Don't like it? Then do something to change it, starting with yourself.
I think you missed my point, along with a couple of the other repliers. Do what to change it? I literally do not have the time nor the capability to worry about everything I'm supposed to worry. Literally. Not rhetorically.
"Learn more" is not a solution. There's too much to learn.
When I go to the grocery store, I can easily walk out with over fifty distinct products, and as I am adventuresome many are often new to me. How much "thought" am I supposed to allocate to each one, in order to avoid being a "sheep"? A minute? Ten? When am I supposed to actually do some work to earn a living? And that's just grocery shopping.
"Sheep" is a useless standard, because nobody can meet it. It's an empty insult and I'm tired of seeing it tossed around on Slashdot like it means anything.
People who call other people "sheep" because they don't share your priorities are arrogant assholes.
"People" have no reason to know Lik-Sang is being shut down, and no reason to care. Seriously, why should they? What priority should Lik-Sang displace? How well things are at work? Should I take time off from spending time with my family or any number of other things in my life to Take Action(TM) about a small company that I've only barely heard of?
You can't care about everything. Shall I call you a sheep because you don't devote 10 hours a week to the plight of African diamond miners? Or because you didn't shout out to Breast Cancer awareness in your post?
Any given human can only worry about so many things at a time. Many, many, many of them are way more important than whether Sony is shutting down Lik-Sang. It may be an interesting story and maybe some people should work on it, but calling people "sheep" because they can't keep up with every sin, both real and perceived, of every corporation they deal with is just arrogant.
I guarantee you you don't even meet your own standard for "non-sheepness", if you took the time to articulate it. (Of course, most people who toss around the word "sheep" seem to simply know they aren't a sheep.) The reason I can guarantee this is that, for example, to explain this situation to my wife who probably isn't even aware that games are imported because they are never released here, let alone who Lik-Sang is, would take several minutes. In order to worry about all the things of a similar magnitude in life that occur would take way more than 100% of your life. We are not sheep for not spending more than 100% of our time worrying about your particular choice of sins in the world.
Give me an example of any 3D behaviour that is easy to use or master without actually restricting 3 dimensional movement.
First, I reject your "mastery" bar. Mastery is irrelevant. Anyone can pick up a piece of clay and perform arbitrary manipulations on it. That they aren't good is a separate problem. A 3D interface effectively doesn't allow that freedom at all, so mastery isn't even an option, so the 3D sucks.
The problem with current 3D is that even "mastery" only allows you to run around, point&grunt. Even a week with sculpture will allow you to make any number of interesting objects with a reasonable degree of skill. Mastery of a modern 3D engine entitles you to a very limited array of actions with far fewer degrees of freedom than even a beginning sculpture.
But what really kills your point is that sculpture is merely one option in the real world. Once you learn to run and gun in a modern 3D environment, you're done. That's all you can do. It's fun, but it's limited, limited, limited.
Dropping the bar on mastery, which is just a made-up point to further an argument without regard to whether it makes any sense, here's an incredibly abridged list of things you can do in the real world but you basically can't in a 3D computer interface:
Picking an item up.
Rotating that item to get a good look at it.
Reading a book, and actually reading a book, not double-clicking on a book and then switching to a custom book interface. Reading a book using only normal 3D manipulations.
Throwing an object. (Granted, mastery can be tough, but humans are actually extremely good at throwing; some have even hypothesized that our throwing abilities are unique in the animal world, because pretty much only the other primates are even capable of throwing and they aren't good enough to use it offensively like we do. I think that of all the things an alien might consider weird about us, our elaborate and incredibly difficult sports like "baseball" that involve incredibly precise throwing and hitting are a candidate for "weirdest thing".)
Opening a cupboard without a special interface, actually using the basic interface of the 3D world.
Actually sitting in a chair by moulding our body shape to conform to it, not just playing a "sitting" animation.
Physical interaction with other entities; stroking, hitting, slapping, wrestling, etc, with arbitrary pressure, speed, angle, and all sorts of other control.
Jumping.
Dancing, actually dancing, not smacking the "dance" macro button.
Writing. (I can't call something "hard" that can be effectively physically mastered by a ten-year-old.)
Playing with toys.
Sculpting.
Dance Dance Revolution.
Playing a musical instrument. (Another "hard to master" topic, but anybody can pick up and strum a guitar and do any number of manipulations, even smashing . In virtual worlds, again, you just get a sound effect.)
3D interfaces suck. To largely supplement the real world, they don't need to support all of this, but they do need to be rich enough that they can represent a set of actions that can do things not envisioned explicitly by a designer.
Also note that while you can hack a 3D interface to do some of these things, there's no way you can do it as cleanly as the real world, and the more of these functions you load onto a button (which is itself effectively binary), the more confusing the interface gets. You'll be out of buttons long before you get to the "open a plastic bag and take out a piece of bread" button.
The key here is that our real-word interface is actually way more than 3D. "Dimensions" are fundamentally a measure of the degrees of freedom a system has. When you're talking about the degrees of freedom we have in the real-world, you're looking at one per joint, minus quite a lot for redundency (but still
I think the reason for that is because we evolved on a large and basically two dimensional space, and 2D navigation is simply more natural for us. That makes 2D controls easier to understand and use, even for navigating 3D spaces.
Planes are fundamentally two-dimensional. You have three things you can do, pitch, roll, and yaw. This is technically three full degrees of freedom, but in navigational terms you have some redundency between roll and yaw, because roll is primary useful for changing your direction, which is yaw. In practice, the plane can not arbitrarily change its altitude, so it doesn't have full freedom in that dimension. So basically, a plane fundamentally is a 2(.5)D device, and this is why we don't control them in 3D.
A helicopter, as you note, is fully 3D. It has the collective, which allows it to raise and lower altitude freely (along with providing thrust in other directions when the helicopter is titing), and it has the ability to arbitrarily lean in any 2D direction relative to the ground. This has the net effect of three degrees of freedom and is thus a fully 3D device. (Additionally, you have a fourth degree of freedom in rotation on the vertical axis; technically you could fly around without that but that would pose obvious logistical and aerodynamic problems. But mathematically, it's not necessary for 3D spatial freedom. Note that you don't have full rotational freedom in the other two axes; you have some freedom, but you can't(/really really shouldn't) flip the helicopter entirely over freely.)
I'd summarize helicopter controls more as "more thrust/less thrust, tilt, and swivel", where the "tilt" is actually in 2D, so to a plane's 2.5D, you end up with 4D on a helicopter. (Rotational freedom counts; see the "sixaxis" controller name on the Sony, three space, three rotation. Another for-instance is that fully characterizing the velocity of a rigid, newtonian object requires six numbers: a velocity vector in x, y, and z, and a rotational vector on the X, Y, and Z axes.)
No, the interface is pleny rich, but of course it's going to get better.
No, it's not. Modern 3D interfaces are like a musical instrument, like a clarinet. To get really good takes a lot of dedication, and when you're done, all you can do is play the clarinet, or half-transfer your skills to a clarinet-like instrument. You still can't play a trombone, or a piano.
Sure, if all you want to do is point and shoot, go figure, a point-and-click-based interface is halfway decent, once you learn how to get around in a 3D space that lacks standard contextual clues and is usually oddly designed in real-space terms. But "the metaverse" is supposed to have a richer interface than just shooting each other.
Try taking your l33t Unreal Tournament skills into Maya or Blender and see how useful they are for actually creating things. You'll find them pretty useless. Maya's a musical instrument too, only more like a modern professional keyboard-based synthesizer in complexity. Unless you spring for some very expensive customized input devices that I've only seen in "behind-the-scenes specials" at Dreamworks and Pixar, you're stuck with fundamentally 2D interfaces trying to work in a fundamentally 3D space, and it's basically your choice of many, many poor hacks to handle that.
The interface sucks and the proof is just how freakin' limited your actions are compared to the real world; you've still basically got a point&grunt interface,
While it may flop or suck, the next best big thing may very well be the Wii controller, because it actually functions in 3D. While it's not immediately obvious to me how to actually use it in 3D, at least there's a chance.
Tables that are created dynamically will not appear unless elements are added to -- in other words, using DOM to write content does not display anything, even though is optional.
You can write <table><tr><td/></tr></table> and it'll work (and that works with.innerHTML, which I've made my peace with as long as it's going to be orders of magnitude faster than DOM manipulations, even though abstractly I prefer the DOM API), but if you're build tables out of DOM manipulations you have to use the equivalent of <table><tbody><tr><td/></tr></tbody></table>. Then things will dynamically appear correctly.
(You may have said this and gotten your tag eaten; it wasn't clear to me and it's worth saying so perhaps other people see it.)
For reference, the HTML 4.01 stardard says (and I think you were referring to this):
The TBODY start tag is always required except when the table contains only one table body and no table head or foot sections. The TBODY end tag may always be safely omitted.
I hear zapping chips in microwaves toasts them pretty quick; if you have a stripe to fall back then the card wouldn't be useless, but I don't know if it would survive.
Does anybody know how magnetic stripes respond to being microwaved? Not much use if you toast that too. And how long do you have to zap a chip to burn it out? (Sub-second?)
(Note the stripe only has to be significantly more robust than the chip, it doesn't have to be immune to microwaves. If there's a range where the chip dies but the stripe still works, it doesn't matter if the stripe would stop working in another ten seconds.)
In Linux, a middle-click on the web page that isn't in a text area is considered to be a paste to the location bar, which is really convenient, but really confusing when combined with the automatic "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality for non-URLs.
An accidental middle-click becomes an odd form of "Go to a sort-of random page", which is often tantalizingly connected to what you're currently doing. Sometimes it's freakishly connected to what you're doing and it's hard to see how Firefox went to a weird page that was so connected.
It took me several weeks to work out what was going on, actually, and sometimes I still find myself pasting into emacs to see what search string took me to this weird page.
It's kind of odd to consider that Google will return a "top page" for just about any combination of real words you can imagine, regardless of how strange or unconnected they are. I've been to some odd pages this way.
I'm going to call "Blub paradox" (only applied to desktop systems instead of programming languages) on you, unless you use some other mechanism to group windows and their layout that doesn't exist in stock Windows. There is no habit that can make up for virtual desktops.
Living without virtual desktops is quite like living without closures in a language; yes, technically it adds no capabilities, but nevertheless you're more empowered with them and you'll pay a price if you don't or can't use them. That you can't percieve the price doesn't mean it's not there.
And they already provide virtual desktops (to which you can switch with keystroke combinations) through the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Manager (MSVDM) Power Toy.
They do, but it's not decent. Every IM program borks the desktop. Every popup borks the desktop. Some programs just plain don't work with it. Some wander all over the desktop, probably because they're confused about being at some coordinates but not actually visible or some other logical thing they can't deal with. Others totally freak out to the point of crashing.
I'm also annoyed that at least last time I tried it I couldn't get it to "go to the workspace to the right", but I'll grant that's a bit more obscure. More important is that Windows wasn't designed for multi-workspace use, and even Microsoft programs work very, very poorly with it.
Same for "focus follows mouse". It works great, except for all the programs that grab the focus, the programs that won't accept the focus following the mouse, the programs that seem to get confused about being the focused program but not being the top window, etc. Windows wasn't designed for it and it shows.
I've tried everything I've ever seen mentioned on Slashdot for multiple workspaces, and they all suck in the same way. My conclusion is that Windows is the common factor, and it's not a stretch to notice the Windows messaging system was fundamentally designed for a 16-bit cooperative multitasking, all-processes-in-one-memory-partition model, and it's still hack-upon-hack on top of that. (Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog has story after story about "here's why Windows has this wart. It all started in Windows [123].0...") Terminal services seems to work OK, and I had hopes that updating Windows to work with TS would also improve applications w.r.t. multiple workspaces, but it hasn't happened.
I've tried everything, and quite a few window managers on Linux too. I'm not sure how I could know more about what I'm talking about. Windows's multiple-workspace support is a bullet-point feature, an unsupported Powertoy, something even major application builders don't test for, and unless it's slipped by all the Vista coverage, for practical purposes, Windows does not decent multi-workspace support.
Somebody wake me up when these [KDE and Gnome] stop playing perpetual 2nd place, and start trying out new GUI ideas.
Funny, I was just pondering how completely Microsoft is missing the point of the features in KDE and Gnome. Until Windows has a decent workspace switching mechanism, I'm not going to find the interface tolerable no matter how many whizbang animations Microsoft adds.
I've also found pervasive KNotify support to be surprisingly useful in little ways, not least of which is helping support that multi-workspace work area. It's the little things, like telling Konsole to KNotify me when the console is active or quiet, or Kopete's ability to use KNotify to put up the first bit of the message, which is often the entire message, preventing me from needing to switch windows to read it (or switch desktops)...
In my opinion, the KDE interface at least has long surpassed Windows and I am yet to read about Vista actually picking up on the reasons why. It doesn't surprise me that a multi-billion dollar company can create a nicer-looking interface, but I'm "surprised"* at how resistant they are to the actual features that make the experience different.
(*: Actually, no I'm not; I'm pretty sure Windows still doesn't really support multi-workspace use, at least from what I've seen of the hacks that offer it, and I'd guess that "fundamental Windows limitations and the inability to offer reverse compatibility" is behind some of the other missing features, too. XWindows may suck but it seems to me it sucks less...)
Compared to Microsoft's uber-comfortable Xbox 360 pad, the SIXAXIS feels cheap, plasticky, uncomfortable and disconcertingly light - almost as if it's going to fly out of your hands during those more extreme gaming moments. Playstation 3 Hands-on
This was on Slashdot just yesterday. The article doesn't contain the literal word "flimsy" but I'd say it's not an unreasonable conclusion.
If you've already read the game list, I doubt anybody will have anything to add. It's not as if anybody has played these games to speak of, or at least anybody allowed to talk about it. (A couple of hours of "hands-on preview" doesn't count.)
I'm interested in the Wii, moreso than the XBox 360 or the PS3. But I'm going to be "sticking with the PS2" myself for a while. For one thing, there's still a good 10 games that I'm interested in, and I have a Real Job so it takes a while to get through them. Fortunately, they're pretty cheap now, especially if you buy them used and sell them back after a reasonable period of time. I've played kick-ass AAA-quality games from two years ago for a net-outlay of about $8 over three or four months, which beats even rental.
While somebody needs to buy the Wii, I don't think there's any compelling reason to run right out there and be first on your block unless you've done everything you want on your existing consoles.
Because for as excited and intrigued as I am, the fact remains that the Wii is highly experimental and it may yet be one dumb-assed idea, and I don't think there's a problem in waiting for somebody else to find that out, while you continue to mine the deepest, richest vein of console video games ever on the PS2. (And those PS2 game's prices aren't going up, although finding them may become an increasing challenge.) I for one will not buy a Wii until I've actually used one, either in a store or preferably at somebody else's house.
(Also, my wife got a DS, and there's a couple of things coming out for that that we have to get. Yoshii's Island 2 is going to be a rare release-date purchase for us, and we just got Mario Kart which is going to keep us occupied for a while. And the new Zelda piques my interest... it's been a long time since I've played a Zelda, and I think both the 3D and the 2D branches of Zelda have their own charms.)
I've shopped all around for mail clients and I've settled on Thunderbird, not because I love it, but because A: It's not bad and B: I've gotten used to its interface because I've used Netscape for mail for a long time.. But it's certainly not a powerhouse.
I would worry less about Eudora becoming a dead-end fork of Thunderbird and more about Thunderbird becoming a dead-end fork of Eudora.
Interesting. Surely it only requires 1 wavelength per type of cone receptor in the eye?
My understanding of how this works actually disagrees with the GP, which is that you actually can't cover the entire color space with a blend of monochromatic sources, you can only get asymoptically closer.
If you take the CIE color space (see the image), you can cover a polygon of that space with your monochromatic sources. Obviously, a triangle of 3 colors covers most of that space, and that's why it is adequate, but there are colors outside of that triangle. Outside of the graph are either imaginary colors or wavelengths we can't see (don't remember which). Since the graph is curvy (non-linear responses again), you can't ever cover the whole gamut, you can only get closer and closer. 5 points would allow you to catch the bulges you end up with on the left and right; I saw somebody in this discussion mention "orange" as one of the useful colors, and you can see why on this chart. Looks like the other useful color, if you were going to 5, would be turquoise or cyan.
The Wikipedia article does back this up in one of the bullet points in the second section.
For some reason the widescreen LCDs I see in stores always have a very grainy look to moving images. They have a very pixellated quality, like looking at an mpeg compressed video close up.
Your diagnosis may be accurate. Stores are shockingly bad about showing off their TVs in their best light, splitting analog signals amount 20 TVs and using MPEG-encoded content that looks bad even at SD if you really look at it on their HD screens.
I'm kind of surprised "they" haven't come up with a little box with a few gigs of ram and an MPEG decoder (and maybe a synchronization feature) that you hook into the local [wireless] network for synchronization and movie updates, and feed at least the high-quality TVs their own, unshared high-quality signal. Such a device ought be producable for under $500 (remember they don't get to scale to consumer electronic scales so the device will be more expensive than you expect), and I'd lay money it'd sell enough more TVs to make up for it.
One of the things I've wondered is if Nintendo has looked into the feasibility of releasing the HDWii in, say, three years. The Wii is supposed to already support widescreen at 480p (I think; google searching was a bit inconclusive but pointed to widescreen support), and the hardest part of upscaling to HD resolutions would be handling varying aspect ratios sanely in the game, as there would be no way whatsoever to hack that in later. (You can handle them non-sanely, but not sanely.)
If they decided to design a new graphics card that was designed from day one to have the exact same performance as the current one, only at a higher resolution, it could be feasible.
Then, once HD adoption has improved and once the graphics card prices have dropped, they could release an HD Wii that played the old games, only at higher resolution, and the games should mostly work. (A few small patches may be needed, and the odd game may not work at all.) This way, they don't go to market with expensive new features most people can't use until most people can use them; best of both worlds.
Polygon-based 3D game scale up really nicely. You wouldn't get higher-resolution textures magically out of the deal, but just actually rendering the whole HD space, rather than upsampling an SD-sized signal, would look much sharper. You might see a bit more pop-in and it's faintly possible the balance of some games might be broken by being able to see a bit farther, but mostly it ought to work.
Yes, there are technical issues, but I don't think they are insurmountable, and even if there is some set of games that just don't work in HD, you can always just run them in SD mode, which the HDWii would need to support anyhow. (Especially if they completely replace the Wii with the HDWii, instead of maintaining two product lines.) Probably the biggest issue would be if games strongly assume SD resolution with some sort of pointer, although it's still possible that such games would still work, it's just that you'd still only be able to point with SD-pixel resolution, which probably most people wouldn't even notice. (Any game that asks for pixel-perfect pointing almost certainly won't be fun anyhow...)
It's not cost-effective to be "truly random" with an iPod Shuffle's hardware budget, but who cares. It's not at all hard to convince a pattern-seeking human that it's not "random", because our pattern-seeking human thinks "random" means "play everything once, then start over with a fresh list", which is anything but random.
I just ran a simulation here of 100 songs, randomly chosen until all 100 songs had been selected once, and ran it 1000 times. On average, it took 523 choices to exhaust the list due to repeats, and on average, the most-played song over that time period had been played 11.7 times before the last unplayed song was finally played.
Joe User will of course assume that the iPod "likes" the song it plays 11.7 times and "hates" the song it only "begrudgingly" gets around to playing 500+ play-throughs later, but that's true randomness.... and one of my pet peeves with MP3 programs.
Humans very rarely want true randomness. When we claim to want randomness in our shuffle, we actually want a somewhat more sophisticated algorithm. But programmers hear "random" and, well, the easiest thing to do is just call the "randint" function... I did once write a non-random shuffler for a thoroughly-non-mainstream music program and I thought it worked out pretty well, but I've never been able to interest anyone in the idea, because it seems like a lot of implementation work vs. "randint".
import random from operator import add
amounts = [] maxes = []
def average(seq):
total = reduce(add, seq) + 0.0
return total/len(seq)
for x in range(1000):
choices = {}
i = 0
while 1:
i += 1
next = random.randint(0, 99)
if not choices.has_key(next):
choices[next] = 1
else:
choices[next] += 1
if len(choices.keys()) == 100:
break
amounts.append(i)
values = choices.values()
values.sort(lambda a, b: cmp(b, a))
maxes.append(values[0])
Consider this program on par with any other Slashdot post; it may have typos, it may even be flat wrong, it certainly wasn't engineered for use in an enterprise-class environment nor analysed for how to make it run faster or with fewer keystrokes, etc. It wasn't composed in a browser text-box but only slightly more care was poured into it.
As I like to say, "random is blotchy". Smoothness is a dead giveaway that a process isn't random. Randomness produces bell curves, not uniform distributions.
Article misses its own point a little
on
Quantum Leaps in RPGs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If the point is about quantum leaps, the article was a bit careless.
Planescape: Torment is awesome, but it's probably, technically, redundant to Fallout. Fallout was the first (IIRC) Black Isle-style RPG, which are notable for being RPGs in the old sense, and it's Fallout that made the quantum leap; P:T and Baldur's Gates et al "merely" polished that leap. That opens up a slot.
Oblivion simple doesn't belong. Morrowind may. I'm striking it because I've seen many games like that before and I'm taking the "quantum leap" idea at its word. I'll replace it with Ultima 4, for introducing the idea that RPGs can be more than brutal slaughtering, something still underrated today. All main-stream Ultimas are from Origin.
Dues Ex I can't speak to, never played it, so I'll defer to the article and leave it up there.
And finally, while I don't know whether I'd pick Chrono Trigger per se, but surely "the first significant JRPG" deserves a mention. However, the problem here is that there really were no quantum leaps, it has been a very smooth evolution. (Final Fantasy I is half Ultima-pre-IV and half Bard's Tale, for instance, not a quantum leap.) I've never played FF7, but one may make the argument that if you're going to try to tell a cinematic, linear story (which has it's place, although I wish they had something we could all agree to call them other than RPG), it is a quantum leap to be able to have cinematics and full motion video.
I note with interest that in all four cases where I changed something, all the relevant choices came from the same company. There's Black Isle RPGs, Origin RPGs, Looking Glass (first-person action) RPGs, and (weakest of all/most competition) Square RPGs.
Maybe consolidation isn't the best thing for the industry after all.
He really make a story from the numbers to memorize the sequence,
Which is, as near as I can make out, the Ultimate Key to memorization stunts of all kind. And in the case of memorizing things from a fixed set, picking appropriate story coding schemes and just practicing enough to commit them to memory.
My memory is probably sub-par overall, but using this technique, I was able to roughly double somebody's score on the Brain Age memorization game vs. somebody with a better memory than me but trying to just say the words and remember them.
(I haven't seen them since but I expect that if they are using that technique they would once again trounce me.)
Read this, try it, and save $$$ from not having to buy elaborate memory books that tell you exactly what's in this message, and maybe include the author's custom coding schemes for some domain that you may not even care about. (And it doesn't much matter, you're probably better off making your own custom coding schemes that will fit your own mind better. Coming up with an encoding scheme is about as hard as a word-association game.)
Did you try reversing the charges anyhow, despite what they said?
I doubt they can tell the credit card companies in advance that a transaction is legal and just ignore the cardholder's reversal attempt, because theoretically a charge from a company already says that. At least at first glance, this strikes me as part of a fraud attempt to convince not to even try to reverse the charges, which could well end up being completely successful.
Depending on how pissed you are you could also take them to small claims. $70 may not be worth your time but it would be a lot of hassle for them; good, legal, even ethical revenge. (It is proper to discourage them from doing this to others, hence the "ethical" bit.)
Heroes seems to be a ton of trailers all mashed up-- never allowing for any substance.
Patience. I'll cop to not watching the second episode yet (still on TiVo), but even so it's pretty clear to me the first two episodes are basically a two-hour pilot, introducing the characters. My bet is these two episodes started that way and got broken up because "they" weren't willing to a two-hour timeslot (for appropriate values of "they"). Which says to me that "they" may not be very confident about the show....
Given the nature of the show, this step is inevitable, so the fact that it starts this way really says little about the quality or lack of it. This is both because these introductions are basically required, and the fact that these introductory episodes are also pretty easy to write; you could crank these out by the tens. Writing a series that actually becomes and stays interesting is harder and will only become clear with time. (I trend pessimistic simply because it's on NBC, but I'll give it a chance; if it manages to avoid the trap of being about the powers and sticks to being about the people and then about the powers, which I see promising signs of, it may yet be good.)
There was a story about an extremely odd artifact found on the Moon that could only be explored by tele-copying somebody into it. It tended to kill you for doing all sorts of random things; for instance, writing the word "no" squished you instantly, and it was odd in various other ways. The author also postulated that the original, if kept in a sensory deprivation chamber, would briefly maintain contact, and thus the original could report on the experiences of the dead copy. Most people couldn't handle the psychological strain and committed suicide, and the story ends with the copy making it all the way through and wondering what to do with himself.
Poul Anderson had a crappy story that was going to turn into a series where the only superluminal travel that was possible was to teleport yourself somewhere (because only information could travel faster than light), and a copy was made. Thus, you walk into the transportation device and in a way, you don't know if you're going to walk out transported or not. (It was crappy for other reasons, not this one.) It addressed a couple of the issues dealing with this, but I hope it wasn't turned into a series; never bothered to look it up.
There is of course the Star Trek: TNG episode where Riker was both beamed off a planet, and not beamed off a planet, resulting in two Rikers. As usual, the Star Trek writers failed to consider any implications of this astonishing possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Boo(b).
"Learn more" is not a solution. There's too much to learn.
When I go to the grocery store, I can easily walk out with over fifty distinct products, and as I am adventuresome many are often new to me. How much "thought" am I supposed to allocate to each one, in order to avoid being a "sheep"? A minute? Ten? When am I supposed to actually do some work to earn a living? And that's just grocery shopping.
"Sheep" is a useless standard, because nobody can meet it. It's an empty insult and I'm tired of seeing it tossed around on Slashdot like it means anything.
"People" have no reason to know Lik-Sang is being shut down, and no reason to care. Seriously, why should they? What priority should Lik-Sang displace? How well things are at work? Should I take time off from spending time with my family or any number of other things in my life to Take Action(TM) about a small company that I've only barely heard of?
You can't care about everything. Shall I call you a sheep because you don't devote 10 hours a week to the plight of African diamond miners? Or because you didn't shout out to Breast Cancer awareness in your post?
Any given human can only worry about so many things at a time. Many, many, many of them are way more important than whether Sony is shutting down Lik-Sang. It may be an interesting story and maybe some people should work on it, but calling people "sheep" because they can't keep up with every sin, both real and perceived, of every corporation they deal with is just arrogant.
I guarantee you you don't even meet your own standard for "non-sheepness", if you took the time to articulate it. (Of course, most people who toss around the word "sheep" seem to simply know they aren't a sheep.) The reason I can guarantee this is that, for example, to explain this situation to my wife who probably isn't even aware that games are imported because they are never released here, let alone who Lik-Sang is, would take several minutes. In order to worry about all the things of a similar magnitude in life that occur would take way more than 100% of your life. We are not sheep for not spending more than 100% of our time worrying about your particular choice of sins in the world.
First, I reject your "mastery" bar. Mastery is irrelevant. Anyone can pick up a piece of clay and perform arbitrary manipulations on it. That they aren't good is a separate problem. A 3D interface effectively doesn't allow that freedom at all, so mastery isn't even an option, so the 3D sucks.
The problem with current 3D is that even "mastery" only allows you to run around, point&grunt. Even a week with sculpture will allow you to make any number of interesting objects with a reasonable degree of skill. Mastery of a modern 3D engine entitles you to a very limited array of actions with far fewer degrees of freedom than even a beginning sculpture.
But what really kills your point is that sculpture is merely one option in the real world. Once you learn to run and gun in a modern 3D environment, you're done. That's all you can do. It's fun, but it's limited, limited, limited.
Dropping the bar on mastery, which is just a made-up point to further an argument without regard to whether it makes any sense, here's an incredibly abridged list of things you can do in the real world but you basically can't in a 3D computer interface:
3D interfaces suck. To largely supplement the real world, they don't need to support all of this, but they do need to be rich enough that they can represent a set of actions that can do things not envisioned explicitly by a designer.
Also note that while you can hack a 3D interface to do some of these things, there's no way you can do it as cleanly as the real world, and the more of these functions you load onto a button (which is itself effectively binary), the more confusing the interface gets. You'll be out of buttons long before you get to the "open a plastic bag and take out a piece of bread" button.
The key here is that our real-word interface is actually way more than 3D. "Dimensions" are fundamentally a measure of the degrees of freedom a system has. When you're talking about the degrees of freedom we have in the real-world, you're looking at one per joint, minus quite a lot for redundency (but still
A helicopter, as you note, is fully 3D. It has the collective, which allows it to raise and lower altitude freely (along with providing thrust in other directions when the helicopter is titing), and it has the ability to arbitrarily lean in any 2D direction relative to the ground. This has the net effect of three degrees of freedom and is thus a fully 3D device. (Additionally, you have a fourth degree of freedom in rotation on the vertical axis; technically you could fly around without that but that would pose obvious logistical and aerodynamic problems. But mathematically, it's not necessary for 3D spatial freedom. Note that you don't have full rotational freedom in the other two axes; you have some freedom, but you can't(/really really shouldn't) flip the helicopter entirely over freely.)
I'd summarize helicopter controls more as "more thrust/less thrust, tilt, and swivel", where the "tilt" is actually in 2D, so to a plane's 2.5D, you end up with 4D on a helicopter. (Rotational freedom counts; see the "sixaxis" controller name on the Sony, three space, three rotation. Another for-instance is that fully characterizing the velocity of a rigid, newtonian object requires six numbers: a velocity vector in x, y, and z, and a rotational vector on the X, Y, and Z axes.)
Sure, if all you want to do is point and shoot, go figure, a point-and-click-based interface is halfway decent, once you learn how to get around in a 3D space that lacks standard contextual clues and is usually oddly designed in real-space terms. But "the metaverse" is supposed to have a richer interface than just shooting each other.
Try taking your l33t Unreal Tournament skills into Maya or Blender and see how useful they are for actually creating things. You'll find them pretty useless. Maya's a musical instrument too, only more like a modern professional keyboard-based synthesizer in complexity. Unless you spring for some very expensive customized input devices that I've only seen in "behind-the-scenes specials" at Dreamworks and Pixar, you're stuck with fundamentally 2D interfaces trying to work in a fundamentally 3D space, and it's basically your choice of many, many poor hacks to handle that.
The interface sucks and the proof is just how freakin' limited your actions are compared to the real world; you've still basically got a point&grunt interface,
While it may flop or suck, the next best big thing may very well be the Wii controller, because it actually functions in 3D. While it's not immediately obvious to me how to actually use it in 3D, at least there's a chance.
(You may have said this and gotten your tag eaten; it wasn't clear to me and it's worth saying so perhaps other people see it.)
For reference, the HTML 4.01 stardard says (and I think you were referring to this):
I hear zapping chips in microwaves toasts them pretty quick; if you have a stripe to fall back then the card wouldn't be useless, but I don't know if it would survive.
Does anybody know how magnetic stripes respond to being microwaved? Not much use if you toast that too. And how long do you have to zap a chip to burn it out? (Sub-second?)
(Note the stripe only has to be significantly more robust than the chip, it doesn't have to be immune to microwaves. If there's a range where the chip dies but the stripe still works, it doesn't matter if the stripe would stop working in another ten seconds.)
In Linux, a middle-click on the web page that isn't in a text area is considered to be a paste to the location bar, which is really convenient, but really confusing when combined with the automatic "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality for non-URLs.
An accidental middle-click becomes an odd form of "Go to a sort-of random page", which is often tantalizingly connected to what you're currently doing. Sometimes it's freakishly connected to what you're doing and it's hard to see how Firefox went to a weird page that was so connected.
It took me several weeks to work out what was going on, actually, and sometimes I still find myself pasting into emacs to see what search string took me to this weird page.
It's kind of odd to consider that Google will return a "top page" for just about any combination of real words you can imagine, regardless of how strange or unconnected they are. I've been to some odd pages this way.
I'm going to call "Blub paradox" (only applied to desktop systems instead of programming languages) on you, unless you use some other mechanism to group windows and their layout that doesn't exist in stock Windows. There is no habit that can make up for virtual desktops.
Living without virtual desktops is quite like living without closures in a language; yes, technically it adds no capabilities, but nevertheless you're more empowered with them and you'll pay a price if you don't or can't use them. That you can't percieve the price doesn't mean it's not there.
I'm also annoyed that at least last time I tried it I couldn't get it to "go to the workspace to the right", but I'll grant that's a bit more obscure. More important is that Windows wasn't designed for multi-workspace use, and even Microsoft programs work very, very poorly with it.
Same for "focus follows mouse". It works great, except for all the programs that grab the focus, the programs that won't accept the focus following the mouse, the programs that seem to get confused about being the focused program but not being the top window, etc. Windows wasn't designed for it and it shows.
I've tried everything I've ever seen mentioned on Slashdot for multiple workspaces, and they all suck in the same way. My conclusion is that Windows is the common factor, and it's not a stretch to notice the Windows messaging system was fundamentally designed for a 16-bit cooperative multitasking, all-processes-in-one-memory-partition model, and it's still hack-upon-hack on top of that. (Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog has story after story about "here's why Windows has this wart. It all started in Windows [123].0...") Terminal services seems to work OK, and I had hopes that updating Windows to work with TS would also improve applications w.r.t. multiple workspaces, but it hasn't happened.
I've tried everything, and quite a few window managers on Linux too. I'm not sure how I could know more about what I'm talking about. Windows's multiple-workspace support is a bullet-point feature, an unsupported Powertoy, something even major application builders don't test for, and unless it's slipped by all the Vista coverage, for practical purposes, Windows does not decent multi-workspace support.
I've also found pervasive KNotify support to be surprisingly useful in little ways, not least of which is helping support that multi-workspace work area. It's the little things, like telling Konsole to KNotify me when the console is active or quiet, or Kopete's ability to use KNotify to put up the first bit of the message, which is often the entire message, preventing me from needing to switch windows to read it (or switch desktops)...
In my opinion, the KDE interface at least has long surpassed Windows and I am yet to read about Vista actually picking up on the reasons why. It doesn't surprise me that a multi-billion dollar company can create a nicer-looking interface, but I'm "surprised"* at how resistant they are to the actual features that make the experience different.
(*: Actually, no I'm not; I'm pretty sure Windows still doesn't really support multi-workspace use, at least from what I've seen of the hacks that offer it, and I'd guess that "fundamental Windows limitations and the inability to offer reverse compatibility" is behind some of the other missing features, too. XWindows may suck but it seems to me it sucks less...)
If you've already read the game list, I doubt anybody will have anything to add. It's not as if anybody has played these games to speak of, or at least anybody allowed to talk about it. (A couple of hours of "hands-on preview" doesn't count.)
I'm interested in the Wii, moreso than the XBox 360 or the PS3. But I'm going to be "sticking with the PS2" myself for a while. For one thing, there's still a good 10 games that I'm interested in, and I have a Real Job so it takes a while to get through them. Fortunately, they're pretty cheap now, especially if you buy them used and sell them back after a reasonable period of time. I've played kick-ass AAA-quality games from two years ago for a net-outlay of about $8 over three or four months, which beats even rental.
While somebody needs to buy the Wii, I don't think there's any compelling reason to run right out there and be first on your block unless you've done everything you want on your existing consoles.
Because for as excited and intrigued as I am, the fact remains that the Wii is highly experimental and it may yet be one dumb-assed idea, and I don't think there's a problem in waiting for somebody else to find that out, while you continue to mine the deepest, richest vein of console video games ever on the PS2. (And those PS2 game's prices aren't going up, although finding them may become an increasing challenge.) I for one will not buy a Wii until I've actually used one, either in a store or preferably at somebody else's house.
(Also, my wife got a DS, and there's a couple of things coming out for that that we have to get. Yoshii's Island 2 is going to be a rare release-date purchase for us, and we just got Mario Kart which is going to keep us occupied for a while. And the new Zelda piques my interest... it's been a long time since I've played a Zelda, and I think both the 3D and the 2D branches of Zelda have their own charms.)
I've shopped all around for mail clients and I've settled on Thunderbird, not because I love it, but because A: It's not bad and B: I've gotten used to its interface because I've used Netscape for mail for a long time.. But it's certainly not a powerhouse.
I would worry less about Eudora becoming a dead-end fork of Thunderbird and more about Thunderbird becoming a dead-end fork of Eudora.
If you take the CIE color space (see the image), you can cover a polygon of that space with your monochromatic sources. Obviously, a triangle of 3 colors covers most of that space, and that's why it is adequate, but there are colors outside of that triangle. Outside of the graph are either imaginary colors or wavelengths we can't see (don't remember which). Since the graph is curvy (non-linear responses again), you can't ever cover the whole gamut, you can only get closer and closer. 5 points would allow you to catch the bulges you end up with on the left and right; I saw somebody in this discussion mention "orange" as one of the useful colors, and you can see why on this chart. Looks like the other useful color, if you were going to 5, would be turquoise or cyan.
The Wikipedia article does back this up in one of the bullet points in the second section.
I'm kind of surprised "they" haven't come up with a little box with a few gigs of ram and an MPEG decoder (and maybe a synchronization feature) that you hook into the local [wireless] network for synchronization and movie updates, and feed at least the high-quality TVs their own, unshared high-quality signal. Such a device ought be producable for under $500 (remember they don't get to scale to consumer electronic scales so the device will be more expensive than you expect), and I'd lay money it'd sell enough more TVs to make up for it.
One of the things I've wondered is if Nintendo has looked into the feasibility of releasing the HDWii in, say, three years. The Wii is supposed to already support widescreen at 480p (I think; google searching was a bit inconclusive but pointed to widescreen support), and the hardest part of upscaling to HD resolutions would be handling varying aspect ratios sanely in the game, as there would be no way whatsoever to hack that in later. (You can handle them non-sanely, but not sanely.)
If they decided to design a new graphics card that was designed from day one to have the exact same performance as the current one, only at a higher resolution, it could be feasible.
Then, once HD adoption has improved and once the graphics card prices have dropped, they could release an HD Wii that played the old games, only at higher resolution, and the games should mostly work. (A few small patches may be needed, and the odd game may not work at all.) This way, they don't go to market with expensive new features most people can't use until most people can use them; best of both worlds.
Polygon-based 3D game scale up really nicely. You wouldn't get higher-resolution textures magically out of the deal, but just actually rendering the whole HD space, rather than upsampling an SD-sized signal, would look much sharper. You might see a bit more pop-in and it's faintly possible the balance of some games might be broken by being able to see a bit farther, but mostly it ought to work.
Yes, there are technical issues, but I don't think they are insurmountable, and even if there is some set of games that just don't work in HD, you can always just run them in SD mode, which the HDWii would need to support anyhow. (Especially if they completely replace the Wii with the HDWii, instead of maintaining two product lines.) Probably the biggest issue would be if games strongly assume SD resolution with some sort of pointer, although it's still possible that such games would still work, it's just that you'd still only be able to point with SD-pixel resolution, which probably most people wouldn't even notice. (Any game that asks for pixel-perfect pointing almost certainly won't be fun anyhow...)
I just ran a simulation here of 100 songs, randomly chosen until all 100 songs had been selected once, and ran it 1000 times. On average, it took 523 choices to exhaust the list due to repeats, and on average, the most-played song over that time period had been played 11.7 times before the last unplayed song was finally played.
Joe User will of course assume that the iPod "likes" the song it plays 11.7 times and "hates" the song it only "begrudgingly" gets around to playing 500+ play-throughs later, but that's true randomness.... and one of my pet peeves with MP3 programs.
Humans very rarely want true randomness. When we claim to want randomness in our shuffle, we actually want a somewhat more sophisticated algorithm. But programmers hear "random" and, well, the easiest thing to do is just call the "randint" function... I did once write a non-random shuffler for a thoroughly-non-mainstream music program and I thought it worked out pretty well, but I've never been able to interest anyone in the idea, because it seems like a lot of implementation work vs. "randint".Consider this program on par with any other Slashdot post; it may have typos, it may even be flat wrong, it certainly wasn't engineered for use in an enterprise-class environment nor analysed for how to make it run faster or with fewer keystrokes, etc. It wasn't composed in a browser text-box but only slightly more care was poured into it.
As I like to say, "random is blotchy". Smoothness is a dead giveaway that a process isn't random. Randomness produces bell curves, not uniform distributions.
If the point is about quantum leaps, the article was a bit careless.
Planescape: Torment is awesome, but it's probably, technically, redundant to Fallout. Fallout was the first (IIRC) Black Isle-style RPG, which are notable for being RPGs in the old sense, and it's Fallout that made the quantum leap; P:T and Baldur's Gates et al "merely" polished that leap. That opens up a slot.
Many people are mentioning System Shock 2, which I'd point out isn't that different from System Shock 1, which itself is clearly descended from Ultima Underworld, which is what should get the nod on that line. Also, interestingly, all from the same company (more or less; SS2 was developed by Looking Glass offshoot Irrational Games and Looking Glass and published by Electronic Arts.
Oblivion simple doesn't belong. Morrowind may. I'm striking it because I've seen many games like that before and I'm taking the "quantum leap" idea at its word. I'll replace it with Ultima 4, for introducing the idea that RPGs can be more than brutal slaughtering, something still underrated today. All main-stream Ultimas are from Origin.
Dues Ex I can't speak to, never played it, so I'll defer to the article and leave it up there.
And finally, while I don't know whether I'd pick Chrono Trigger per se, but surely "the first significant JRPG" deserves a mention. However, the problem here is that there really were no quantum leaps, it has been a very smooth evolution. (Final Fantasy I is half Ultima-pre-IV and half Bard's Tale, for instance, not a quantum leap.) I've never played FF7, but one may make the argument that if you're going to try to tell a cinematic, linear story (which has it's place, although I wish they had something we could all agree to call them other than RPG), it is a quantum leap to be able to have cinematics and full motion video.
I note with interest that in all four cases where I changed something, all the relevant choices came from the same company. There's Black Isle RPGs, Origin RPGs, Looking Glass (first-person action) RPGs, and (weakest of all/most competition) Square RPGs.
Maybe consolidation isn't the best thing for the industry after all.
(OK, no "maybe".)
My memory is probably sub-par overall, but using this technique, I was able to roughly double somebody's score on the Brain Age memorization game vs. somebody with a better memory than me but trying to just say the words and remember them.
(I haven't seen them since but I expect that if they are using that technique they would once again trounce me.)
Read this, try it, and save $$$ from not having to buy elaborate memory books that tell you exactly what's in this message, and maybe include the author's custom coding schemes for some domain that you may not even care about. (And it doesn't much matter, you're probably better off making your own custom coding schemes that will fit your own mind better. Coming up with an encoding scheme is about as hard as a word-association game.)
I doubt they can tell the credit card companies in advance that a transaction is legal and just ignore the cardholder's reversal attempt, because theoretically a charge from a company already says that. At least at first glance, this strikes me as part of a fraud attempt to convince not to even try to reverse the charges, which could well end up being completely successful.
Depending on how pissed you are you could also take them to small claims. $70 may not be worth your time but it would be a lot of hassle for them; good, legal, even ethical revenge. (It is proper to discourage them from doing this to others, hence the "ethical" bit.)
Heroes seems to be a ton of trailers all mashed up-- never allowing for any substance.
Patience. I'll cop to not watching the second episode yet (still on TiVo), but even so it's pretty clear to me the first two episodes are basically a two-hour pilot, introducing the characters. My bet is these two episodes started that way and got broken up because "they" weren't willing to a two-hour timeslot (for appropriate values of "they"). Which says to me that "they" may not be very confident about the show....
Given the nature of the show, this step is inevitable, so the fact that it starts this way really says little about the quality or lack of it. This is both because these introductions are basically required, and the fact that these introductory episodes are also pretty easy to write; you could crank these out by the tens. Writing a series that actually becomes and stays interesting is harder and will only become clear with time. (I trend pessimistic simply because it's on NBC, but I'll give it a chance; if it manages to avoid the trap of being about the powers and sticks to being about the people and then about the powers, which I see promising signs of, it may yet be good.)
I like old science fiction.
There was a story about an extremely odd artifact found on the Moon that could only be explored by tele-copying somebody into it. It tended to kill you for doing all sorts of random things; for instance, writing the word "no" squished you instantly, and it was odd in various other ways. The author also postulated that the original, if kept in a sensory deprivation chamber, would briefly maintain contact, and thus the original could report on the experiences of the dead copy. Most people couldn't handle the psychological strain and committed suicide, and the story ends with the copy making it all the way through and wondering what to do with himself.
Poul Anderson had a crappy story that was going to turn into a series where the only superluminal travel that was possible was to teleport yourself somewhere (because only information could travel faster than light), and a copy was made. Thus, you walk into the transportation device and in a way, you don't know if you're going to walk out transported or not. (It was crappy for other reasons, not this one.) It addressed a couple of the issues dealing with this, but I hope it wasn't turned into a series; never bothered to look it up.
There is of course the Star Trek: TNG episode where Riker was both beamed off a planet, and not beamed off a planet, resulting in two Rikers. As usual, the Star Trek writers failed to consider any implications of this astonishing possibility.