If a DDR pad is a motion detector because it can tell which contact switches you're stepping on, then a standard gamepad must be a motion detector too. It can detect the movement of your thumbs.
I'm disappointed at how much was left out of this article. The tilt sensor inside the GBA cart for Wario Ware: Twisted, for example. Or hell, the tilt sensor inside any pinball table.
There are a full thirteen buttons on the PS2 controller which Katamari Damacy ignores. The entire game is played with two joysticks.
Okay. But imagine how much MORE fun Katamari might have been if the most natural interface for rolling a ball around -- a trackball, naturally -- had been available.
It's great that Takahashi figured out a way to shoehorn an intuitive control scheme onto a decade-old input device. But not every game designer can, or should be expected to, work under those same constraints.
Sure I'm not right [for ripping rented DVD's] but neither are they [for putting unskippable ad content on the DVD's]. They might be "legal" but that doesn't make them right.
And since two wrongs DO make a right, your system works out great for everybody in the end.
Oh sure, you won't resent it at all since you'll never buy it. But what about the masses?
I'm going to assume that none of Philips' competitors are going to be dumb enough to implement this technology in their own devices, because 1) they don't want to license the patent from a competitor and 2) they don't want to make their customers resent them.
Thus, only a fraction of the TV models offered for sale will have this mis-feature. The Masses may by chance end up buying such models, but, having had the ability to change channels or skip commercials for the past thirty to sixty years, they will be just as mad about an applicance telling them what they can or can't do, and will exchange the defective devices for models that work the way they expect. Philips televisions will become even more derided and avoided than Sorny or Magnetbox.
(That is, IF Philips actually goes through with putting this technology into a consumer product. Which I don't expect they ever will.)
Around Seattle, there are a _lot_ of people with Plasma displays
What does "a _lot_" mean? 8% of the TV-owning public, instead of just 3%?
And the people that already own HDMI equipment are the same kind of people who want better quality and will go for HD-DVD.
That goes without saying. I just don't believe that group of people is large enough to provide critical mass for widespread adoption of this technology.
Believe it or not, some people watch DVDs on crappy 27" tubes from 1985 through the composite interfaces.
I believe it, and I think it proves my point. There's a _LOT_ of people out there who simply don't care enough about picture quality to replace their perfectly-functional TVs and DVD players with new and improved HDTVs and HD-DVD players. The only way those people will upgrade is when their old equipment dies and there isn't any more inexpensive non-HD hardware on the market anymore--and that day is far into the future. I mean, you can still buy black-and-white TV sets with RF antenna inputs in 2006...
I think your comment contained a lot of insight and solid reasoning, there's just a couple bits of it I take exception to.
do I really want to physically move something every single time I play a game?
Like your thumbs?
I doubt that operating the Revo-mote will be any more physically taxing than operating a mouse, or a standard joystick or gamepad for that matter. Sure, there may be some games where swinging it around like a sword or a baseball bat makes sense, but I suspect most games that use its positional abilities are going to require only small and simple wrist movements.
There's already the problem on the DS with developers who are feel they absolutely must utilize the touch screen an end up with a weak game as a result.
I'm going to assign the blame for that on the developers, not the DS hardware. Consider Mario Kart DS, most certainly one of the best DS games so far, and the only place the touchscreen is a must-use is on the logo painting screen. That's an example where the game producers were rightly focused on gameplay over innovation. Certainly there are counter-examples to this--I hear there are complaints about touchscreen features feeling pasted-on in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow--but I wouldn't take them as an indictment of the desire to innovate in general.
Can someone explain to me why a game released in Japan was thought to be "too difficult" for players in the U.S.?
Circa 1986, I'd guess that the average age of a Nintendo player in Japan was ~24, and the average age in the United States was closer to ~12. A game that might offer a suitable challenge for an adult gamer might make a child gamer throw the controller across the room in frustration.
Twenty years later, and the US has caught up with Japan as far as ages go. I'd expect local difficulty variations to be less pronounced now (especially with the advent of worldwide multiplayer online gaming).
True, but by the time of the NES's North American launch, Japanese developers had already moved on to develop the second generation of scrolling platformers (e.g. Metroid). I think we need to admit that at least part of SMB1's popularity was due to its status as the pack-in game for most of the NES's that were sold.
Maybe it's not canon because the entire game is a dream sequence.:)
HELLO SPOILER WARNING PLEASE
Just because Mario dreamed the events and creatures seen in SMB2 doesn't mean they didn't exist in his reality, as well. In fact, if he dreamed of Shyguys and Bob-Ombs, it's probably more likely that those are animals he had encountered in his real life, instead of being entirely imagined.
Making fun of the handicapped is not the role of an encyclopedia
No, but disseminating information about noteworthy (or even just meme-worthy) persons IS within the role of an encyclopedia, and therefore it is legitimate for a Wikipedia page about Mr. Peppers to exist.
Proper contents for such a page would include biographical information about him, information about his physical condition, and facts pertaining to his status as a registered sex offender. "Making fun of him" would not be proper. The issue, then, is whether Wiki administrators, in attempting to prevent the latter, have gone too far and prevented the former as well.
Even the most aggressive cable internet sales pitches I see these days don't make any claims stronger than "up to 100x average dial-up speeds". The "up to" phrase is of course an easy out for them: they could deliver speeds of 80x dial-up, or 20x dialup, and still be delivering as advertised; they could even deliver speeds of 0.5x dialup and still be complying with the letter of the agreement, if not the spirit.
Duke can write you an e-mail probably telling you to "keep it real!"
I guess the only question is whether the open SMTP relay that the game uses to send you this email will be installed on your PC along with the game binaries, or whether it will be a centralized service that any player or other person who needs to send mail can access across the internet.
the manufacturer makes no claims about how well it will overclock.
THANK you.
Since the retail product and review sample were both rated as DDR2-667 (or is it 553? Depends on whether you're reading page 2 or page 2 of the "article"), neither one needed to perform reliably at memory clock rates any higher than 333.5MHz. That the retail product didn't fail until it was overclocked to 25% more than its rating suggests to me that it's solid kit.
I would also hesitate to conclude from the findings that any hardware vendor routinely sends out review samples that outperform retail units. We only have TWO data points here, not enough to extrapolate any type of meaningful findings. For all we know, a different review sample from the same manufacturer would fail at only 340MHz.
I have no idea what a DLL is. I don't know what it means to flash BIOS. Why? Because I have never needed to know, nor have I wanted to know.
I have been a Windows user for over 10 years. I know what a DLL is, but apart from dropping one for a Visual Basic Runtime into the System folder, and occasionally trawling through them for interesting icon resources, I've never had any reason to deal with them. And I've never ever in my life flashed a BIOS. I've never had a reason to.
Before we can answer your question about what outstanding Windows software is out there, we need to know what you're interested in. A graphic designer is going to have a different list of essential programs than a home-studio musician, than a casual internet user and occasional work-from-homer.
Re:Not go gushing about Woz but.....
on
I, Woz
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Although woz would probably not like it, there should be some sort of Nerd/Geek cannonization....
I wouldn't like to be shot out of a cannon, either.
Some Geeks might, but I'd imagine that only applies in smaller circuses, where there's few enough that the same guy who bites heads of chickens also has to perform as an acrobat...
1) Paul Allen doesn't hold a technical candle to Woz 2) Bill Gates doesn't hold a visionary candle to Jobs
And it's because of these two reasons that Apple controls about 90% of the home computer market, and Microsoft, while profitable, remains little more than a niche player.
Or perhaps there's some other factors involved than raw technical and visionary prowess.
Too bad that the Semantic Web is a pipe dream at the moment.
Too bad that the Semantic Web will always be a pipe dream, at least until the day comes when it's possible for a computer to understand the semantic content of a document with zero hinting from the author. The potential is there, but the willingness of humans to spend time explaining semantic structures to machines, when they're obvious enough to other humans, is lacking.
Even if the Nintendo Rev-omote did use gyroscopes to detect motion, there's no reason why a properly designed input driver wouldn't establish a movement threshhold, so that the tiny movements of your arm as it stabilizes itself don't do anything onscreen, but a sharp flick of the wrist does.
The primary flaw of the NES Power Glove was that it didn't have any such system to deal with drift. The only way it could be used with many games was to press the re-center button every few seconds.
So, basically if I have to wait until the next day to view a free broadcast TV program I missed when it aired live the night before, I should still use my favorite TV torrent site, where I can get a commercial-free copy that I can keep indefinitely.
I'd guess that 90% of households don't have large screen hidef TV's yet. And since the only HD content available these days is Xbox 360 games and a handful of broadcast and premium cable channels, I don't think HDTV adoption is going to be a factor until the console generation AFTER this coming one.
Sony and Microsoft will copy it immediately. And that will leave the Revolution where, exactly?
Sitting on top of a pile of cash from Nintendo's patent holdings?
Consider the digital D-pad. Nintendo patented their plus-shaped implementation of it; avoiding license fees are why the PlayStations have each direction as a separate button, and why the Xbox controllers (and the Sega controllers they descend from) have a raised plus on top of a disc.
In the end, Nintendo's implementation is simply better.
The English language is a beautiful one and not everything is about efficiency, speed and clarity.
Not everything is, but newspapers are.
Want clever wordplay? Visit the Humor section at your local bookstore. While you're there, you can page through a few volumes of Jay Leno's "Headlines" books, which show the results of what happens when newspaper copyeditors forget about efficiency, speed, and clarity.
Slashdot Mirror
So they take it up a notch. How hardcore a golfer are you? "Oh, well I spent $1000 on this space age driver." "Oh well, I have a $4500 simulator."
I have a bigger dick than them, and God gave it to me for free. And that burns them up.
Why don't you call your local bar association and ask for a referral to an employement lawyer?
The bar association wouldn't give me a referral unless I filled out an electronic form specifying what kind of lawyer I wanted to talk to!
If a DDR pad is a motion detector because it can tell which contact switches you're stepping on, then a standard gamepad must be a motion detector too. It can detect the movement of your thumbs.
I'm disappointed at how much was left out of this article. The tilt sensor inside the GBA cart for Wario Ware: Twisted, for example. Or hell, the tilt sensor inside any pinball table.
There are a full thirteen buttons on the PS2 controller which Katamari Damacy ignores. The entire game is played with two joysticks.
Okay. But imagine how much MORE fun Katamari might have been if the most natural interface for rolling a ball around -- a trackball, naturally -- had been available.
It's great that Takahashi figured out a way to shoehorn an intuitive control scheme onto a decade-old input device. But not every game designer can, or should be expected to, work under those same constraints.
Sure I'm not right [for ripping rented DVD's] but neither are they [for putting unskippable ad content on the DVD's]. They might be "legal" but that doesn't make them right.
And since two wrongs DO make a right, your system works out great for everybody in the end.
Oh sure, you won't resent it at all since you'll never buy it.
But what about the masses?
I'm going to assume that none of Philips' competitors are going to be dumb enough to implement this technology in their own devices, because 1) they don't want to license the patent from a competitor and 2) they don't want to make their customers resent them.
Thus, only a fraction of the TV models offered for sale will have this mis-feature. The Masses may by chance end up buying such models, but, having had the ability to change channels or skip commercials for the past thirty to sixty years, they will be just as mad about an applicance telling them what they can or can't do, and will exchange the defective devices for models that work the way they expect. Philips televisions will become even more derided and avoided than Sorny or Magnetbox.
(That is, IF Philips actually goes through with putting this technology into a consumer product. Which I don't expect they ever will.)
Around Seattle, there are a _lot_ of people with Plasma displays
What does "a _lot_" mean? 8% of the TV-owning public, instead of just 3%?
And the people that already own HDMI equipment are the same kind of people who want better quality and will go for HD-DVD.
That goes without saying. I just don't believe that group of people is large enough to provide critical mass for widespread adoption of this technology.
Believe it or not, some people watch DVDs on crappy 27" tubes from 1985 through the composite interfaces.
I believe it, and I think it proves my point. There's a _LOT_ of people out there who simply don't care enough about picture quality to replace their perfectly-functional TVs and DVD players with new and improved HDTVs and HD-DVD players. The only way those people will upgrade is when their old equipment dies and there isn't any more inexpensive non-HD hardware on the market anymore--and that day is far into the future. I mean, you can still buy black-and-white TV sets with RF antenna inputs in 2006...
I think your comment contained a lot of insight and solid reasoning, there's just a couple bits of it I take exception to.
do I really want to physically move something every single time I play a game?
Like your thumbs?
I doubt that operating the Revo-mote will be any more physically taxing than operating a mouse, or a standard joystick or gamepad for that matter. Sure, there may be some games where swinging it around like a sword or a baseball bat makes sense, but I suspect most games that use its positional abilities are going to require only small and simple wrist movements.
There's already the problem on the DS with developers who are feel they absolutely must utilize the touch screen an end up with a weak game as a result.
I'm going to assign the blame for that on the developers, not the DS hardware. Consider Mario Kart DS, most certainly one of the best DS games so far, and the only place the touchscreen is a must-use is on the logo painting screen. That's an example where the game producers were rightly focused on gameplay over innovation. Certainly there are counter-examples to this--I hear there are complaints about touchscreen features feeling pasted-on in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow--but I wouldn't take them as an indictment of the desire to innovate in general.
Can someone explain to me why a game released in Japan was thought to be "too difficult" for players in the U.S.?
Circa 1986, I'd guess that the average age of a Nintendo player in Japan was ~24, and the average age in the United States was closer to ~12. A game that might offer a suitable challenge for an adult gamer might make a child gamer throw the controller across the room in frustration.
Twenty years later, and the US has caught up with Japan as far as ages go. I'd expect local difficulty variations to be less pronounced now (especially with the advent of worldwide multiplayer online gaming).
first worthwhile 2D sidescroller...
True, but by the time of the NES's North American launch, Japanese developers had already moved on to develop the second generation of scrolling platformers (e.g. Metroid). I think we need to admit that at least part of SMB1's popularity was due to its status as the pack-in game for most of the NES's that were sold.
Maybe it's not canon because the entire game is a dream sequence. :)
HELLO SPOILER WARNING PLEASE
Just because Mario dreamed the events and creatures seen in SMB2 doesn't mean they didn't exist in his reality, as well. In fact, if he dreamed of Shyguys and Bob-Ombs, it's probably more likely that those are animals he had encountered in his real life, instead of being entirely imagined.
(Are Bob-Ombs animals?)
Ok, for next time:
WARNING: THIS VIDEO FILE OF A COUPLE MORONS FIREBOMBING A BUILDING MAY CONTAIN POLITICALLY DISAGREEABLE LANGUAGE.
(In my own experience I didn't find Cornell to be excessively PC, either. Maybe things have changed.)
Making fun of the handicapped is not the role of an encyclopedia
No, but disseminating information about noteworthy (or even just meme-worthy) persons IS within the role of an encyclopedia, and therefore it is legitimate for a Wikipedia page about Mr. Peppers to exist.
Proper contents for such a page would include biographical information about him, information about his physical condition, and facts pertaining to his status as a registered sex offender. "Making fun of him" would not be proper. The issue, then, is whether Wiki administrators, in attempting to prevent the latter, have gone too far and prevented the former as well.
No ISP has ever advertised "unlimited bandwidth".
Even the most aggressive cable internet sales pitches I see these days don't make any claims stronger than "up to 100x average dial-up speeds". The "up to" phrase is of course an easy out for them: they could deliver speeds of 80x dial-up, or 20x dialup, and still be delivering as advertised; they could even deliver speeds of 0.5x dialup and still be complying with the letter of the agreement, if not the spirit.
Duke can write you an e-mail probably telling you to "keep it real!"
I guess the only question is whether the open SMTP relay that the game uses to send you this email will be installed on your PC along with the game binaries, or whether it will be a centralized service that any player or other person who needs to send mail can access across the internet.
the manufacturer makes no claims about how well it will overclock.
THANK you.
Since the retail product and review sample were both rated as DDR2-667 (or is it 553? Depends on whether you're reading page 2 or page 2 of the "article"), neither one needed to perform reliably at memory clock rates any higher than 333.5MHz. That the retail product didn't fail until it was overclocked to 25% more than its rating suggests to me that it's solid kit.
I would also hesitate to conclude from the findings that any hardware vendor routinely sends out review samples that outperform retail units. We only have TWO data points here, not enough to extrapolate any type of meaningful findings. For all we know, a different review sample from the same manufacturer would fail at only 340MHz.
I have no idea what a DLL is. I don't know what it means to flash BIOS. Why? Because I have never needed to know, nor have I wanted to know.
I have been a Windows user for over 10 years. I know what a DLL is, but apart from dropping one for a Visual Basic Runtime into the System folder, and occasionally trawling through them for interesting icon resources, I've never had any reason to deal with them. And I've never ever in my life flashed a BIOS. I've never had a reason to.
Before we can answer your question about what outstanding Windows software is out there, we need to know what you're interested in. A graphic designer is going to have a different list of essential programs than a home-studio musician, than a casual internet user and occasional work-from-homer.
Although woz would probably not like it, there should be some sort of Nerd/Geek cannonization....
I wouldn't like to be shot out of a cannon, either.
Some Geeks might, but I'd imagine that only applies in smaller circuses, where there's few enough that the same guy who bites heads of chickens also has to perform as an acrobat...
1) Paul Allen doesn't hold a technical candle to Woz
2) Bill Gates doesn't hold a visionary candle to Jobs
And it's because of these two reasons that Apple controls about 90% of the home computer market, and Microsoft, while profitable, remains little more than a niche player.
Or perhaps there's some other factors involved than raw technical and visionary prowess.
Too bad that the Semantic Web is a pipe dream at the moment.
Too bad that the Semantic Web will always be a pipe dream, at least until the day comes when it's possible for a computer to understand the semantic content of a document with zero hinting from the author. The potential is there, but the willingness of humans to spend time explaining semantic structures to machines, when they're obvious enough to other humans, is lacking.
Even if the Nintendo Rev-omote did use gyroscopes to detect motion, there's no reason why a properly designed input driver wouldn't establish a movement threshhold, so that the tiny movements of your arm as it stabilizes itself don't do anything onscreen, but a sharp flick of the wrist does.
The primary flaw of the NES Power Glove was that it didn't have any such system to deal with drift. The only way it could be used with many games was to press the re-center button every few seconds.
So, basically if I have to wait until the next day to view a free broadcast TV program I missed when it aired live the night before, I should still use my favorite TV torrent site, where I can get a commercial-free copy that I can keep indefinitely.
I'd guess that 90% of households don't have large screen hidef TV's yet. And since the only HD content available these days is Xbox 360 games and a handful of broadcast and premium cable channels, I don't think HDTV adoption is going to be a factor until the console generation AFTER this coming one.
Sony and Microsoft will copy it immediately. And that will leave the Revolution where, exactly?
Sitting on top of a pile of cash from Nintendo's patent holdings?
Consider the digital D-pad. Nintendo patented their plus-shaped implementation of it; avoiding license fees are why the PlayStations have each direction as a separate button, and why the Xbox controllers (and the Sega controllers they descend from) have a raised plus on top of a disc.
In the end, Nintendo's implementation is simply better.
The English language is a beautiful one and not everything is about efficiency, speed and clarity.
Not everything is, but newspapers are.
Want clever wordplay? Visit the Humor section at your local bookstore. While you're there, you can page through a few volumes of Jay Leno's "Headlines" books, which show the results of what happens when newspaper copyeditors forget about efficiency, speed, and clarity.