Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
A normal mouse and keyboard are _terrible_ input devices, and the major causes of RSI.
The only difference between a normal keyboard and mouse and "ergonomic" input devices is that the ergonomic devices force you to break your bad habits. It's perfectly possible to use a normal keyboard and mouse in a way that won't injure you.
Think about an ergonomic input device like the little rubber thingie you had on your pencil in second grade to teach you to hold it right...
[...] the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati [...]
It seems like sites like this end up with a few thousand hardcore users and the rest of the people using the internet don't care about them in the least. That is what Google has to be afraid of?
I think that people making such speculation are just too short of understanding to see that the internet is more than just Google. Using the internet for something other than searching the web doesn't hurt Google in the least.
Are you saying that they used to cut on and off all the time?
Used to? Most of the cheap ones still do. There are also models that have only a "low" and "high" setting, but aren't particularly variable. Those are in the sub-$500 price range, while the good ones are in the $1000+ price range.
Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 2, Informative
At work I use [...] a symmetric trackball (Kensington Orbital) centered _in front_ of the keyboard.
Turning up the speed on your mouse so you don't have to move your wrist, or moving at the elbow instead of the wrist works just as well as a trackball.
RSI problems for typists are caused by bad habits more than anything else, and if you have the will power and presence of mind you don't need any fancy gadgets to fix them. Career computer users aren't even close to being in a job that is at the top of the list for CTS risk.
I guess I'm one of the 'elitist' people you're talking about, except that I believe that RSI is real... I just think that people cause it themselves. I've been typing and playing piano for 18 years and have never gotten a RSI from them, probably because the only thing my piano teacher ever taught me was good posture. Working as a painter for 6 months though, that's another story.
The trick to not getting injured is fixing your habits, toys or no toys... Of course if you can afford the fancy keyboards and all that, then go for it. The people I've worked with that bitch about pain in their wrists all have obviously horrible working styles and posture. God forbid that anybody tells them that it's how they sit and move that causes the problem, and not the fact that their employer hasn't bought them a $1000 chair and a $300 keyboard that won't even help if they don't change their habits though...
They've improved dramatically in the last 3 to 5 years. You can get them with variable burners and pressure sensors now, so the greater the flow, the more flame, etc... They're a suitable replacement for up to a 40 gallon traditional water heater these days.
Oh, the downside is that the good ones cost about twice as much as a 40 gallon tank heater. You won't be finding one in new construction by a cheapo construction company.
They're also ensuring that a) fewer cross-platform games will be made...
I doubt that.
Developers are going to code to the market. For the next 10 years the market is going to be greater than 50% Non-HD. That means that the games are all going to be coded for Non-HD with some HD extra features. You can be certain that there will be few if any games that require HD on any platform. The least common denominator this generation isn't the Revolution, it's the majority of TV sets in the market.
What Nintendo is setting themselves up for is a console that is obsolete in a couple of years when everybody starts to get HD.
Actually, what they're doing is betting that the majority of people still won't have HD in 3 years when the console will be obsolete anyway. They're probably right, but only time will tell whether they shot themselves in the foot by not including it, or whether Microsoft and Sony shot themselves in the feet by wasting money on HD that could have gone to profit. It seems to me that PS3 and Xbox 360 will likely be used in Non-HD mode by the vast majority of people who buy them; myself included. Considering that even with the lowest market share Nintendo is still winning the profit battle, I'd think hard before betting against decisions they make.
It's always come down to the games in the past anyway. Graphics have always been secondary to the majority of buyers. The game lineup 6 months after release will determine who 'wins' this generation more than any set of specs any company releases now.
That's exactly the way to do it... All too often things get re-arranged from the order in which the creator presented them into the plot's chronological order.
A recent upsetting discovery of mine was realizing that children these days are given the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia with "The Magician's Nephew" as book one instead of last. Not only does it spoil the mystery of things in Narnia for the rest of the series, but it spoils the wonder and pure fan service done by reading "The Magician's Nephew" last. Who ever decided to change the order needs to be shot.
It sounded to me more like he was insulting Microsoft for caliming they were innovative. Copying what other businesses are doing, or even doing what other successful businesses are doing, but doing it a little bit better is a respectable business model. Doing all that but claiming you're the big innovator in the field is just plain dishonest.
I guess if you put words in the parent poster's mouth your comment becomes insightful though.
my point was, that we are talking about emulating a DS on a PSP...
The comment I was responding to was saying that a madern P4 PC wasn't fast enough to emulate a DS... If we're arguing unrelated points, it's no wonder we don't see eye to eye on the matter.
I agree that emulating the DS on the PSP would be, for the vast majority of the games, impractical.
Let's get something straight about emulation... Emulation is about making a general purpose device to act like a specific device. not about turning a PC into a DS. That means you don't do any magical morphing of hardware or anything, you just take a general purpose piece of harware that maps an event to a coordinate and you map that functionality into touches on the DS touch screen. That means you can emulate the touch screen with mouse clicks and drags, with a trackpad, with a digitizer tablet, or with a PC touch screen for that matter. It has nothing to do with how powerful the PC is.
Your question is like asking me how I'd emulate the case, or the battery, or the D-pad... It's just stupid.
Re:Hello World, Goodbye Gameboy
on
PSP Hackers Go Retro
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
3. PSP is teh ghey
Um... Wow.
4. PSP is *not* powerful enough to emulate the DS and all its hardware, emulation isn't easy at all, even pentium 4's cant emualte DS at fullspeed (not implying DS is anywhere close to the power of a P4, just explaining how difficult emulation is)
This is total bull. If the low-level specs for the hardware were available, it would be emulated on a modern PC fairly easily. Your comment can't help but remind me of the people saying you'd need a 1 Ghz machine to emulate an N64 back around 1997 when hitting 1Ghz was an unobtainable milestone... Then UltraHLE came out and people with a P233 were playing Goldeneye. It's the lack of hardware docs that make emulation hard. If the hardware design docs were available, any third year CS student worth his/her future diploma could emulate it on a box that was approximately twice as fast.
Says who? Prettu much anything bigger than a few feet on a side that weighs between 250lbs and 1 ton comes in wood.
A crate made out of particle board and 1x4s is about as cheap as it gets for strong shipping containers for heavy, expensive items. Order a full rack storage array, or an 5' industrial water filter or a V8 engine sometime and see for yourself.
I'm in college and I can't get a job that respects my intellect, either. During the summer I do construction.
One of the big reasons for this is that they give out highschool diplomas to just anybody these days. All you have to do is show up. You can't institute testing, or raise graduation requirements because it disproportionally fails out minority students, and somewhere along the line that became all that was required to be racist... No matter what the actual intent (in this case to provide employers with an accurate assessment of your skills).
Wait until your third or fourth year of college. You'll get better jobs then. Employers will see that you had what it takes to make it that far and be more willing to take a chance on you.
As for working construction, well, there's nothing wrong with that. You're working, which is a lot more effort than many people are willing to put into things. Plus you'll actually understand how some everyday things that nobody ever teaches you about in a classroom work. After you graduate, you'll be surprised how many of your peers have never done a hard days work in their life, and wouldn't know where to start if they ever had to repair anything themselves.
The reason you get paid to do something is because it sucks so bad that almost nobody is willing to do it for free.
There's another reason too. Sometimes you get paid to do something because there you have skills that aren't particularly common. Skills you had to, let's say, get a college education to learn. When you're in school, look for the courses and subjects where they don't have all the answers yet. Then you'll be in demand for your knowledge, and not just because you're willing to do something that sucks. You can even find yourself in a job you enjoy.
you need to consider the OS being used is Win2K based [as is the original XBox] and probably weighs over 1GB
It's a Win2k kernel, which, at least on my windows 2000 server box, is only a few hundred KB. Sure that doesn't include drivers, but all you really need in the system is a bootloader that knows how to read the OS off the DVD drive. If you need to update the OS, you just include the updated copy on newer games. Older games can continue to use the older OS.
Yeah, because the PS2 really tanked after the Xbox came out with a hard drive.
I'd rather there was no hard drive. It keeps the developers out of the patch mentality and keeps the machine from being loud. As for storage, with an SD slot you'll have no problem saving all your games and downloaded content on a $25 1GB memory card. What's the big deal?
Maybe they'll surprise everybody and make it so you can plug in any old USB 2.0 hard drive... Normally I wouldn't even have allowed myself the joy of hope in that department, but they gave a little in the supported memory format department, so who knows... If the PS3 uses all industry standard perhiperals, the Xbox 360 is screwed.
Bah. My proofreading skills aren't working today. I can't believe I let myself post that sentence. It should say:
Treating the the term 'My Computer' as a proper noun to people who aren't that familliar it with ends up getting you into a similar conversation to the one you would have every Saturday if you named your son 'Second' and enrolled him in little league.
You'd be surprised hos often that conversation *doesn't* happen when you don't get all colloquial and actually say something like: "Click on the icon labeled 'My Computer'" in the first place.
Treating the the term 'My Computer' as a proper noun to people who aren't that familliar with ends up getting you into a similar conversation as what you would have if you named your son 'Second' and enrolled him in little league.
Of course, if Microsoft hadn't broken their own paradigm and made icons either files, folders or apps *all the time*, they would have put an icon for the root directory of your hard drive on the desktop, and put all the rest of your devices in the device manager where they belong. Then nobody would ever had to worry about why "computers don't make any sense".
This is way off the subject, but this is the third time today I've either read somebody or heard somebody say something like this:...check my physical mail box every day, just to see how much less money I'm going to have after I do bills...
What I want to know is: How can you not know already? Why are people afraid to check the mail, or hate when bills arrive? Don't you all already know how much money you spent, and when payment is due?
I have a huge ass mailbox because I often go weeks at a time witout checking it, yet still all my bills get paid on time, becuase bills are either recurring debt or I can't help but know what money I spent and, if it was on credit, when I need to pay off the balance by. The only things that vary are the electric and gas bills, and those hardly ever are more than a few dollars different than the same month last year. Do other people just not keep track?
Slashdot Mirror
A normal mouse and keyboard are _terrible_ input devices, and the major causes of RSI.
The only difference between a normal keyboard and mouse and "ergonomic" input devices is that the ergonomic devices force you to break your bad habits. It's perfectly possible to use a normal keyboard and mouse in a way that won't injure you.
Think about an ergonomic input device like the little rubber thingie you had on your pencil in second grade to teach you to hold it right...
[...] the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati [...]
It seems like sites like this end up with a few thousand hardcore users and the rest of the people using the internet don't care about them in the least. That is what Google has to be afraid of?
I think that people making such speculation are just too short of understanding to see that the internet is more than just Google. Using the internet for something other than searching the web doesn't hurt Google in the least.
Are you saying that they used to cut on and off all the time?
Used to? Most of the cheap ones still do. There are also models that have only a "low" and "high" setting, but aren't particularly variable. Those are in the sub-$500 price range, while the good ones are in the $1000+ price range.
At work I use [...] a symmetric trackball (Kensington Orbital) centered _in front_ of the keyboard.
Turning up the speed on your mouse so you don't have to move your wrist, or moving at the elbow instead of the wrist works just as well as a trackball.
RSI problems for typists are caused by bad habits more than anything else, and if you have the will power and presence of mind you don't need any fancy gadgets to fix them. Career computer users aren't even close to being in a job that is at the top of the list for CTS risk.
I guess I'm one of the 'elitist' people you're talking about, except that I believe that RSI is real... I just think that people cause it themselves. I've been typing and playing piano for 18 years and have never gotten a RSI from them, probably because the only thing my piano teacher ever taught me was good posture. Working as a painter for 6 months though, that's another story.
The trick to not getting injured is fixing your habits, toys or no toys... Of course if you can afford the fancy keyboards and all that, then go for it. The people I've worked with that bitch about pain in their wrists all have obviously horrible working styles and posture. God forbid that anybody tells them that it's how they sit and move that causes the problem, and not the fact that their employer hasn't bought them a $1000 chair and a $300 keyboard that won't even help if they don't change their habits though...
They've improved dramatically in the last 3 to 5 years. You can get them with variable burners and pressure sensors now, so the greater the flow, the more flame, etc... They're a suitable replacement for up to a 40 gallon traditional water heater these days.
Oh, the downside is that the good ones cost about twice as much as a 40 gallon tank heater. You won't be finding one in new construction by a cheapo construction company.
They're also ensuring that a) fewer cross-platform games will be made...
I doubt that.
Developers are going to code to the market. For the next 10 years the market is going to be greater than 50% Non-HD. That means that the games are all going to be coded for Non-HD with some HD extra features. You can be certain that there will be few if any games that require HD on any platform. The least common denominator this generation isn't the Revolution, it's the majority of TV sets in the market.
What Nintendo is setting themselves up for is a console that is obsolete in a couple of years when everybody starts to get HD.
Actually, what they're doing is betting that the majority of people still won't have HD in 3 years when the console will be obsolete anyway. They're probably right, but only time will tell whether they shot themselves in the foot by not including it, or whether Microsoft and Sony shot themselves in the feet by wasting money on HD that could have gone to profit. It seems to me that PS3 and Xbox 360 will likely be used in Non-HD mode by the vast majority of people who buy them; myself included. Considering that even with the lowest market share Nintendo is still winning the profit battle, I'd think hard before betting against decisions they make.
It's always come down to the games in the past anyway. Graphics have always been secondary to the majority of buyers. The game lineup 6 months after release will determine who 'wins' this generation more than any set of specs any company releases now.
That's exactly the way to do it... All too often things get re-arranged from the order in which the creator presented them into the plot's chronological order.
A recent upsetting discovery of mine was realizing that children these days are given the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia with "The Magician's Nephew" as book one instead of last. Not only does it spoil the mystery of things in Narnia for the rest of the series, but it spoils the wonder and pure fan service done by reading "The Magician's Nephew" last. Who ever decided to change the order needs to be shot.
Why insult Microsoft for making it?
It sounded to me more like he was insulting Microsoft for caliming they were innovative. Copying what other businesses are doing, or even doing what other successful businesses are doing, but doing it a little bit better is a respectable business model. Doing all that but claiming you're the big innovator in the field is just plain dishonest.
I guess if you put words in the parent poster's mouth your comment becomes insightful though.
I've never stuck around long enough to see what happens when the countdown finishes...
Judging by the fact that I can still post this after trying it, I'd say little or nothing.
Sounds like a great way to become a programmer.
The poster is asking about learning computer science.
$20 for an additional set? Where? Even with DirecTV you get to hook up 4 before they start charging you extra...
TV in the laundry room? Kids rooms? Damn.
my point was, that we are talking about emulating a DS on a PSP...
The comment I was responding to was saying that a madern P4 PC wasn't fast enough to emulate a DS... If we're arguing unrelated points, it's no wonder we don't see eye to eye on the matter.
I agree that emulating the DS on the PSP would be, for the vast majority of the games, impractical.
Personally I prefer to use CAD applications with only the keyboard. Typing in numerical coordinates is much easier, and IMHO faster, than clicking.
I'm sure you'd find some POVRay users to disagree with you too.
A monkey?
Let's get something straight about emulation... Emulation is about making a general purpose device to act like a specific device. not about turning a PC into a DS. That means you don't do any magical morphing of hardware or anything, you just take a general purpose piece of harware that maps an event to a coordinate and you map that functionality into touches on the DS touch screen. That means you can emulate the touch screen with mouse clicks and drags, with a trackpad, with a digitizer tablet, or with a PC touch screen for that matter. It has nothing to do with how powerful the PC is.
Your question is like asking me how I'd emulate the case, or the battery, or the D-pad... It's just stupid.
3. PSP is teh ghey
Um... Wow.
4. PSP is *not* powerful enough to emulate the DS and all its hardware, emulation isn't easy at all, even pentium 4's cant emualte DS at fullspeed (not implying DS is anywhere close to the power of a P4, just explaining how difficult emulation is)
This is total bull. If the low-level specs for the hardware were available, it would be emulated on a modern PC fairly easily. Your comment can't help but remind me of the people saying you'd need a 1 Ghz machine to emulate an N64 back around 1997 when hitting 1Ghz was an unobtainable milestone... Then UltraHLE came out and people with a P233 were playing Goldeneye. It's the lack of hardware docs that make emulation hard. If the hardware design docs were available, any third year CS student worth his/her future diploma could emulate it on a box that was approximately twice as fast.
he same kind of people care about calling a Mac a 'Mac' as care about calling Linux 'GNU/Linux'.
:-D
I've never heard of anybody caring about calling Linux 'GNU/Linux'...
There are plenty of people who want to call GNU/Linux 'GNU/Linux' though. Mostly because 'Linux' and 'GNU/Linux' are two different things...
You know a place that has new releases for only $9? Where is it, and how many ads do you have to watch before the movie?
Says who? Prettu much anything bigger than a few feet on a side that weighs between 250lbs and 1 ton comes in wood.
A crate made out of particle board and 1x4s is about as cheap as it gets for strong shipping containers for heavy, expensive items. Order a full rack storage array, or an 5' industrial water filter or a V8 engine sometime and see for yourself.
I'm in college and I can't get a job that respects my intellect, either. During the summer I do construction.
One of the big reasons for this is that they give out highschool diplomas to just anybody these days. All you have to do is show up. You can't institute testing, or raise graduation requirements because it disproportionally fails out minority students, and somewhere along the line that became all that was required to be racist... No matter what the actual intent (in this case to provide employers with an accurate assessment of your skills).
Wait until your third or fourth year of college. You'll get better jobs then. Employers will see that you had what it takes to make it that far and be more willing to take a chance on you.
As for working construction, well, there's nothing wrong with that. You're working, which is a lot more effort than many people are willing to put into things. Plus you'll actually understand how some everyday things that nobody ever teaches you about in a classroom work. After you graduate, you'll be surprised how many of your peers have never done a hard days work in their life, and wouldn't know where to start if they ever had to repair anything themselves.
The reason you get paid to do something is because it sucks so bad that almost nobody is willing to do it for free.
There's another reason too. Sometimes you get paid to do something because there you have skills that aren't particularly common. Skills you had to, let's say, get a college education to learn. When you're in school, look for the courses and subjects where they don't have all the answers yet. Then you'll be in demand for your knowledge, and not just because you're willing to do something that sucks. You can even find yourself in a job you enjoy.
you need to consider the OS being used is Win2K based [as is the original XBox] and probably weighs over 1GB
It's a Win2k kernel, which, at least on my windows 2000 server box, is only a few hundred KB. Sure that doesn't include drivers, but all you really need in the system is a bootloader that knows how to read the OS off the DVD drive. If you need to update the OS, you just include the updated copy on newer games. Older games can continue to use the older OS.
Yeah, because the PS2 really tanked after the Xbox came out with a hard drive.
I'd rather there was no hard drive. It keeps the developers out of the patch mentality and keeps the machine from being loud. As for storage, with an SD slot you'll have no problem saving all your games and downloaded content on a $25 1GB memory card. What's the big deal?
Maybe they'll surprise everybody and make it so you can plug in any old USB 2.0 hard drive... Normally I wouldn't even have allowed myself the joy of hope in that department, but they gave a little in the supported memory format department, so who knows... If the PS3 uses all industry standard perhiperals, the Xbox 360 is screwed.
Bah. My proofreading skills aren't working today. I can't believe I let myself post that sentence. It should say:
Treating the the term 'My Computer' as a proper noun to people who aren't that familliar it with ends up getting you into a similar conversation to the one you would have every Saturday if you named your son 'Second' and enrolled him in little league.
You'd be surprised hos often that conversation *doesn't* happen when you don't get all colloquial and actually say something like: "Click on the icon labeled 'My Computer'" in the first place.
Treating the the term 'My Computer' as a proper noun to people who aren't that familliar with ends up getting you into a similar conversation as what you would have if you named your son 'Second' and enrolled him in little league.
Of course, if Microsoft hadn't broken their own paradigm and made icons either files, folders or apps *all the time*, they would have put an icon for the root directory of your hard drive on the desktop, and put all the rest of your devices in the device manager where they belong. Then nobody would ever had to worry about why "computers don't make any sense".
This is way off the subject, but this is the third time today I've either read somebody or heard somebody say something like this: ...check my physical mail box every day, just to see how much less money I'm going to have after I do bills...
What I want to know is: How can you not know already? Why are people afraid to check the mail, or hate when bills arrive? Don't you all already know how much money you spent, and when payment is due?
I have a huge ass mailbox because I often go weeks at a time witout checking it, yet still all my bills get paid on time, becuase bills are either recurring debt or I can't help but know what money I spent and, if it was on credit, when I need to pay off the balance by. The only things that vary are the electric and gas bills, and those hardly ever are more than a few dollars different than the same month last year. Do other people just not keep track?