Note: I actually think the idea is fairly cool.... BUT only when sent to a very select group of people who will appreciate it, ie those who are already a bit tech savy.
That same group of people are also the ones you've told over and over not to run things people send them (in email). If you got through to them, this disk will go right in the trash. They have no way of knowing what's on it without running it (which you told them is a Bad Thing (tm)).
Please don't let HL2 suck as much as Halo2. Please please please.
What part of Halo 2 sucked? The ending was a little weak (cliffhanger), but if you followed the story it did give a small amount of satisfaction. It was like the ending to Empire Strikes Back. The rest of the game is top-notch, and the multi-player component is the best I've seen. Half-Life 2 had to go and re-hash Counter-Strike (again!) to get a decent (not that I would call CS "decent", but apparently some people like it) multiplayer game in the box, and they didn't do anything new in the game besides updating the graphics.
It'd be nice if Valve would release a demo of HL2, so I could gauge how well it will work on my aging GeForce 3. At least with Halo 2, I know that it will work so long as I have an XBox. No need to drop another $200-500 to upgrade a video card so I can play the game decently.
Are cleats made of metals still? They would cause interface to the RFID read.
Generally, no. Football cleats for natural turf may have a metal core, but they're coated in plastic and/or rubber. Cleats are not used on artificial turf, which I would imagine is the best place to pioneer this technology. Baseball or track cleats may be different.
So how do you feel about genetically engineered food crops? Surgery? The internet?
Genetically engineered food does not have the potential to violate your privacy. Surgery does, but medical records are strictly regulated. The internet does as well, but there are tools and practices you can use to minimize your exposure. With a passive RFID chip containing your personal information, there's nothing to stop a reader from getting that info. That's why an on/off mechanism is required.
Greater technology always brings with it a greater risk of abuse. The same technology that gives your mechanic the ability to repair the very sophisticated car with the 400hp engine that gets 20MPG can jsut as easily be used by the police or insurance company to determine how fast you were going when you wrapped it around a pole, or to run from the scene of a crime
Not quite. Automobile "black boxes" only record a minimal set of data, and only keep it for a short period of time. You're correct that it could be used to investigate an accident (because the recorder will have the last 5-10 seconds of acceleration and braking information), but in the long term it doesn't record your speed or location (it wouldn't be useful in proving you ran from a crime). Your mechanic can query the ECM for engine malfunction data (which may include how often you hit your rev-limiter, but it doesn't track the gear or actual speed so it's not prima facie evidence for speeding). That could change, of course, but that's why you see articles on Slashdot covering advances in this technology.
So avoid products with RFID tags
That may be a viable option at the moment, but what do you do when everything includes an RFID tag? Nuking the tag when you get home isn't sufficient, because you've already given away information simply by buying the product in the first place.
To-do lists. These are mostly implemented now and are mentioned in the article. They are basically reminders without the cumbersome Outlook interface. "Remind me in 20 minutes to call my friend," you type to the proxy, and it dutifully does so. No more setting up calendar appointments for simple things.
I really like OneNote for TODO lists. Is IMSmarter better than that? The one thing OneNote doesn't do is notifications (or, I haven't figured out how to do that, anyway), but I don't need to be notified. I wrote the stuff in my TODO list, I know I need to do it. The list just acts as a reminder of all the things that need to be done.
Logging (and yes, for the paranoid out there, you can turn this off.) This is actually pretty useful as the logs are stored on a central server. I can't tell you how many times I've logged into my PC from home just to dig through chat logs; now I don't have to.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't think I've ever had an IM conversation where I found myself going back through the logs at some later point. To me, IM is like a face-to-face conversation. If I need to take away something important, I'll write it down (in OneNote:). If I don't, the conversation happens and then vanishes into the ether.
Website updates. This is the one I've been bugging David about. The service will automatically notify your friends when you update your personal website. I can't wait to use this one for my blog.
My friends would kill me if I sent them all notifications whenever I update my web site. Similarly, I would kill them if they did that to me. Push models suck. If you want your friends to know when you've updated your website, tell them to get an RSS reader, and publish your site changes in an RSS feed. That way, the friends that care about your update can find out about it, and those that don't, won't. And they won't be bothered in the middle of an important meeting with a note that you just updated your personal website.
Fedex/UPS tracking. Notifies you when a package you've shipped has arrived, for instance.
For those times when the doorbell just isn't enough, eh? Sure, if you're away from home when the delivery happens, the doorbell won't be much use. On the other hand, if you're away from home when the delivery happens, why do you need to be notified the moment it shows up? If you're doing the shipping, UPS and FedEx both allow you to receive tracking notifications via email, so why not use that?
Knowing how motivated David is in this venture, I know we'll see great things from IMSmarter. It still needs maturation -- right now, the platform is there to build on, but not too many implementations have been built. He needs beta testers, and beta testing is pretty simple (you just set up a proxy on your IM client and sign up through their website.) Check it out and mark this one down as "one to watch."
I'm sure David is a smart guy, but this looks like it might find a niche market at best. This is going to be one of those things that you read about on Slashdot, say to yourself, "That's kinda neat, if only it did/didn't do this/that/the other," maybe you try it out once or twice, and then you completely forget about it a week later. It just doesn't seem like it offers anything new that you can't get elsewhere, in an unattractive package (I use IM for IM; my day does not center around my IM client) with an unattractive business model (this is going to collect a lot of personally identifiable information, and that's not something I would trust to an ad-supported company -- it's too easy to decide that you have a real goldmine of user information at your fingertips and start selling it off
Amusing idea, following on from that, perhaps one could have an AI that tags maps so that the developer doesn't have to. You'd probably only need to tag the map once to generate the AI tags for prosperity.
Similar things have been done. There was a bot for Quake 2 (sorry I don't remember which one, I saw my little brother playing with it but never did so myself) that you could teach maps. IIRC, you could go about it in one of two ways. The first way was to run through the level yourself, with the bot AI recording where you went. That way, you could run routes from quad to rocket launcher to rail gun, or show the bots where they could climb the level in non-obvious ways. The other was to just let the bots loose on the level, and they'd eventually find their way around, prioritizing their routes as they made them. About all I really remember is that you could see the bot's paths as green laser beams connecting skull nodes (those being entities already built into Quake 2, and repurposed as mapping constructs).
Does anybody else remember such a bot, and if so what the name of it was and who wrote it? I wasn't a big Quake 2 guy (at the time, I was still playing TeamFortress on Q1), so I saw this only in passing.
Ahh, humans tag, if you will, but they do it dynamically. If we were like an AI, we'd need someone to go around in front of us painting things orange or red or green so we'd know where to go.
What would be great would be to have an AI that can tag terrain dynamically and decide which is the best place to go based only on what it can "see". That way you could design any map, random or planned, and drop an AI into it and have a great game. Unfortunately what happens is that the game developers plot out all of the paths and areas and points of interest for the AI before the game starts.
Actually, a lot of things humans do have been pre-tagged. It's just that we can apply one set of tags from one situation to a new situation and expect them to work relatively well. As an example, look at driving a race car on a track. For a given driving style, there is an optimal line to take on the track for best speed. If you put a human in a race car on that track for the first time, with nobody helping them, they have to go through many laps of trial and error to find the line (level developers tagging things). If instead you put an experienced driver in the car, but kept this as his first time on the track, he'd be able to apply sets of tags from other race tracks to similar turns on this one. It won't be perfect, but it gives him a good place to start (level designers learning how to tag levels for AI, becoming more proficient). Now if you put an instructor who knows the track in the car with driver, and put down cones on the track for braking points, turn-in, apex, and exit points, most drivers will be able to turn flawless laps almost immediately (they'll still have to work up their speed, though). That's equivalent to putting an AI into a pre-tagged level.
It's not much fun watching someone drive a race track for the first time (it's fun doing it, but not watching it). Most people prefer to watch the actual race, filled with drivers who know what they're doing and who know the track. It's more fun that way. Similarly, you don't really want to spend your time running around with the AI while they learn a level. Therefore, the best thing to do is to pre-tag levels so the AI already knows what to do. Alternatively, you could use a learning AI, but you still need to spend the time up front to teach the AI the levels before you ship. If you build a new map, it's up to you to train the AI and provide that information when you ship the map.
This way car owners can go to a fee-station any time to pay whatever tax whatever state wants to charge per mile travelled.
Your state can't tax me if I'm not a citizen. It goes along with that old concept of, "No taxation without representation." I don't reside in your state, nor can I vote in your state (ignoring being barred from voting by age or legal issues), so you can't tax me.
Usually this isn't a big concern, but ask folks from states with no sales tax (Oregon) and they'll tell you. If you live in such a state, you only need to prove that you live there (driver's license is usually enough) and you should not be charged sales tax in any other state. This usually works smoothly in border areas (for instance, Portlanders going to Vancouver, WA), but all states are supposed to honor it. Similarly, if you buy something in Oregon but live in a sales tax state, you're supposed to declare it on your yearly tax return and pay your state taxes on it. Most states don't care about minor purchases (oh, crap, I need to register that pack of gum I bought down in Oregon...), but they do enforce large purchases like cars. Mail-order purchases are a bit of a gray area, but most larger retailers like Dell have started to charge you tax based on your state, even though they don't have a presence in your state. That's why I used to buy books online from Barnes and Noble rather than Amazon, because B&N isn't based in Washington.
Of course, you already had to have a passport if you have a Live! account. If you don't have a Live! account, this is obviously useless to you.
who needs to know every kill in every game of every player in every universe. It's stupid
Do you keep track of the miles per gallon you get in your car? Do you follow your bank account, tracking where you spend your money? Do you follow any sports team? Even high school teams track stats. Maybe this is stupid for you, but this is an excellent feature even as a novelty item. Why? Because:
It can enable competitions. You can give prizes for most kills, most wins, most deaths, or even most times you killed someone from behind.
Halo 2 supports clans. Clans can range from a group of friends who typically play together to semi-professional groups of gamers who hold scheduled practices. For the former, tracking stats gives you something to brag about when you win. For the latter, the stat tracking and game viewer give you the ability to analyze your clan's performance and work on your weak spots.
Bragging rights. For example, 21 kills, 1 death, 0 shots fired. Without stats I could still regale my coworkers with a description of the game, but now I can also point to my prowess (the fact that I haven't duplicated that feat is also obvious by looking at the rest of my stats).
Stats are cool. Just because you don't think so doesn't make them "stupid". Kudos to Bungie for going above and beyond with the Halo 2 multiplayer component, and I'm looking forward to what more they can do with this!
The game itself tells you about this (in tips while waiting in the multiplayer hopper, and in the manual). The RSS feed is neat, but it's pretty useless since you can only get to your own feed unless a feed link is given to you by someone else. I don't need to watch my own feeds via RSS, but it would be nice to watch friends and rivals without having to always go to bungie.net.
However, the most impressive feature in my opinion is not the RSS feed, but the Game Viewer. A full list of features available on bungie.net is available (Game Viewer is section 6.5), as is a list of medals you can earn during multiplayer and a description of how rankings are determined.
This data is stored on XBox Live!'s stat servers, so sometimes bungie.net can be out of sync (I've seen it think I hadn't played any games on the overview page, though the games themselves showed up in the game list).
Most players I've talked to, and most of the reviews for the original Metroid Prime, say that the jumping is better handled in Metroid Prime than just about any other FPS or third-person game they've ever played. The movement is smooth, the camera angle feels natural, and you don't have to be split-second precise to make the jumps.
The difference between "in spite of" and "because of". Metroid Prime's jumping works better than other FPS games in spite of its control scheme, not because of it. Half-Life's jumping puzzles on Xen sucked horribly, for example. However, if you coupled Metroid Prime's jumping physics with Half-Life's control scheme, you'd have a winner. As it is, you have one game that sucks to control, and one that sucks for jumping puzzles.
Yes, I figured out how to look down. I was in rant mode, which doesn't work as well when I say, "Let me look down without having to pull the R button for free-look mode so I can tilt my head, and then hold the L button to lock the camera view so I can release the R button and finally be able to move around so I can make that jump." Doesn't that seem a little silly to you? Let's compare:
A normal first-person perspective game (if you want to get away from shooters, consider something like Morrowind) - I tilt the right thumbstick in the direction of "down" (which might be up on the stick if you play inverted). Then I run forward with the left thumbstick and jump. When I land, I can continue to look around with the right thumbstick, returning my view to level or looking up or down as I choose.
Metroid Prime - I pull the R button, and then tilt the left stick in the direction of "down". I let go of the R button and... Oops. Spring-look. Okay, I pull the R button, tilt the left stick in the direction of down, and pull the L button to lock my view. Shoot, I'm not quite lined up with the jump, so I need to turn my body. I turn left... oh, wait, I just strafed left (and fell off the platform) because I was still holding L. Start over, adjust my angle of attack first and then go through the R button mayhem. Now I can move, so I run forward with the left thumbstick and jump. Once I land, I don't want to continue looking at my feet so I let go of the L button. Of course, if I want to look around (ie, up or down), I have to pull the R button again. String a couple jumps together in a row and you've got a recipe for tedium.
Which would you prefer?
If your control scheme is so bad that you can assume that someone missed such simple functionality as looking down, something's broken. If you have to explain how to look down with more words than, "Use the stick to look down," something's broken.
Nintendo builds on previous games. They're always improving something, and at the very least, they try to maintain the same level of quality.
They built on Mario 64 by giving Mario a water-jet backpack, and maintained the same level of quality as Mario 64 in Mario Sunshine. Sadly, Mario Sunshine was a Gamecube game, so one would've expected it to surpass the quality of a N64 title. It didn't.
Nintendo doesn't shit gold. Nobody does, not even Valve. Nintendo does make some fun games, but they also make repetitive games, and they get stuck taking the safe route of adding one or two new "innovations" to an existing title (oo! You now have a second person in your racing kart! And nothing else changed...) and calling it new. That doesn't mean the new game is any less fun, but it does seem about as redundant as buying Madden 2004 when you already have Madden 2003 (of course, if you must have that roster update, what are you going to do?).
In my opinion, game developers would be better off if they took Ben Affleck's advice (paraphrased from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back). "You gotta do the safe [game]. Then you can do the art [game]. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback [game] because your friend says you owe him. And sometimes, you have to go back to the well." Game developers do the "safe" game, and then just keep going back to that well. Sometimes you get the art game (Katamari Damacy, for example), but those are very rare.
I love Metroid Prime's control scheme. Sure, you have to use target-lock to be able to strafe around, but how often do you want to strafe when you're not fighting something?
I strafe all the time. Pay attention to your day-to-day movements, and you'll find that you even do it in real life. However, strafing wasn't my biggest complaint. It was jumping. If you're going to put me in a first-person perspective and then throw jumping puzzles at me, let me look down!
The only minor complaint is that the turning speed could be faster, but then again, you/are/ wearing a giant metal suit.
Lame justification. Master Chief is in a similar giant metal suit, yet you have full range of movement in Halo. Halo is to Quake as Metroid Prime is to Duke Nukem 3D, with respect to looking up and down.
People justify Prime's control scheme by pointing out it's not a shooter. That doesn't mean you should make it more difficult for me to move, especially if you're going to make me jump. They say that you "get used to it" if you spend some time with the game. What a lame excuse for a broken control scheme, especially when you have to "get used to it" all over again if you stop playing the game for a week or two. I'm simply calling a spade a spade. Prime's control scheme sucks, and if Prime 2 didn't change that, Prime 2's control scheme sucks.
I perosnally have played xbox live quite a few times, as well as the free online supporters (xlink Kai, xbconnect). I have found the free ones to be quite nice, and on par with xbox live. If more people switched to free the experience would only get better.
Let's see, how about:
Single-sign on. Your gamertag is the same across all games. Of course, that could be done by these other services (presuming that one service does everything you want, so you don't have to jump across multiple services), so let's move on.
Cross-game friends list. Again, this can be done by tunnelling services, but with Live I can access the list in-game, rather than having to jump over to my computer (which is upstairs and across the house from my XBox).
Ubiquitous voice support. The game itself has to support voice, and few games support voice in system link mode (no point when you can yell across the room). I suppose you could use a different voice server like with PC games, and since you have to have a PC acting as a tunnel already it's not another hardware addition. Pain in the ass, though.
Performance optimizations. Here's where things get interesting. These tunnelling services work via System Link (ie, the XBox thinks it's playing on a LAN). Games don't need to worry about network latency for System Link games, because there effectively is none (okay, I'm sure you could find a way to saturate a 100Mbps network and cause lag, but in general that's not going to happen with today's games). Live! expects to work over the internet, and thus good games will optimize for that (some games behave poorly, like Star Wars: Battelfront, but most work well). Nine times out of ten, you're going to have a more enjoyable experience on Live than on a tunnelling service, unless you have an uber-fast broadband connection (both upstream and down) and you only play with other folk with the same.
Support. As I mentioned, these tunnelling services rely on System Link support. What do you do with a game that supports Live but not System Link? Oops, you're screwed.
Matchmaking. Sure, tunnelling services can implement matchmaking, but they have to do it outside of the game. By using Live!, you get to use the game-specific matchmaking code (means it can take into account variables such as a player's skill level).
Stat keeping. Again, this is something that tunnelling services can do, but not to the extent as Live nor as easily. For example, please tell me how you can record stats like this without having intimate knowledge of the game internals (and access to them)? There was a hack a while ago on Slashdot that used video capture to examine Soul Calibur 2 games and track stats, but you're not going to be able to do that in scale. Perhaps you could do it by examining the network traffic (assuming that data is even transmitted), but that's a huge reverse engineering process that you would need to do for each and every game. It would take time to get stats up and running for a new game while people reverse engineer the network data. In the meantime, I've been tracking my Halo 2 stats since the day it shipped.
Cheater protection. Live isn't immune to cheaters, but by and large they're limited to exploiting existing bugs and not hacking their own clients. More importantly, Live allows developers to push bug fixes down to players, and can keep people off of Live if they don't want to patch. Let's see you do that with a tunnelling service!
I just dont see why pepople will pay for microsoft to screw them.
I don't. I pay less than $5/mo (oh nos! I have to skip a venti triple no-fat soy mocha latte-ccino with whip and a cherry for one day this month to afford that! whatever will I do?), and in return I get everything listed above. And I don't have to monkey about with setting up software on a PC, screwing around with my home network, setting up tunnels, and otherwise having a poor experience. I turn on the XBox, put in the game, login to Live, and play. Simple, and totally worth the monthly fee.
Are you with me then that Metroid Prime just wasn't that great? Okay, wait... it was good, don't get me wrong, it was a beautful game, and fun to play, but something was lost in the exploration part of it. Is it just me, or was the underwater world just a little too hard to navigate? I think the first person 3D just didn't work for the Metroid games... it made it a little disorientating.
I never finished Prime. It was just too boring, and the control scheme was so bad that if I stopped playing for a week or two it would take me an hour or so before I got comfortable with it again (or as comfortable as possible with the brokenness -- there's something wrong with a control scheme when you have to rationalize it with, "Spend an hour on the game and you'll get used to it"). I stuck it out and made it pretty far, and I may go back and finish it some day, but the odds are pretty slim. The FPS view combined with the difficulty in looking up or down made many of the jumping puzzles very difficult. I don't know if it would've been better in a third-person perspective. For me, Metroid will always be a 2D platform adventure. I fear for the future of the franchise, with Prime 2 and Metroid Hunters on the DS, both in first person perspective. Remake Super Metroid for the GBA, and I'll be satisfied for a while.
Metroid Prime is one of those rare games that got pretty much everything right. The only thing missing was a more engrossing story
Metroid isn't really known for its engrossing storylines, so I wouldn't really call that a "missing element". I would call the horrendous abortion of a control scheme a "missing element". Too bad it doesn't sound like they've addressed that for Prime 2.
Did I miss a Metroid game somewhere? Are you referring to Metroid Fusion (a "new" Metroid game in that it's not a remake like Metroid: Zero Mission, but it's not "new" as it was released a few years back)? Some would say that Metroid Fusion was a departure from the normal Metroid formula. The addition of the ship computer giving you missions added a sense of urgency and linearity to the game that other Metroids didn't have. Because of that, you were often limited on where you could go (doors were opened by the storyline, and not by 5 missiles or super missiles or super bombs) and how much time you could spend there (the story urged you to run through an area rather than spending time exploring). It was still a good game IMHO, but not up to par with Super Metroid or Metroid: Zero Mission. It was better than Metroid Prime, though.
As for other side-scrollers, Metal Slug was recently published on XBox, and Alien Hominid is available on PS2 and Gamecube (great development story behind this one -- it went from a fun little Flash game to a full-blown console side-scroller, and was developed by literally a handful of people like back in the days of "garage game developers"). The Mega Man Anniversary collection is available for PS2 and GC if you want to get your old school Mega Man game on. Also, even though the DS looks like it will recycle N64 games, there's still a ton of side scrollers available for the GBA to keep you happy for quite a while (everything from Mario to Mega Man to River City Ransom).
Check out Viewtiful Joe for the Gamecube though - a great reinvention of a sidescrolling game for the modern gameplay ear.
Also available on the PS2 now, if you don't have a Gamecube.
I wonder how many customers did not come back to the store thanks to you
I would guess quite a few, considering he kept sending them off to different islands (isles). Had he sent them to random aisles, I'm sure they would've remained in the store.
Ecellent points, every one of them. However, I'd like to add a note of caution. Theming/skinnning is not enough to create a seamless user experience. Sure, that might make buttons look the same across all applications, but if those buttons don't work the same, it's not seamless. If you have one app written in Athena/Xaw, another using Motif/Lesstif (don't laugh, there are still plenty of apps that use that stuff, especially in the engineering and scientific sectors), and a third using GTK/GNOME, no amount of theming is going to make them work the same. Athena/Xaw's scrollbars act completely different than anything you've ever seen, as do Motif's comboboxes. The point here is that Linux really needs a single, standard widget toolkit (a single standard desktop or WM is not as important, but that would be a good next step). Qt or GTK, pick one. Everything else should change to use the chosen one (ie, if Qt is chosen, write a light layer that provides the GTK programming interface backed by Qt widgets).
Xbox warranty is only 90 days. Suck0rz. But they do offer an extended two-year one, which you have to buy at the time of purchase I guess
That's correct, but there is also a range of serial numbers (no, I don't know the range of numbers or the build dates they cover) that XBox support will fix even outside of warranty. The problem comes from having the hard drive. For some insane reason, part of fixing the DVD-ROM (a simple replacement job you could do yourself without even a mod chip, if you were to buy replacement parts) involves wiping the hard drive. Now that many games have moved to being hard drive only (you can't copy their saves from the hard drive to a memory card), and others use very large files (a single KOTOR save game file is larger than the 8MB memory cards you can buy for XBox), that means you're going to be screwed on many games you're playing (and that's assuming that you do shell out for many memory cards to save what you can). Not to mention the huge inconvenience of re-ripping any CDs you've saved to the hard drive (the CD-ripping experience is so poor that I've never bothered to do it more than once).
And the difference between generating downforce and generating less upforce is . . . zip, zilch, zero, nada.
Not quite. You're correct about the net effect at "normal" speeds, but the way they approach it is completely different. A spoiler negates most (but not all) lift. You're never going to get a net downforce out of a spoiler, and you're always going to end up with some amount of positive lift. A wing generates an opposing force that cancels positive lift. Because it's generating its own force vector, you certainly can end up with more downward force than upward force. In general, the ideal is to balance it out to 0, but that changes depending on what the car is doing. You cannot get to that goal with a spoiler.
Think of a picture of a car with arrows pointing upwards from underneath the car. That's lift. A spoiler will shorten the length of those arrows, but will never eliminate them or replace them with arrows pointing down. A wing will generate its own set of arrows, this time at the top of the car pointing down. If you add the two vectors together, you'll end up with some resulting force that can be pointing up, down, or is 0. (If only Slashdot would show pictures, and I had some small amount of artistic ability, I could draw this out to explain it.) As a colorful example, we've all heard about how F1 cars generate so much downforce that they could drive on an upside-down track without falling off. An F1 car could not do that with just a spoiler alone. That's why they have big wings (and not just on the rear of the car, either).
Downward forces applied behind the rear wheel will reduce the force on the front wheels where the braking, turning, and acceleration forces are most important.
That's why a proper (functional) aerodynamic package includes not just a wing for the rear, but also a front lip spoiler, and perhaps underbody panelling and tunnels as well. But I agree, most people putting wings and body kits on their cars are doing so for the look, not the physics.
Slashdot Mirror
That same group of people are also the ones you've told over and over not to run things people send them (in email). If you got through to them, this disk will go right in the trash. They have no way of knowing what's on it without running it (which you told them is a Bad Thing (tm)).
What part of Halo 2 sucked? The ending was a little weak (cliffhanger), but if you followed the story it did give a small amount of satisfaction. It was like the ending to Empire Strikes Back. The rest of the game is top-notch, and the multi-player component is the best I've seen. Half-Life 2 had to go and re-hash Counter-Strike (again!) to get a decent (not that I would call CS "decent", but apparently some people like it) multiplayer game in the box, and they didn't do anything new in the game besides updating the graphics.
It'd be nice if Valve would release a demo of HL2, so I could gauge how well it will work on my aging GeForce 3. At least with Halo 2, I know that it will work so long as I have an XBox. No need to drop another $200-500 to upgrade a video card so I can play the game decently.
Generally, no. Football cleats for natural turf may have a metal core, but they're coated in plastic and/or rubber. Cleats are not used on artificial turf, which I would imagine is the best place to pioneer this technology. Baseball or track cleats may be different.
Genetically engineered food does not have the potential to violate your privacy. Surgery does, but medical records are strictly regulated. The internet does as well, but there are tools and practices you can use to minimize your exposure. With a passive RFID chip containing your personal information, there's nothing to stop a reader from getting that info. That's why an on/off mechanism is required.
Not quite. Automobile "black boxes" only record a minimal set of data, and only keep it for a short period of time. You're correct that it could be used to investigate an accident (because the recorder will have the last 5-10 seconds of acceleration and braking information), but in the long term it doesn't record your speed or location (it wouldn't be useful in proving you ran from a crime). Your mechanic can query the ECM for engine malfunction data (which may include how often you hit your rev-limiter, but it doesn't track the gear or actual speed so it's not prima facie evidence for speeding). That could change, of course, but that's why you see articles on Slashdot covering advances in this technology.
That may be a viable option at the moment, but what do you do when everything includes an RFID tag? Nuking the tag when you get home isn't sufficient, because you've already given away information simply by buying the product in the first place.
I really like OneNote for TODO lists. Is IMSmarter better than that? The one thing OneNote doesn't do is notifications (or, I haven't figured out how to do that, anyway), but I don't need to be notified. I wrote the stuff in my TODO list, I know I need to do it. The list just acts as a reminder of all the things that need to be done.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't think I've ever had an IM conversation where I found myself going back through the logs at some later point. To me, IM is like a face-to-face conversation. If I need to take away something important, I'll write it down (in OneNote :). If I don't, the conversation happens and then vanishes into the ether.
My friends would kill me if I sent them all notifications whenever I update my web site. Similarly, I would kill them if they did that to me. Push models suck. If you want your friends to know when you've updated your website, tell them to get an RSS reader, and publish your site changes in an RSS feed. That way, the friends that care about your update can find out about it, and those that don't, won't. And they won't be bothered in the middle of an important meeting with a note that you just updated your personal website.
For those times when the doorbell just isn't enough, eh? Sure, if you're away from home when the delivery happens, the doorbell won't be much use. On the other hand, if you're away from home when the delivery happens, why do you need to be notified the moment it shows up? If you're doing the shipping, UPS and FedEx both allow you to receive tracking notifications via email, so why not use that?
I'm sure David is a smart guy, but this looks like it might find a niche market at best. This is going to be one of those things that you read about on Slashdot, say to yourself, "That's kinda neat, if only it did/didn't do this/that/the other," maybe you try it out once or twice, and then you completely forget about it a week later. It just doesn't seem like it offers anything new that you can't get elsewhere, in an unattractive package (I use IM for IM; my day does not center around my IM client) with an unattractive business model (this is going to collect a lot of personally identifiable information, and that's not something I would trust to an ad-supported company -- it's too easy to decide that you have a real goldmine of user information at your fingertips and start selling it off
Similar things have been done. There was a bot for Quake 2 (sorry I don't remember which one, I saw my little brother playing with it but never did so myself) that you could teach maps. IIRC, you could go about it in one of two ways. The first way was to run through the level yourself, with the bot AI recording where you went. That way, you could run routes from quad to rocket launcher to rail gun, or show the bots where they could climb the level in non-obvious ways. The other was to just let the bots loose on the level, and they'd eventually find their way around, prioritizing their routes as they made them. About all I really remember is that you could see the bot's paths as green laser beams connecting skull nodes (those being entities already built into Quake 2, and repurposed as mapping constructs).
Does anybody else remember such a bot, and if so what the name of it was and who wrote it? I wasn't a big Quake 2 guy (at the time, I was still playing TeamFortress on Q1), so I saw this only in passing.
Actually, a lot of things humans do have been pre-tagged. It's just that we can apply one set of tags from one situation to a new situation and expect them to work relatively well. As an example, look at driving a race car on a track. For a given driving style, there is an optimal line to take on the track for best speed. If you put a human in a race car on that track for the first time, with nobody helping them, they have to go through many laps of trial and error to find the line (level developers tagging things). If instead you put an experienced driver in the car, but kept this as his first time on the track, he'd be able to apply sets of tags from other race tracks to similar turns on this one. It won't be perfect, but it gives him a good place to start (level designers learning how to tag levels for AI, becoming more proficient). Now if you put an instructor who knows the track in the car with driver, and put down cones on the track for braking points, turn-in, apex, and exit points, most drivers will be able to turn flawless laps almost immediately (they'll still have to work up their speed, though). That's equivalent to putting an AI into a pre-tagged level.
It's not much fun watching someone drive a race track for the first time (it's fun doing it, but not watching it). Most people prefer to watch the actual race, filled with drivers who know what they're doing and who know the track. It's more fun that way. Similarly, you don't really want to spend your time running around with the AI while they learn a level. Therefore, the best thing to do is to pre-tag levels so the AI already knows what to do. Alternatively, you could use a learning AI, but you still need to spend the time up front to teach the AI the levels before you ship. If you build a new map, it's up to you to train the AI and provide that information when you ship the map.
Your state can't tax me if I'm not a citizen. It goes along with that old concept of, "No taxation without representation." I don't reside in your state, nor can I vote in your state (ignoring being barred from voting by age or legal issues), so you can't tax me.
Usually this isn't a big concern, but ask folks from states with no sales tax (Oregon) and they'll tell you. If you live in such a state, you only need to prove that you live there (driver's license is usually enough) and you should not be charged sales tax in any other state. This usually works smoothly in border areas (for instance, Portlanders going to Vancouver, WA), but all states are supposed to honor it. Similarly, if you buy something in Oregon but live in a sales tax state, you're supposed to declare it on your yearly tax return and pay your state taxes on it. Most states don't care about minor purchases (oh, crap, I need to register that pack of gum I bought down in Oregon ...), but they do enforce large purchases like cars. Mail-order purchases are a bit of a gray area, but most larger retailers like Dell have started to charge you tax based on your state, even though they don't have a presence in your state. That's why I used to buy books online from Barnes and Noble rather than Amazon, because B&N isn't based in Washington.
Of course, you already had to have a passport if you have a Live! account. If you don't have a Live! account, this is obviously useless to you.
Do you keep track of the miles per gallon you get in your car? Do you follow your bank account, tracking where you spend your money? Do you follow any sports team? Even high school teams track stats. Maybe this is stupid for you, but this is an excellent feature even as a novelty item. Why? Because:
- It can enable competitions. You can give prizes for most kills, most wins, most deaths, or even most times you killed someone from behind.
- Halo 2 supports clans. Clans can range from a group of friends who typically play together to semi-professional groups of gamers who hold scheduled practices. For the former, tracking stats gives you something to brag about when you win. For the latter, the stat tracking and game viewer give you the ability to analyze your clan's performance and work on your weak spots.
- Bragging rights. For example, 21 kills, 1 death, 0 shots fired. Without stats I could still regale my coworkers with a description of the game, but now I can also point to my prowess (the fact that I haven't duplicated that feat is also obvious by looking at the rest of my stats).
Stats are cool. Just because you don't think so doesn't make them "stupid". Kudos to Bungie for going above and beyond with the Halo 2 multiplayer component, and I'm looking forward to what more they can do with this!The game itself tells you about this (in tips while waiting in the multiplayer hopper, and in the manual). The RSS feed is neat, but it's pretty useless since you can only get to your own feed unless a feed link is given to you by someone else. I don't need to watch my own feeds via RSS, but it would be nice to watch friends and rivals without having to always go to bungie.net.
However, the most impressive feature in my opinion is not the RSS feed, but the Game Viewer. A full list of features available on bungie.net is available (Game Viewer is section 6.5), as is a list of medals you can earn during multiplayer and a description of how rankings are determined.
This data is stored on XBox Live!'s stat servers, so sometimes bungie.net can be out of sync (I've seen it think I hadn't played any games on the overview page, though the games themselves showed up in the game list).
The difference between "in spite of" and "because of". Metroid Prime's jumping works better than other FPS games in spite of its control scheme, not because of it. Half-Life's jumping puzzles on Xen sucked horribly, for example. However, if you coupled Metroid Prime's jumping physics with Half-Life's control scheme, you'd have a winner. As it is, you have one game that sucks to control, and one that sucks for jumping puzzles.
Yes, I figured out how to look down. I was in rant mode, which doesn't work as well when I say, "Let me look down without having to pull the R button for free-look mode so I can tilt my head, and then hold the L button to lock the camera view so I can release the R button and finally be able to move around so I can make that jump." Doesn't that seem a little silly to you? Let's compare:
- A normal first-person perspective game (if you want to get away from shooters, consider something like Morrowind) - I tilt the right thumbstick in the direction of "down" (which might be up on the stick if you play inverted). Then I run forward with the left thumbstick and jump. When I land, I can continue to look around with the right thumbstick, returning my view to level or looking up or down as I choose.
- Metroid Prime - I pull the R button, and then tilt the left stick in the direction of "down". I let go of the R button and
... Oops. Spring-look. Okay, I pull the R button, tilt the left stick in the direction of down, and pull the L button to lock my view. Shoot, I'm not quite lined up with the jump, so I need to turn my body. I turn left ... oh, wait, I just strafed left (and fell off the platform) because I was still holding L. Start over, adjust my angle of attack first and then go through the R button mayhem. Now I can move, so I run forward with the left thumbstick and jump. Once I land, I don't want to continue looking at my feet so I let go of the L button. Of course, if I want to look around (ie, up or down), I have to pull the R button again. String a couple jumps together in a row and you've got a recipe for tedium.
Which would you prefer?If your control scheme is so bad that you can assume that someone missed such simple functionality as looking down, something's broken. If you have to explain how to look down with more words than, "Use the stick to look down," something's broken.
They built on Mario 64 by giving Mario a water-jet backpack, and maintained the same level of quality as Mario 64 in Mario Sunshine. Sadly, Mario Sunshine was a Gamecube game, so one would've expected it to surpass the quality of a N64 title. It didn't.
Nintendo doesn't shit gold. Nobody does, not even Valve. Nintendo does make some fun games, but they also make repetitive games, and they get stuck taking the safe route of adding one or two new "innovations" to an existing title (oo! You now have a second person in your racing kart! And nothing else changed ...) and calling it new. That doesn't mean the new game is any less fun, but it does seem about as redundant as buying Madden 2004 when you already have Madden 2003 (of course, if you must have that roster update, what are you going to do?).
In my opinion, game developers would be better off if they took Ben Affleck's advice (paraphrased from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back). "You gotta do the safe [game]. Then you can do the art [game]. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback [game] because your friend says you owe him. And sometimes, you have to go back to the well." Game developers do the "safe" game, and then just keep going back to that well. Sometimes you get the art game (Katamari Damacy, for example), but those are very rare.
I strafe all the time. Pay attention to your day-to-day movements, and you'll find that you even do it in real life. However, strafing wasn't my biggest complaint. It was jumping. If you're going to put me in a first-person perspective and then throw jumping puzzles at me, let me look down!
Lame justification. Master Chief is in a similar giant metal suit, yet you have full range of movement in Halo. Halo is to Quake as Metroid Prime is to Duke Nukem 3D, with respect to looking up and down.
People justify Prime's control scheme by pointing out it's not a shooter. That doesn't mean you should make it more difficult for me to move, especially if you're going to make me jump. They say that you "get used to it" if you spend some time with the game. What a lame excuse for a broken control scheme, especially when you have to "get used to it" all over again if you stop playing the game for a week or two. I'm simply calling a spade a spade. Prime's control scheme sucks, and if Prime 2 didn't change that, Prime 2's control scheme sucks.
Let's see, how about:
I don't. I pay less than $5/mo (oh nos! I have to skip a venti triple no-fat soy mocha latte-ccino with whip and a cherry for one day this month to afford that! whatever will I do?), and in return I get everything listed above. And I don't have to monkey about with setting up software on a PC, screwing around with my home network, setting up tunnels, and otherwise having a poor experience. I turn on the XBox, put in the game, login to Live, and play. Simple, and totally worth the monthly fee.
I never finished Prime. It was just too boring, and the control scheme was so bad that if I stopped playing for a week or two it would take me an hour or so before I got comfortable with it again (or as comfortable as possible with the brokenness -- there's something wrong with a control scheme when you have to rationalize it with, "Spend an hour on the game and you'll get used to it"). I stuck it out and made it pretty far, and I may go back and finish it some day, but the odds are pretty slim. The FPS view combined with the difficulty in looking up or down made many of the jumping puzzles very difficult. I don't know if it would've been better in a third-person perspective. For me, Metroid will always be a 2D platform adventure. I fear for the future of the franchise, with Prime 2 and Metroid Hunters on the DS, both in first person perspective. Remake Super Metroid for the GBA, and I'll be satisfied for a while.
Metroid isn't really known for its engrossing storylines, so I wouldn't really call that a "missing element". I would call the horrendous abortion of a control scheme a "missing element". Too bad it doesn't sound like they've addressed that for Prime 2.
Did I miss a Metroid game somewhere? Are you referring to Metroid Fusion (a "new" Metroid game in that it's not a remake like Metroid: Zero Mission, but it's not "new" as it was released a few years back)? Some would say that Metroid Fusion was a departure from the normal Metroid formula. The addition of the ship computer giving you missions added a sense of urgency and linearity to the game that other Metroids didn't have. Because of that, you were often limited on where you could go (doors were opened by the storyline, and not by 5 missiles or super missiles or super bombs) and how much time you could spend there (the story urged you to run through an area rather than spending time exploring). It was still a good game IMHO, but not up to par with Super Metroid or Metroid: Zero Mission. It was better than Metroid Prime, though.
As for other side-scrollers, Metal Slug was recently published on XBox, and Alien Hominid is available on PS2 and Gamecube (great development story behind this one -- it went from a fun little Flash game to a full-blown console side-scroller, and was developed by literally a handful of people like back in the days of "garage game developers"). The Mega Man Anniversary collection is available for PS2 and GC if you want to get your old school Mega Man game on. Also, even though the DS looks like it will recycle N64 games, there's still a ton of side scrollers available for the GBA to keep you happy for quite a while (everything from Mario to Mega Man to River City Ransom).
Also available on the PS2 now, if you don't have a Gamecube.
No, not your pocket. Pick it up with your ball and turn it into a star, obviously.
You're referring to the overabundance of single mothers we have here in the Seattle area, right? Right? ...
I would guess quite a few, considering he kept sending them off to different islands (isles). Had he sent them to random aisles, I'm sure they would've remained in the store.
Ecellent points, every one of them. However, I'd like to add a note of caution. Theming/skinnning is not enough to create a seamless user experience. Sure, that might make buttons look the same across all applications, but if those buttons don't work the same, it's not seamless. If you have one app written in Athena/Xaw, another using Motif/Lesstif (don't laugh, there are still plenty of apps that use that stuff, especially in the engineering and scientific sectors), and a third using GTK/GNOME, no amount of theming is going to make them work the same. Athena/Xaw's scrollbars act completely different than anything you've ever seen, as do Motif's comboboxes. The point here is that Linux really needs a single, standard widget toolkit (a single standard desktop or WM is not as important, but that would be a good next step). Qt or GTK, pick one. Everything else should change to use the chosen one (ie, if Qt is chosen, write a light layer that provides the GTK programming interface backed by Qt widgets).
That's correct, but there is also a range of serial numbers (no, I don't know the range of numbers or the build dates they cover) that XBox support will fix even outside of warranty. The problem comes from having the hard drive. For some insane reason, part of fixing the DVD-ROM (a simple replacement job you could do yourself without even a mod chip, if you were to buy replacement parts) involves wiping the hard drive. Now that many games have moved to being hard drive only (you can't copy their saves from the hard drive to a memory card), and others use very large files (a single KOTOR save game file is larger than the 8MB memory cards you can buy for XBox), that means you're going to be screwed on many games you're playing (and that's assuming that you do shell out for many memory cards to save what you can). Not to mention the huge inconvenience of re-ripping any CDs you've saved to the hard drive (the CD-ripping experience is so poor that I've never bothered to do it more than once).
Not quite. You're correct about the net effect at "normal" speeds, but the way they approach it is completely different. A spoiler negates most (but not all) lift. You're never going to get a net downforce out of a spoiler, and you're always going to end up with some amount of positive lift. A wing generates an opposing force that cancels positive lift. Because it's generating its own force vector, you certainly can end up with more downward force than upward force. In general, the ideal is to balance it out to 0, but that changes depending on what the car is doing. You cannot get to that goal with a spoiler.
Think of a picture of a car with arrows pointing upwards from underneath the car. That's lift. A spoiler will shorten the length of those arrows, but will never eliminate them or replace them with arrows pointing down. A wing will generate its own set of arrows, this time at the top of the car pointing down. If you add the two vectors together, you'll end up with some resulting force that can be pointing up, down, or is 0. (If only Slashdot would show pictures, and I had some small amount of artistic ability, I could draw this out to explain it.) As a colorful example, we've all heard about how F1 cars generate so much downforce that they could drive on an upside-down track without falling off. An F1 car could not do that with just a spoiler alone. That's why they have big wings (and not just on the rear of the car, either).
That's why a proper (functional) aerodynamic package includes not just a wing for the rear, but also a front lip spoiler, and perhaps underbody panelling and tunnels as well. But I agree, most people putting wings and body kits on their cars are doing so for the look, not the physics.