It's not exactly like 47 billion is a hard number to handle.
Not on a modern 64-bit CPU with loads of disk space and RAM, no.
It takes 43 binary digits to story a value of $47 billion (to a one-cent precision). Chances are good that memory was at such a premium decades ago, when the IRS processing code was first developed, that it would have been considered ludicrous to dedicate the space required for such a value.
I'd say it's probably because their SOFTWARE has some sort of limitation, using low precision numbers or the like
Sure. But really, it's not the precision that gets ya, it's the scale.
OLED technology just isn't good enough for this to be viable yet.
Which begs the question of why they're attempting to use full-color OLED technology in the first place.
A sensible first-pass at a device of this type would be a small keypad (perhaps a numeric pad, or a row of function keys) with low-resolution, monochromatic LCD displays in them. The technology is extremely cheap and reliable, and as Susan Kare demonstrated with the classic Mac system icons, even 32x32x1 is sufficient to get across a good amount of visual information.
Once THAT technology works and demonstrates that it's commercially viable, THEN you jazz it up with cutting-edge materials, color, backlighting and all that sweet stuff.
That's exactly the strategy Nintendo used to undercut the competition and win the portable console market.
"... after he photographed gas storage cylinders at the city's Shell oil refinery" This seems to be sensitive and could have caused trouble if such pictures land up in the hands of terrorists.
If the location and appearance of gas storage cylinders is such sensitive information, then those cylinders shouldn't be left out in the open where any member of the public can see them.
You know, if you had treated that police officer as someone who could help you, rather than mouthing off and daring him to arrest you, you probably wouldn't have stayed lost.
Australia might be different, but at least in the US, they can't drag you off without a charge.
Wow, five games, two of which aren't released yet.
And yet, those three titles have drawn nearly as many players to Nintendo WiFi in a few months as it has taken Xbox Live years to. Kinda makes you think, no?
The interchangable sleeves also allowed the game pad to be customized for looks and ease of finding buttons. You don't need to remember buttun 6 is for selecting X, because there was a picture of that item right on the controller.
Unless you lost or destroyed the keypad overlay for the game. Not like keypads are for looking at, anyway. The gamer's eyes, not unlike a touch typist's eyes, should stay on the screen almost all the time.
I think the Gamecube controller is well-designed from a usability standpoint, because despite the large number of buttons and gizmos available, pressing the correct one is often a simple matter of intuition -- it's probably the biggest button, the one that's directly under your thumb in its natural position.
on the Dual Shock 2, the four buttons (triangle, square, circle, X) are velocity/pressure-sensitive
Is it velocity-sensitive, or pressure-sensitive? The two are not equivalent.
A velocity-sensitive button has two switches at the ends of its travel range. By measuring the time between state changes of the two switches, it can be calculated how fast the button was pressed (or released), but once pressed, no pressure fluctuation is available.
Pressure-sensitive buttons use a single switch barrier that varies in conductivity depending on how much pressure is applied to it. A light touch might allow 0.1V through, for example, and a firm press might allow 1.0V.
In the world of MIDI musical instruments, this is the difference between note velocity (which is almost universally implemented, 'cos it's cheap and easy) and note aftertouch (which is more rare, because it requires each of the usually 50+ keys to have its own pressure-sensitive switch).
For console controllers, which may have 10 buttons per unit, pressure sensitivity is not unreasonable.
I'm not even convinced that the second half of the Revolution controller should ever be used.
The spatial movement features of the "remote" already give you 5 axes of motion (up/down, left/right, forward/back, plus pitch and yaw) -- is there a need for the additional 2 axes provided by the thumbstick add-on?
The 5200 joystick may have been a 16-direction model, at best, but it certainly was not a 360.
The 5200 had an analog stick (with no centering and poorly-designed potentiometer rails that made diagonal movements irregular). Are you thinking of the Intellivision's 8-switch, 16-directional digital stick?
The console bias means that all the analog controllers of home computers are ignored by this article. The original IBM PC joystick interface, the one that musicians hung their MIDI interfaces off of in the days before USB and Firewire, was designed to have 2 joysticks attached to it, each with 2 digital buttons and 2 axes of analog joystick control.
Even my trusty CoCo's joysticks were analog -- CoCo BASIC even had functions for reading them.
Rumours are the other prizes include books on forming lasting interpersonal relationships, 7-day trips to Club Med, and the book 'Romance for Dummies.'
Y'know, those that live in Slash houses shouldn't cast stones...
Re:Do people actually log-in when searching Google
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What is everyone doing on the web that they don't want others to see?
Paying my credit card bill? Inquiring about the status of my Social Security account?
its much better to use something open source that doesn't censor results for opressive regimes
Which would be whom, exactly?
ALL SEARCH ENGINES that do business in China are filtering results there as per the local laws. The reason Google is being singled out for doing it is because their motto is "Don't Be Evil". We EXPECT evil from the likes of MSN and Yahoo.
And maybe in 10 years, it will get there. I still have some Windows software which uses Win3.1 dialogs...
(WinFX does use Win32 extensively underneath, but why emulate 2 API's??)
So people can run Windows software that doesn't use the WinFX API's exclusively, of course (and I expect even Office.NET to fall into this category, at least initially).
And now Congress will vote to make freely-editable online encyclopedias illegal.
"We'd love to fight this blatantly un-Constitutional law," a spokesman for the ACLU said, "but we're all too busy defending child molesters' right to ban school prayer in the womb."
There, now we've got two ludicrious misrepresentations out of the way. Is that enough that we can move on to relevant discourse instead?
It sounds to me like they're trying to avoid antitrust cases from Symantec and other AV software venders.
More likely, they're trying to avoid the cost of either licensing Reputable AntiVirus SE Lite Useless Edition Minus Minus for bundling with the OS, or the cost of buying a reputable AV software company outright.
The punks were politically-motivated and rebelling against the Establishment, and even the establishment in popular culture.
Maybe the first wave of them were, but the copycats that saw what they were doing and emulated it were mostly just brain-dead zombies. Same as any other cultural phenomenon throughout history.
the addition of an analog stick, much like the addition of a backlit screen makes a whole lot of sense
Well, the DS already had backlit screens. The DS Lite merely has brighter backlighting. There probably wasn't even any electronics design work necessary to make this change.
Adding an analog stick would have been a whole different situation. The case design would have to have been radically modified. There would need to be a new version of the control API. It wouldn't be worth the costs unless there was a strong commitment from developers to make use of it.
I think Nintendo has realized that a tiny tiny joystick with maybe a centimeter of travel along each axis is a suboptimal device for analog game control. The DS has the touchscreen for this purpose (although if you've played the Metroid Prime Hunters demo you'll probably agree this new control metaphor isn't quite mature yet). The Revolution is eschewing analog sticks entirely (except on the legacy-compatibility controller attachments) in favor of a unique spatial control concept.
I don't know if Nintendo will end up leading the industry in another direction, but given their past innovations in controller design -- the D-pad, shoulder buttons, and yes, even the analog stick -- it seems plausible that they will.
if they can't adopt a given STANDARD for security reasons... I have no reason to buy their products.
How about "they're fun"? That's a good enough reason for me.
It's not like owning a DS means you have to disable encryption on your 802.11 access point altogether. WEP is supported, and it's still better than nothing.
Don't trust WEP? Drop $30 on Nintendo's USB DS-only Wifi dongle (also Windows-only, but since you mentioned you're a PC gamer I assume this will not be a problem for you).
Or play games over DS peer networking only, or un-networked. They're still fun.
That was the longest paragraph I've ever read. But there was this very insightful statement buried deep within it:
Natural selection is real. I would say, though, that evolution theory is how God did his work. Evolution is an endless process that is still going on today. There's no reason for these two viewpoints to not co-exist.
I am a believer in science and a spiritual agnostic, and I absolutely agree with you. I only wish that the Biblical Literalists and Anti-Intellectuals that are pushing for Intelligent Design in public schools were more open to our shared perspective.
I'd like to see the questions they asked for the survey.
As would I, considering that I can't think of any relevant question for which Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Evolution would be equally appropriate answers.
The concepts don't even share the same space in biological calculus. Creationism/ID is an origin story; Evolution is the story of what has happened between the origin and the present.
Referring specifically to matters of the origin of life and the idea of intraspecies evolution, neither theory is even close to establishing scientific proof of their ideas, yet the intellectually "elite" have no problem ridiculing those who don't believe in evolution wholesale.
Were the scare quotes around elite really necessary? I think I can take it on faith that a respected member of the scientific community is indeed more intellectually elite than a layperson.
I think you'll find that many scienticians (uh) will be more than happy to consider alternate scientific theories on the origin of species, but the simple fact is that ID/Creationism is Not Science.
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You can legally say no [to a police officer asking permission to search your car], and the officer must let you go due to the lack of a warrant.
Or, perhaps just as likely, since the officer already had cause to pull you over, he detains you until a quickie search warrant can be obtained.
It's not exactly like 47 billion is a hard number to handle.
Not on a modern 64-bit CPU with loads of disk space and RAM, no.
It takes 43 binary digits to story a value of $47 billion (to a one-cent precision). Chances are good that memory was at such a premium decades ago, when the IRS processing code was first developed, that it would have been considered ludicrous to dedicate the space required for such a value.
I'd say it's probably because their SOFTWARE has some sort of limitation, using low precision numbers or the like
Sure. But really, it's not the precision that gets ya, it's the scale.
OLED technology just isn't good enough for this to be viable yet.
Which begs the question of why they're attempting to use full-color OLED technology in the first place.
A sensible first-pass at a device of this type would be a small keypad (perhaps a numeric pad, or a row of function keys) with low-resolution, monochromatic LCD displays in them. The technology is extremely cheap and reliable, and as Susan Kare demonstrated with the classic Mac system icons, even 32x32x1 is sufficient to get across a good amount of visual information.
Once THAT technology works and demonstrates that it's commercially viable, THEN you jazz it up with cutting-edge materials, color, backlighting and all that sweet stuff.
That's exactly the strategy Nintendo used to undercut the competition and win the portable console market.
"... after he photographed gas storage cylinders at the city's Shell oil refinery" This seems to be sensitive and could have caused trouble if such pictures land up in the hands of terrorists.
If the location and appearance of gas storage cylinders is such sensitive information, then those cylinders shouldn't be left out in the open where any member of the public can see them.
You know, if you had treated that police officer as someone who could help you, rather than mouthing off and daring him to arrest you, you probably wouldn't have stayed lost.
Australia might be different, but at least in the US, they can't drag you off without a charge.
They shouldn't be able to, but they do.
One of my friends was taking pictures of an industrial facility at night for a photography class - security detained him and destroyed his film.
And this industrial facility -- was it public property?
Wow, five games, two of which aren't released yet.
And yet, those three titles have drawn nearly as many players to Nintendo WiFi in a few months as it has taken Xbox Live years to. Kinda makes you think, no?
The interchangable sleeves also allowed the game pad to be customized for looks and ease of finding buttons. You don't need to remember buttun 6 is for selecting X, because there was a picture of that item right on the controller.
Unless you lost or destroyed the keypad overlay for the game. Not like keypads are for looking at, anyway. The gamer's eyes, not unlike a touch typist's eyes, should stay on the screen almost all the time.
I think the Gamecube controller is well-designed from a usability standpoint, because despite the large number of buttons and gizmos available, pressing the correct one is often a simple matter of intuition -- it's probably the biggest button, the one that's directly under your thumb in its natural position.
on the Dual Shock 2, the four buttons (triangle, square, circle, X) are velocity/pressure-sensitive
Is it velocity-sensitive, or pressure-sensitive? The two are not equivalent.
A velocity-sensitive button has two switches at the ends of its travel range. By measuring the time between state changes of the two switches, it can be calculated how fast the button was pressed (or released), but once pressed, no pressure fluctuation is available.
Pressure-sensitive buttons use a single switch barrier that varies in conductivity depending on how much pressure is applied to it. A light touch might allow 0.1V through, for example, and a firm press might allow 1.0V.
In the world of MIDI musical instruments, this is the difference between note velocity (which is almost universally implemented, 'cos it's cheap and easy) and note aftertouch (which is more rare, because it requires each of the usually 50+ keys to have its own pressure-sensitive switch).
For console controllers, which may have 10 buttons per unit, pressure sensitivity is not unreasonable.
Revolution: Put down one half of controller.
I'm not even convinced that the second half of the Revolution controller should ever be used.
The spatial movement features of the "remote" already give you 5 axes of motion (up/down, left/right, forward/back, plus pitch and yaw) -- is there a need for the additional 2 axes provided by the thumbstick add-on?
The 5200 joystick may have been a 16-direction model, at best, but it certainly was not a 360.
The 5200 had an analog stick (with no centering and poorly-designed potentiometer rails that made diagonal movements irregular). Are you thinking of the Intellivision's 8-switch, 16-directional digital stick?
The console bias means that all the analog controllers of home computers are ignored by this article. The original IBM PC joystick interface, the one that musicians hung their MIDI interfaces off of in the days before USB and Firewire, was designed to have 2 joysticks attached to it, each with 2 digital buttons and 2 axes of analog joystick control.
Even my trusty CoCo's joysticks were analog -- CoCo BASIC even had functions for reading them.
Rumours are the other prizes include books on forming lasting interpersonal relationships, 7-day trips to Club Med, and the book 'Romance for Dummies.'
Y'know, those that live in Slash houses shouldn't cast stones...
What is everyone doing on the web that they don't want others to see?
Paying my credit card bill? Inquiring about the status of my Social Security account?
its much better to use something open source that doesn't censor results for opressive regimes
Which would be whom, exactly?
ALL SEARCH ENGINES that do business in China are filtering results there as per the local laws. The reason Google is being singled out for doing it is because their motto is "Don't Be Evil". We EXPECT evil from the likes of MSN and Yahoo.
Anyone who's ever used a TV as a monitor know they're virtually impossible to read for long periods of time.
Not if you have an HDTV, they're not. A 720- or 1080-line HD display should provide at least as much sharpness and legibility as a modern PC monitor.
So all we have to do is wait for adoption of High-Definition Television in the third world, and then... oh...
Windows is moving to WinFX.
And maybe in 10 years, it will get there. I still have some Windows software which uses Win3.1 dialogs...
(WinFX does use Win32 extensively underneath, but why emulate 2 API's??)
So people can run Windows software that doesn't use the WinFX API's exclusively, of course (and I expect even Office.NET to fall into this category, at least initially).
And now Congress will vote to make freely-editable online encyclopedias illegal.
"We'd love to fight this blatantly un-Constitutional law," a spokesman for the ACLU said, "but we're all too busy defending child molesters' right to ban school prayer in the womb."
There, now we've got two ludicrious misrepresentations out of the way. Is that enough that we can move on to relevant discourse instead?
It sounds to me like they're trying to avoid antitrust cases from Symantec and other AV software venders.
More likely, they're trying to avoid the cost of either licensing Reputable AntiVirus SE Lite Useless Edition Minus Minus for bundling with the OS, or the cost of buying a reputable AV software company outright.
The punks were politically-motivated and rebelling against the Establishment, and even the establishment in popular culture.
Maybe the first wave of them were, but the copycats that saw what they were doing and emulated it were mostly just brain-dead zombies. Same as any other cultural phenomenon throughout history.
the addition of an analog stick, much like the addition of a backlit screen makes a whole lot of sense
Well, the DS already had backlit screens. The DS Lite merely has brighter backlighting. There probably wasn't even any electronics design work necessary to make this change.
Adding an analog stick would have been a whole different situation. The case design would have to have been radically modified. There would need to be a new version of the control API. It wouldn't be worth the costs unless there was a strong commitment from developers to make use of it.
I think Nintendo has realized that a tiny tiny joystick with maybe a centimeter of travel along each axis is a suboptimal device for analog game control. The DS has the touchscreen for this purpose (although if you've played the Metroid Prime Hunters demo you'll probably agree this new control metaphor isn't quite mature yet). The Revolution is eschewing analog sticks entirely (except on the legacy-compatibility controller attachments) in favor of a unique spatial control concept.
I don't know if Nintendo will end up leading the industry in another direction, but given their past innovations in controller design -- the D-pad, shoulder buttons, and yes, even the analog stick -- it seems plausible that they will.
if they can't adopt a given STANDARD for security reasons... I have no reason to buy their products.
How about "they're fun"? That's a good enough reason for me.
It's not like owning a DS means you have to disable encryption on your 802.11 access point altogether. WEP is supported, and it's still better than nothing.
Don't trust WEP? Drop $30 on Nintendo's USB DS-only Wifi dongle (also Windows-only, but since you mentioned you're a PC gamer I assume this will not be a problem for you).
Or play games over DS peer networking only, or un-networked. They're still fun.
That was the longest paragraph I've ever read. But there was this very insightful statement buried deep within it:
Natural selection is real. I would say, though, that evolution theory is how God did his work. Evolution is an endless process that is still going on today. There's no reason for these two viewpoints to not co-exist.
I am a believer in science and a spiritual agnostic, and I absolutely agree with you. I only wish that the Biblical Literalists and Anti-Intellectuals that are pushing for Intelligent Design in public schools were more open to our shared perspective.
As for Britain being a "proudly secular country", I don't think so.
Not as long as there's an Anglican Church.
I'd like to see the questions they asked for the survey.
As would I, considering that I can't think of any relevant question for which Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Evolution would be equally appropriate answers.
The concepts don't even share the same space in biological calculus. Creationism/ID is an origin story; Evolution is the story of what has happened between the origin and the present.
Referring specifically to matters of the origin of life and the idea of intraspecies evolution, neither theory is even close to establishing scientific proof of their ideas, yet the intellectually "elite" have no problem ridiculing those who don't believe in evolution wholesale.
Were the scare quotes around elite really necessary? I think I can take it on faith that a respected member of the scientific community is indeed more intellectually elite than a layperson.
I think you'll find that many scienticians (uh) will be more than happy to consider alternate scientific theories on the origin of species, but the simple fact is that ID/Creationism is Not Science.