Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.
Did you not even read the Slashdot summary?
The video signal broadcast from the Moon to Earth was higher resolution than standard broadcast TV. Those master tapes of that hi-res signal are now missing, leaving only those low-res second-generation copies that we all saw on TV.
Is it possible that the master tapes never existed? Maybe. But people claim to have viewed them -- are they liars? Conspirators?
What other input devices do we use while playing a console game, beside the gamepad? Maybe a gun... I can't think of anything else.
The past few years have seen a flourishing of alternate input devices for console games: DDR pads, Guitar Hero axes, touch screens (if you consider the DS a proper console), EyeToy cameras...
I think the market has shown that new control paradigms can be market successes if properly supported (and no, Xavix showcasing their silly sports simulators in Guitar Centers instead of electronics stores doesn't qualify). It will be interesting to see how well the Wiimote concept lives up to its potential, and it's certainly too soon to say definitively whether it will succeed or fail.
How do they do to make critters chase PacMan? Or they just don't and wonder around in the maze?
The ghosts have never chased PacMan around the maze, even though it seems an awful lot like they are when you find yourself in their paths.
Ghost movement patterns are predetermined and unrelated to the player's actions, as anyone who's looked at the slipcover inside Buckner and Garcia's "Pac Man Fever" LP could tell you.
I have a design for a device that is inevitable, and could be made with today's technology. The problem is that I have no idea how to get a patent, it just seems to complex for me to figure out.
The government doesn't "already" have the money. If they didn't they wouldn't be borrowing against future revenues to fund so much of the unnecessary shit they do.
The "[instead of Sonic]" seems to be the work of the story submitter, and not an accurate quote.
Kalinske's point is valid, though -- the pack-in game (remember those?) was an important factor in console sales, especially in its role in providing a mascot, an identity, for the system.
Nintendo always had Mario, the most successful (and sometimes-overused) mascot in gaming history.
NEC started out weakly with Keith Courage, but later realized their mistake and replaced him with a much stronger mascot in Bonk.
The mascot of the Sega Master System was a robe-wearing monkeyboy named Alex Kidd, and the console floundered.
The launch mascot of the Genesis was -- whom? Did the guy(s) in Altered Beast even have a name? Genesis needed a mascot, and Kalinske saw great potential in the character that was to become Sonic, and put him into that role. Wisely, too, if you consider all the would-be franchise stars that copied their attitude and gameplay from Sonic: Bubsy, Jazz Jackrabbit, et al.
I'll say it again - you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a PS2 or X-Box commercial. Even Nintendo had their share of marketing blitz. The Dreamcast? Word of mouth does not work well in console sales.
Really? You don't remember the ads showing a variety of game characters interacting in the "arena" in the interior of a Dreamcast console, or the whispered "It's thinking" tagline? There was a time for a while where I couldn't watch TV for fifteen minutes without seeing a Dreamcast commercial.
Whether prerendered footage of unfamiliar characters making suble references to online play was the best way to tout the console's abilities to the public is another discussion entirely.
When you buy a copyright protected item, you own that particular thing.
That particular instance of that thing, yes. If you buy a copy of a book, you own that paper and ink and binding glue.
You need zero license to make standard use of that particular thing you purchased.
You need zero license to make NON-standard use of that thing either, as long as that use is legal. You can run your brand new copy of "The Da Vinci Code" through a crosscut shredder and use it as confetti, if you like. In fact, I recommend this.
The only things you CAN'T do by law with a purchased copy of a copyrighted work are those actions expressly forbidden by the copyright law.
This is another case of pulling the race card when race was not involved
The ad campaign specifically drew attention to a struggle between two people, one with fair skin and one with dark skin. How can you claim "race was not involved"?
The ad may not be RACIST, but it is indisputably RACIAL.
Safari pisses me off though because lack of design mode is a major flaw, but one that is obviously fixable.
I don't have a bathtub in my kitchen. It would be very easy to hire a plumber to have one installed, but I won't. Why not? Because a bathtub does not belong in a kitchen.
Apple doesn't seem to be of the opinion that it's appropriate for a web BROWSING application to incorporate the features of a web AUTHORING tool. I find this to be a reasonable design decision, even if I don't particularly agree with it.
This "Microformatting" concept is predicated on the idea that data is (or should be) human-readable in its default state, but with mechanisms that make it easier to translate it into something machine-readable. This seems backwards to me.
Humans only need to be able to comprehend the data structure at two points: input and output. In between, computers may perform a thousand different transfers and transformations on the data, and at those points, the ability to see the data in plain English (or plain Anyotherlanguage) is just excess baggage.
He mentions Webmonkey and Technorati as computer services which essentially work by screen-scraping content intended for humans and hacking it into something for computers. This is not to be encouraged.
The XML output of the author's sample transformation seems like a more logical default storage format for the data. It's easy and flexible to transform this data back into any format desired, and certainly easier than transforming from "Microformatted" XHTML to intermediate XML to target format.
The reason it takes so long is not only do you not use NTSC like the US and Japan
Handheld consoles sold in Europe use NTSC video timing, the same as their counterparts sold anywhere else. Compatibility with European televisions and 50Hz electricity may be a factor in home console release schedules, but is irrelevant when discussing battery-operated handhelds.
Did you maybe mean to post your comment to a different story about Take-Two? I don't see anything in the story suggesting that the SEC investigation is in any way related to the presence of the "Hot Coffee" code on the media GTA was shipped on.
To address your semi-OT point, I understand why Take Two didn't excise the code completely, but I also think they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble when they submitted the game to the ESRB for review. If they had said "early revisions of this game included a sex simulation, which has since been removed, and testing proves this content is inaccessible to the user in the game's current state", they would have had a better defense against allegations that they intended for gamers to find it, and intentionally subverted the ratings board.
And if they couldn't prove that the content was inaccessible, they deserve everything they got as a result.
I find it very strange that your TV does not remember your favorites or display settings after a power cycle.
1. Is it broken? 2. Are you using the unit's power button, or cutting power upstream at a power strip or wall switch? It's possible that the TV is designed in such a way to require a trickle of "standby" power to retain those settings.
# the requirement the ".3" portion be satisfied, i.e., if you didn't give a ".3" extension, it wasn't valid.
May have been an issue in DOS 1.0, but later versions had no such requirement. I've created plenty of files without extensions., and if I looked through my filesystem right now I'd probably find
# the semantic mapping of the extension to filetype, WTF?
It's a very loose mapping, though. WordPerfect still opened (or tried to) any file you asked it to, regardless of what the last three letters of the filename were. Most other DOS applications did the same.
Using part of the filename to hint at a file's contents was standard practice at the time. We still do it in Unix-based systems, do we not?
# the implied (don't remember if it was canonical) semantic that no ".3" extension meant the file was a directory
DOS 1.x did not have a concept of directories, and DOS 3.x had no such implication. So if this behavior existed at all, it could only have been in the little used 2.x release.
# the case insensitive nature of file names
There are arguments for and against case-sensitive filenames. For the user, case-insensitive is a lot easier. For the careful programmer, slightly more difficult. For the sloppy programmer, a lot more difficult.
PCs took off because Windows provided an equal format for everyone.
Except they didn't. There was a standard system baseline in PC/MS-DOS for a decade before Windows gained any popularity, and even at the height of Wintel's dominance there were still non-negligible numbers of users on other systems like Macintosh.
Just because you have 1200+ emails relating to a project doesn't necessarily mean you are doing your job.
I don't think the argument is that the number of emails proves that a good job is being done, but rather that the proof is in the CONTENTS of those 1200 emails.
And for those games that are released cross-platform for both the 360 and the PS3, I expect to see a lot of lowest-common-denominator coding. Given the choice between developing two divergent codebases highly optimized for the systems' respective CPUs, or a baseline PowerPC codebase that only needs slight tweaking to give decent performance on each platform, which do you think small-to-medium development houses are more likely to pursue?
I'm sorry, but in the United States, slavery and apartheid of black people ended on a national level a long time ago.
I don't consider 50-ish years to be "a long time".
You almost never see an advertisement that doesn't include a black person or an asian person right up there with white people.
I can't understand why you find this to be problematic. Are there really products that should only be marketed to and enjoyed by white people?
There's no white history month, is there?
Every month of the school year is White History Month. Our history books were written mostly by whites, and have a marked bias towards Eurocentrism. I don't find it offensive to point out that the peoples of Africa (or Asia, or the Americas) had histories of their own hapenning in parallel to those in Europe, and I don't find it offensive to make a concerted effort to offer a more comprehensive historical view.
"Oh, he's black, the poor thing; we should give him extra money because he's black." is exactly the message that affirmative action sends to me.
I'm sorry that you interpret the message in that way.
There is a statistical correlation (not a causal link, no, but a correlation) between skin color and educational opportunity. If you live in the ghetto, you're more likely to be black, and therefore you're also more likely to have substandard school facilities and teachers, a peer group that discourages academic achievement, and a financial situation that makes college study unattainable without massive assistance in the forms of loans, grants, and scholarships.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.
Did you not even read the Slashdot summary?
The video signal broadcast from the Moon to Earth was higher resolution than standard broadcast TV. Those master tapes of that hi-res signal are now missing, leaving only those low-res second-generation copies that we all saw on TV.
Is it possible that the master tapes never existed? Maybe. But people claim to have viewed them -- are they liars? Conspirators?
What other input devices do we use while playing a console game, beside the gamepad? Maybe a gun... I can't think of anything else.
The past few years have seen a flourishing of alternate input devices for console games: DDR pads, Guitar Hero axes, touch screens (if you consider the DS a proper console), EyeToy cameras...
I think the market has shown that new control paradigms can be market successes if properly supported (and no, Xavix showcasing their silly sports simulators in Guitar Centers instead of electronics stores doesn't qualify). It will be interesting to see how well the Wiimote concept lives up to its potential, and it's certainly too soon to say definitively whether it will succeed or fail.
How do they do to make critters chase PacMan? Or they just don't and wonder around in the maze?
The ghosts have never chased PacMan around the maze, even though it seems an awful lot like they are when you find yourself in their paths.
Ghost movement patterns are predetermined and unrelated to the player's actions, as anyone who's looked at the slipcover inside Buckner and Garcia's "Pac Man Fever" LP could tell you.
He wants a handheld computer. Radio Shack can't even begin to touch what he needs.
He wants a project box. RS has plenty of basic project boxes in stock, even if the sales staff has no idea what they are for.
I have a design for a device that is inevitable, and could be made with today's technology. The problem is that I have no idea how to get a patent, it just seems to complex for me to figure out.
You could always hire a patent attorney...
The government doesn't "already" have the money. If they didn't they wouldn't be borrowing against future revenues to fund so much of the unnecessary shit they do.
The "[instead of Sonic]" seems to be the work of the story submitter, and not an accurate quote.
Kalinske's point is valid, though -- the pack-in game (remember those?) was an important factor in console sales, especially in its role in providing a mascot, an identity, for the system.
Nintendo always had Mario, the most successful (and sometimes-overused) mascot in gaming history.
NEC started out weakly with Keith Courage, but later realized their mistake and replaced him with a much stronger mascot in Bonk.
The mascot of the Sega Master System was a robe-wearing monkeyboy named Alex Kidd, and the console floundered.
The launch mascot of the Genesis was -- whom? Did the guy(s) in Altered Beast even have a name? Genesis needed a mascot, and Kalinske saw great potential in the character that was to become Sonic, and put him into that role. Wisely, too, if you consider all the would-be franchise stars that copied their attitude and gameplay from Sonic: Bubsy, Jazz Jackrabbit, et al.
I'll say it again - you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a PS2 or X-Box commercial. Even Nintendo had their share of marketing blitz. The Dreamcast? Word of mouth does not work well in console sales.
Really? You don't remember the ads showing a variety of game characters interacting in the "arena" in the interior of a Dreamcast console, or the whispered "It's thinking" tagline? There was a time for a while where I couldn't watch TV for fifteen minutes without seeing a Dreamcast commercial.
Whether prerendered footage of unfamiliar characters making suble references to online play was the best way to tout the console's abilities to the public is another discussion entirely.
When you buy a copyright protected item, you own that particular thing.
That particular instance of that thing, yes. If you buy a copy of a book, you own that paper and ink and binding glue.
You need zero license to make standard use of that particular thing you purchased.
You need zero license to make NON-standard use of that thing either, as long as that use is legal. You can run your brand new copy of "The Da Vinci Code" through a crosscut shredder and use it as confetti, if you like. In fact, I recommend this.
The only things you CAN'T do by law with a purchased copy of a copyrighted work are those actions expressly forbidden by the copyright law.
What, you're screen is black? Yeah that's normal. Like I said, DNF graphics...
I dunno, black screen sounds more like Doom 3 graphics to me...
This is another case of pulling the race card when race was not involved
The ad campaign specifically drew attention to a struggle between two people, one with fair skin and one with dark skin. How can you claim "race was not involved"?
The ad may not be RACIST, but it is indisputably RACIAL.
It's 'Firefox'. Not 'FireFox'.
You must have missed the latest Renaming.
Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox -> FireFox -> ???
Safari pisses me off though because lack of design mode is a major flaw, but one that is obviously fixable.
I don't have a bathtub in my kitchen. It would be very easy to hire a plumber to have one installed, but I won't. Why not? Because a bathtub does not belong in a kitchen.
Apple doesn't seem to be of the opinion that it's appropriate for a web BROWSING application to incorporate the features of a web AUTHORING tool. I find this to be a reasonable design decision, even if I don't particularly agree with it.
This "Microformatting" concept is predicated on the idea that data is (or should be) human-readable in its default state, but with mechanisms that make it easier to translate it into something machine-readable. This seems backwards to me.
Humans only need to be able to comprehend the data structure at two points: input and output. In between, computers may perform a thousand different transfers and transformations on the data, and at those points, the ability to see the data in plain English (or plain Anyotherlanguage) is just excess baggage.
He mentions Webmonkey and Technorati as computer services which essentially work by screen-scraping content intended for humans and hacking it into something for computers. This is not to be encouraged.
The XML output of the author's sample transformation seems like a more logical default storage format for the data. It's easy and flexible to transform this data back into any format desired, and certainly easier than transforming from "Microformatted" XHTML to intermediate XML to target format.
The reason it takes so long is not only do you not use NTSC like the US and Japan
Handheld consoles sold in Europe use NTSC video timing, the same as their counterparts sold anywhere else. Compatibility with European televisions and 50Hz electricity may be a factor in home console release schedules, but is irrelevant when discussing battery-operated handhelds.
Good luck in explaining the spike in traffic 3 full days after the article was posted.
And then there will be another spike two days after that!
Web-physicists call it "The Slashdupe Effect".
Did you maybe mean to post your comment to a different story about Take-Two? I don't see anything in the story suggesting that the SEC investigation is in any way related to the presence of the "Hot Coffee" code on the media GTA was shipped on.
To address your semi-OT point, I understand why Take Two didn't excise the code completely, but I also think they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble when they submitted the game to the ESRB for review. If they had said "early revisions of this game included a sex simulation, which has since been removed, and testing proves this content is inaccessible to the user in the game's current state", they would have had a better defense against allegations that they intended for gamers to find it, and intentionally subverted the ratings board.
And if they couldn't prove that the content was inaccessible, they deserve everything they got as a result.
I find it very strange that your TV does not remember your favorites or display settings after a power cycle.
1. Is it broken?
2. Are you using the unit's power button, or cutting power upstream at a power strip or wall switch? It's possible that the TV is designed in such a way to require a trickle of "standby" power to retain those settings.
# the requirement the ".3" portion be satisfied, i.e., if you didn't give a ".3" extension, it wasn't valid.
May have been an issue in DOS 1.0, but later versions had no such requirement. I've created plenty of files without extensions., and if I looked through my filesystem right now I'd probably find
# the semantic mapping of the extension to filetype, WTF?
It's a very loose mapping, though. WordPerfect still opened (or tried to) any file you asked it to, regardless of what the last three letters of the filename were. Most other DOS applications did the same.
Using part of the filename to hint at a file's contents was standard practice at the time. We still do it in Unix-based systems, do we not?
# the implied (don't remember if it was canonical) semantic that no ".3" extension meant the file was a directory
DOS 1.x did not have a concept of directories, and DOS 3.x had no such implication. So if this behavior existed at all, it could only have been in the little used 2.x release.
# the case insensitive nature of file names
There are arguments for and against case-sensitive filenames. For the user, case-insensitive is a lot easier. For the careful programmer, slightly more difficult. For the sloppy programmer, a lot more difficult.
Result in a nutshell: If I own a DVD, I cannot pay someone to make a copy of that movie for me sans parts I might find offensive.
Unless that person has an agreement with the creators of the movie giving them the RIGHT to make a COPY of it, then no. You cannot.
Or is it simply a case of "censoring is ok, as long as the studio does it?"
It's a case of "distributing a derivative of a copyrighted work is ok, as long as the copyright holder approves of it."
PCs took off because Windows provided an equal format for everyone.
Except they didn't. There was a standard system baseline in PC/MS-DOS for a decade before Windows gained any popularity, and even at the height of Wintel's dominance there were still non-negligible numbers of users on other systems like Macintosh.
Just because you have 1200+ emails relating to a project doesn't necessarily mean you are doing your job.
I don't think the argument is that the number of emails proves that a good job is being done, but rather that the proof is in the CONTENTS of those 1200 emails.
And for those games that are released cross-platform for both the 360 and the PS3, I expect to see a lot of lowest-common-denominator coding. Given the choice between developing two divergent codebases highly optimized for the systems' respective CPUs, or a baseline PowerPC codebase that only needs slight tweaking to give decent performance on each platform, which do you think small-to-medium development houses are more likely to pursue?
I'm sorry, but in the United States, slavery and apartheid of black people ended on a national level a long time ago.
I don't consider 50-ish years to be "a long time".
You almost never see an advertisement that doesn't include a black person or an asian person right up there with white people.
I can't understand why you find this to be problematic. Are there really products that should only be marketed to and enjoyed by white people?
There's no white history month, is there?
Every month of the school year is White History Month. Our history books were written mostly by whites, and have a marked bias towards Eurocentrism. I don't find it offensive to point out that the peoples of Africa (or Asia, or the Americas) had histories of their own hapenning in parallel to those in Europe, and I don't find it offensive to make a concerted effort to offer a more comprehensive historical view.
"Oh, he's black, the poor thing; we should give him extra money because he's black." is exactly the message that affirmative action sends to me.
I'm sorry that you interpret the message in that way.
There is a statistical correlation (not a causal link, no, but a correlation) between skin color and educational opportunity. If you live in the ghetto, you're more likely to be black, and therefore you're also more likely to have substandard school facilities and teachers, a peer group that discourages academic achievement, and a financial situation that makes college study unattainable without massive assistance in the forms of loans, grants, and scholarships.