification.
Isn't that already the case? Seems to me that client-side authentication would be rife with problems, and thus all authentication methods I know of are either 100% server-side (IIS' basic auth or Apache's .htaccess, for example) or use little or no javascript client-side just for sanity-checking before sending off the credentials for server-side validation via Perl, PHP, Ruby, ASP, ASP.NET, etc.
I whole-heartedly agree! XMLHttpRequest is good for what it is, but it has too many problems and limitations. Granted, some of those are security-related (Same Origin Policy), but others (threading) could be solved with a better framework.
If it wasn't for Microsoft, this whole "AJAX" thing never would've been possible in the first place. See, late in 1998 Microsoft released an ActiveX control called "XMLHTTP" that they used with their Outlook Web Access software that ships with Exchange to make a very compelling user interface. It was leaps and bounds ahead of all webmail software for a number of years. Later, around 2003, Opera and Firefox jumped on the bandwagon, taking the interface defined by XMLHTTP and implementing it in their browsers without the need for ActiveX. They called it XMLHttpRequest, and it's the basis for the first "A" and the "X" in "AJAX". It took Google to really publicize the availability of such coolness with Google Maps and Gmail, but that was more a failing of Microsoft's marketing department than any technical problems. Sure, developers have used hidden frames and iframes to fake asynchronous calls for years, but the essence of AJAX/Web 2.0 is the ability to easily make an asynchronous call without any hacks.
Web 2.0 applications are not going to kill the Microsoft cash cows of Windows and Office any time soon. If anything, Microsoft is leveraging the web to make their offerings even more compelling, with rich RSS support in IE7 and Vista, the Windows and Office Live family of products, etc. They may not be the most innovative of services (though they have beaten Google to the punch several times -- Live.com gadgets and Live Favorites, for example), but it's a core area of growth at Microsoft with massive investment and potential.
If anything, how could you possibly exclude Microsoft from a list of companies making an impact with web-centric software.
(Yes, I know this sounds like a shill, so let me get my geek creds back. I've run Linux since 1997, my entire home network is managed by a Debian box, I have a Nintendo Wii as well as an Xbox 360, I've never had a virus, and I once set up a quad-boot system for a friend that switched between two different distros of Linux, NT 4.0, and Windows 98. There, that should do it ... :)
Ouch! Only 197MB of system RAM (I assume the other 59MB is being used for video memory at the moment, since the RAM is shared). The PS3 may be technically better than an Xbox 360, but if anything's going to cause problems it'll be the PS3's lack of RAM. By comparison, Xbox 360 has 512MB of unified RAM, up from an originally planned 256MB when developers complained that 256MB was too little. Microsoft listened, Sony didn't.
He was commenting on your extremely high Slashdot user id. Which is a little funny, considering he posted as an anonymous coward without any ID. Assuming he even has an id, it's probably at least in the high 900,000s. Anyway, his point was that with such a high id, you must either be young or very new to linux/computers/the interwebs else you would've registered on Slashdot years ago. Maybe you could purchase a low-number account on ebay after you make bank on the PS3 sale? That'd show the anonymous coward what's up!
You don't have to go expensive for it to Just Work(tm). My 5 year old piece of crap Kodak camera that cost all of $300 (back when point-and-shoot digitals were still expensive) works just like you mentioned: Plug in the USB cable, turn on the camera, and boom -- wizard. Sure, it can be more complicated if I need to resize or retouch a photo, but I let my web upload software handle resizing on the server and I don't give a crap about retouching the photos (the cameras bad enough that there's just no point).
Too bad my rig is nowhere near powerful enough to handle F.E.A.R. Otherwise I'd give it a try. As for TS3, I'm pretty sure it got overlooked thanks to the craptastic aiming of TS2. I know that's why I didn't bother, though I had a friend who kept raving about it. Maybe someday I'll go back and play it ... (yeah, right, "someday" just never seems to come along).
The thing about Halo's AI is that it only becomes obvious how good it can be when you play on higher difficulty levels. At lower difficulty levels, the enemies are dumbed down to make them easier, and there are fewer of them which makes their squad tactics less-obvious (grunts getting scared and running to hide behind elites, elites pinning you down with covering fire and flanking your position, etc).
Having played the FEAR demo on Xbox 360, I found the controls horribly bad. This is a common theme for games ported to consoles from the PC, where the game was designed around mouse/kb controls and no real effort was made to tweak the game to work well on a console beyond a bit of auto-aim. That's where Halo really shines -- from the ground up, it was built as an FPS for the console (well, after Bungie scrapped the idea of doing it as an RTS, and then as a third-person shooter, and then got purchased by Microsoft. But they had a good year or so to redefine the controls and gameplay balance of the game for the console after the Microsoft purchase). The controls are tight and responsive and while it does do auto-aim it's also quite possible to consistently headshot enemies without having to rely on the auto-aim. As a counter-example, look at Unreal Championship on the Xbox. It was essentially the exact same game as Unreal Tournament 2003 on the PC, and it suffered for that in the control department. Most anti-Halo (or really, anti-console FPS) fanboys trot out the "no kb/mouse support" argument without ever taking the time to stop and consider that a console FPS has different design criteria than a PC FPS, in terms of control and balance.
As for the AI issue, Halo 2 really did have quite good AI, for a FPS game. Sure, most encounters were based on triggers, but once the trigger fired the AI takes over. Go play a scenario in Halo 2 and you'll find that the bad guys don't always do the same things over and over again. If you hide, they flank you. If you charge right in they'll back up and take cover. If you focus on one enemey and ignore the others, they'll team up and take you out. Now go play some Gears of War, a game that's being lauded for its AI almost as much as its graphics. You'll quickly find that its AI is terribly scripted. It gets to the point that you know that an enemy will pop his head out right "here" every time. You can flank a set of enemies and they won't even turn around until you've chainsawed them to death. It's a fun game but not an example of brilliant AI. It's quite possible that there are games with better enemy AI than Halo 2 ("real" AI, not simply scripted bits to make it look "smart"), but I'd be hard-pressed to name one off the top of my head. Then again, I'm not a PC gamer when it comes to FPS. I'd rather play Civ IV or GalCiv 2 on my PC than Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R.
You've got it backwards. The PS2-on-a-chip in the PS3 is not a further miniaturization of the PS2 beyond the slimline PSTwo. It is the PSTwo (or close enough). So, no, you probably won't be seeing an even smaller PSTwo. It's the same thing Sony did with the PSOne. That was released prior to the PS2 from the effort needed to miniaturize the PS1 to a single chip for backwards compatibility. There was never an even-smaller PSOne.
I like to believe that's why the game died an early death. Ubi released it just months before Xbox Live debuted, which meant that its truly brilliant multiplayer gameplay could not be experienced on Live. Had they waited 6 more months for Live to launch and to implement it in the game, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up as a massively popular game with multiple sequels.
Now, though? Good luck finding a copy if you don't already have one. It might even be worth real money in a decade or so when the Xbox becomes "retro" like the SNES is today.
I think this sums it all up. We're both advocating the same thing, that the "best" way to develop software is somewhere between extremely "agile" methodologies and walled-off teams. But it's a gradient, and I think I fall a little bit farther towards "agile" than you do. IMHO, "agile" methods should never be followed to the letter. Instead, you pick a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B, and so on. Unit testing is never a replacement for full QA, but working closely with testers (by which I mean test developers) is a good form of "pair programming" (real pair programming is crap). Stand-up meetings are all well and good, but I've found that you can have a sit-down status meeting with 4-7 people and still be done in 15 minutes as long as you have good leadership and avoid rat-holing. Short release cycles are great when you only have maintenance work to do, but there's nothing wrong with bundling two or three cycles together when you have a number of big features that need to be done. And so on.
Code without tests is not shippable code!
You can, and you should. If your build is not organized enough that each developer can do a full build (or at least a build of modified components) prior to checkin then you have some work to do. As for architectural changes and refactorings, think of this as a small barrier to entry. It prevents frivalous re-architecting when your developers should be getting on with their real work. If a new architecture or a refactoring is important enough, then it's also important enough to fix or deprecate the test suite.
I agree with the idea, but not the sentiment. Testers and test developers are there ensure QA. They have their own job to do, and it's not mopping up after lazy developers who can't be bothered that they broke a build or checked in non-functional code because they didn't unit test. Bear in mind that the advocated "developer testing" really is minimum-bar stuff -- does your code work for the mainline scenarios? Maybe you have an obscure boundary condition or off-by-one error that you missed, and that's okay. What's not okay is just checking in a bunch of code and throwing it over the wall to the test department. Your quality will suffer and your testers will hate you. An adversarial test-dev relationship benefits nobody.
Sony didn't just back BetaMax, they created it. It was just the first in a long line of media duds for Sony: BetaMax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, UMD, and soon to be Blu-Ray. Sony just doesn't learn. It's like the entire company is operating under a Kutaragi reality distortion field where they honestly believe they've won all of the past media wars.
So accuracy in counting votes only matters when it could change the outcome of an election? Bullshit. How do you know whether or not the votes will change the outcome if you don't accurately track them? In a close race, especially in a small town of only 80 voters, one vote could make all the difference even if it's not cast for the two parties in contention. Besides that, voting for third parties is often used as a statement even if the percentage of votes the parties get is miniscule. Getting 5% of the vote is nowhere near enough to win an election, but it's a significant minority and is quite a bit more than 0%.
You know, that "sitting around for weeks" part is usually called "testing", and is considered a good thing. Just because the fix might only take 5 minutes of developer time doesn't mean it's ready to ship. It's need to be verified that it fixes the original problem without compromising the gameplay or introducing other bugs in the process.
I would knock Sony for doing an immediate system update, but Xbox 360 did exactly the same thing. The hard drive shipped (and still ships, AFAIK) with an old build of the BC engine that only supports Halo 1 and 2 with no online play. To make BC even usable, you have to download the latest engine update (there was an update available at launch, and have since been several updates). If you can't get online, you can download and burn the update, or order a CD for the price of shipping, but it's still a launch-day update.
Because the factories are in China? Though I guess if you can afford a PS3, you can afford to fly to China and camp the factory ...
Unlike the PS2 and Xbox 360, the PS3 does not do any enhancements in backwards compatibility mode. How it looks on the PS2 is how it'll look on the PS3. There's no free upscaling to 720p or 1080p or free FSAA like the Xbox 360 does with Xbox games, no texture filtering like the PS2 does for PS1 games, etc. Just the same old PS2 game being played on the same old PS2 hardware embedded inside the PS3 (that's what the slim PSTwo was all about -- reduce the size of the PS2 to a single chip so it could fit inside the massive grill of the PS3).
If you really are going to buy a PS3, I'd wait to see if Squeenix is going to revamp their older titles. There was a rumor that they would remake 7/8/9 on PS3, which might be worthwhile. Whether they'll get around to X/X2/XII is anybody's guess.
I could almost accept the contentless-ness of the "review" if it was at least readable. "Book report" is right, as this reads like it was written by a 4th grader. It's full of run-on sentences, sentence fragments, overly-repeated phrasing ("This book", "The book") and sentence structure, convoluted paragraphs covering multiple unrelated topics, minor spelling and punctuation errors, etc.
As book reports go, I'd expect this one to get a C+ or B- depending on whether we're talking about 3rd or 4th grade. As a semi-professional book review by a supposedly-educated adult, this gets an F.
Completely off-topic, but this bit of your example is wrong. The average farmer in question probably got his first computer 20+ years ago, and was probably on the internet well before most people here. Being a farmer means manual labor, sure, but it also means being an accountant, a people manager, a stock broker, etc. To that end, every farmer I've ever known has been using computers since they became viable for home use (and some even before that, being able to justify the expense for business purposes). You think you're cutting edge because you had sat-nav in your car a couple years ago? Farmers were using GPS 10+ years ago for mapping purposes. You long for a future where cars drive themselves? Farmers already have that, with automated tractors that can plant an entire field with little to no human input.
Contrary to popular belief, the family farmer is one of the more high tech people in the world today. They're not their grandfathers, walking behind horses dragging plows.
(Note: I grew up on a farm, and I'm not making this up. Also note: This mostly applies to the indepdendent grain farmer, though I'd bet it generalizes to farming/ranching in general.)
It's not a question of power, but codecs. If the DivX/XviD/Quicktime/Real/etc codecs aren't available, it can't play those videos, period. Could the codecs be added in the future? Almost certainly. Will they? Who knows. Assuming they can get through all of the licensing issues, would you pay extra to download DivX support off of Marketplace (similar to how the iPod support can be downloaded, though that's for free)?
It enumerates every time you enter the Arcade section. My guess is that they read more data at once now, as before it seemed like it was reading one game at a time (find game on HDD/MU, make a call to get information, display it, repeat).
On the other hand, if such a minor thing is a major complaint, that means Microsoft has done a great job on the rest, right? :)
The Xbox 360 has 10MB of high-speed local framebuffer for the GPU that is used exclusively for the output frames (a 1920x1080@32bpp frame is 7.9MB). As well, it has a hardware scaling unit that does high quality upscaling to any resolution. The point of all of this is that games will render at a lower resolution (usually 540p or 720p) and then scale up to 1080p at output. With this update, developers now have the option to render internally at 1080p if they wish, but even PS3 games aren't rendering at 1080p. Since there are no games rendering internally at 1080p right now, why add 1080p support at all? By scaling the image in hardware on the console itself, you get a better image than if you let your TV do it (scaling before analog conversion) and you eliminate any potential lag from TVs with poor scaling hardware. That means that even though games are still rendered internally at 720p, a 1080p-native display (DLP, LCD, Plasma) will no longer have to do any conversion of its own. The quality will be similar to an up-converting DVD player from 480p to 720p, for example.
Because scaling is done in hardware, Microsoft doesn't require anything from developers. They can choose whatever size is appropriate for their internal rendering (as noted above, usually 540p or 720p) and let the scaling unit take care of upscaling or downscaling to 1080i/p or 480i/p. Obviously games will look better when rendered at a higher internal resolution. And since the game always renders at the same resolution regardless, there's no tweaking that needs to be done to accomodate different resolutions (ie, a player at 480p is not going to have more free cycles for AI than a player at 1080p, since in both cases the image is rendered at 720p and then scaled in hardware).
What does this all mean? Well, you really can't talk about a game "supporting" 720p or 1080p on 360, as all games support all resolutions. All you can really say is what resolution is native to that game, as a game with a 540p native resolution will obviously look worse than a native resolution 1080p. But then, as Slashdotters like to say, graphics aren't all that matters. A game like Lego Star Wars II has no need to use a 1080p native resolution, for example. But since the console can now support it, 1080p users can play it in the resolution native to their display. I would assume that Sony's taken a similar approach with the PS3, but I'm probably wrong.
The build-up for Halo 2 was the same way. Most previews were focused on multiplayer features because Bungie kept the single player story tightly under wraps (for example, nobody knew you played part of the game as someone other than Master Chief). I anticipate Halo 3 will be the same way. Lots of multiplayer information, but with a few holes where that info might give away the single player story, and as the game gets closer to releasing we'll get a few peeks at what's in store.
As for critics panning the single player, the biggest complaint by far was the lack of a real ending. I doubt that will happen again for Halo 3, since it's supposed to be the last in the Master Chief storyline (Bungie once said it'd be the last Halo, period, but I'm interpreting that as "last in the Master Chief/Cortana/Arbiter/Gravemind" story given the upcoming Halo Wars and other potential spin-offs). Sure, critics didn't like that the the single player story didn't spend as much time on Earth, or that they had to play as the Arbiter, but by and large the legitimate reviewers (ie, not some fanboy writing on his 1up blog) gave the story high marks except for the cliffhanger ending.
The first one was great before and after the Library section. You just have to slog your way through the Library and get it over with. The game got much better once you were finally done with that section (and Bungie has gone on record as saying that the Library was crap).
I assumed they meant "Sidewinder", the big snowy map from Halo 1, but got confused.
You mean like virtually banning non-3D games on the original Playstation? Sony restricts their consoles to licensees just like Nintendo (Net Yaroze and PS2 Linux not withstanding, since you couldn't create commercial games with those anyway -- and Nintendo did have BASIC on the Famicom way back in the day). While Nintendo historically was very concerned with being family-friendly ("sweat" instead of blood in Mortal Kombat, Nazi symbols removed from Wolfenstein 3D, minor nudity and language censored from Japanese games), they've come quite a long way since then (uh ... Conker, anybody?).
To top it off, Nintendo turns a blind eye to homebrew GBA and DS development while Sony actively fights against homebrew PSP development (to the point where you have to decide if you want your PSP to play retail games or homebrew games, but not both). Sure, Nintendo could jump all over the GBA/DS dev community any time they like. The fact that they haven't is encouraging.