That would have been an ok solution. The spacing would still be a bit off unless they changed the size of the buttons. Still better than the current situation.
No I didn't: I just don't think it's a valid point.
Do you think that the controls on the Palm are superior or even equal to those on a GameBoy? Do you think that a "gaming Palm" will keep the traditional button arrangement/number?
I think "Use the left-most button to go left and the right-most button to go right" is fairly intuitive.
In some games that would work fine, a thumb on each of those buttons. The submarine game that comes with the Palm is an example. But how do you go up or down in that situation? Reach with one thumb or the other? All direction controls should be easily reachable with one thumb, which you shouldn't even have to lift. It shouldn't take three digits to control up/down/left/right on a mobile gaming system.
Rather than something that is "fairly intuitive" as you put it, and only works for a subset of games, they could have had something that was truely intuitive and would work for nearly every game as well as being useful in the organizer apps.
Given your love of awkward interfaces you probably pine for the days of the C=64 and its two cursor keys which could move the cursor in four directions if you used a modifier key with them.
You have missed my point entirely. They could have easily had somthing resembling a d-pad, instead of the non-intuitive mess that the design forces you to put up with. They didn't make it easy, natural, or obvious. That was dumb. You can bet that the "gaming Palm" or Helix or whatever will not have the same button layout that you are accustomed to.
It would have cost them next to nothing to have a left and right button as well as the up and down. This wouldn't have hurt its organizer functionality at all and would have allowed it to play games more easily. As it was the controls for many Palm based games were terrible hacks that made the games less enjoyable. I am not saying that it would have become a great gaming platform early on, but it wouldn't have hurt it to have two more measily buttons. The sad thing is that it seems so obivious. How did they miss it?
Hey, it seems that what you did worked for you. Congrats on winning the contest. Like I said, it seems to have a lot of polish.
Optimization would not have been a complete waste of time given that if it is able to be run on a lesser machine it will run even better on a fast one. I don't see what it is doing that couldn't be done on a much slower machine.
Did the judges play it during the presentation or did you "present" it?
Anyhow, the game looks pretty fun, I just wish I was able to play it.
Did his speech start out incredibly detailed and textured, only to accelerate about halfway through? At that point was he only sketching out ideas rather than exploring them? Did it get faster and faster until he ended suddenly with an unfinished sentence, quickly walking off the stage, leaving everyone to wonder about the details?
I enjoy his books, but his tendancy to "accelerate" makes me think that he gets bored with them far sooner than I do.
So I managed to download and play Xazzon. It is what you would expect, a 3D version of Zaxxon. Pretty good for a student project, but it doesn't seem very efficient.
As with most student projects, it seems to assume that you have a pretty fast machine. I have a machine that can run Q3A reasonably and this little Zaxxon game gets 12fps on it. They didn't spend much time optimizing or testing on slow machines. Even at 320x240 (windowed) it runs like a dog. Also, the ship goes out of control after a while, with the point of view switching jerkily from one side to the other.
Some of you will say that I need a new machine, which is true, but for what this game is it could run a lot faster.
When I was in school we had an assignment to make an asteroids game. Most of the projects were barely playable they were so slow. There were only a few each quarter that were worth playing. Yet using the same computers my group made a 3d space fighter game in which you pilot a ship through an asteroid field instead of the usual top-down 2d asteroids. Not only was it more ambitious than the normal games, it ran faster too, because we cared about efficiency from the start and made sure it was playable. You can download the Windows port here. It isn't nearly as polished as the Zaxxon game, but it was a 2 week project, and was playable on a 60 MHz Mac Performa with no 3d acceleration.
scaling them to the same height is also misleading.
Even more misleading is the fact that these are still images as opposed to motion pictures. If it were moving you would get the full scene eventually with p&s. Of course you could also see that the effect is annoying.
Interesting how the iPod has become the standard by which other players are judged. Interesting that the submitter has found a player that is both larger than the iPod (a good thing) and also slightly larger than the iPod (a bad thing). Maybe being specific about when we mean capacity in GB and when we mean physical dimensions wouldn't be such a bad thing...
I can't believe that I've never seen that before. That movie deserves its own front page/. article. That is up there with the exploding whale video on the scale of "strange things I've seen on the internet."
Also remember that Steve likes to announce things himself. There is not way he would stand for a leak of this size. The chances of this being real are slim indeed. If it were real they would show us a picture of the machine and its innards. That said, if it is real this might be enough to get me to purchase another Mac.
Did you order the PC you "shopped around for" from Dell or somewehre similar or did you build it yourself? If you are in the build it yourself catergory or even the white-box group then you are probably not in Apple's target market.
The guys who did Opencard have started using a Java PC/SC wrapper instead. Opencard is just to big for what it does in most cases.
You can find JPCSC and other open source smart card stuff at the MUSLCE project.
Also, I happen to be on a team that has implemented a smart card based photo ID system. Contact me through the email on my webpage (linked to in the header of this post) if you have questions and I'll get back to you on my corporate acocunt.
Don't let SNL know this! They would have to stop all their fake ads that reference actual products, like the current "Swiffer Sleeper" ad. BTW, it is a very lame plan.
I went without a land line in my house for about six months. Note that I use my house as a home office. So one month I had a lot of conference calls to 800 numbers and my cell bill went through the roof. I got a land line just for conference calls. Now I use it for faxes as well, but if it weren't for work related calls like those I wouldn't have a land line.
I am not saying that blame should (or should not) be assigned. I am simply pointing out how politics plays a part in whether it is assigned. It certainly was assigned last time. And yes, there were people who did know that things were wrong. NASA was aware of foam falling off the old style external tanks on previous flights.
So, if this is true (and hopefully Wired has become more trustworth as a "news source" in recent years...), then obviously they want to discourage people from renting more than 5 per month.
The method above seems like a pretty good way to do it!
It is only a good method if the users are aware of it and act accordingly. How can you discourage someone if they are not aware of the consequences of thier actions? If NetFlix told you about this then it would have a greater impact. So instead of acting as a demotivator, this seems to be a way to cut their losses, by sending you the less popular movies in the queue instead of the new ones. This way they don't have to buy as many new movies. In two years they don't want to be sitting on 10,000 copies of Sweet Home Alabama. This is a clever way of hooking new customers and distributing demand for new movies over a longer period of time, causing them to have to buy fewer copies of new releases.
My point is that flaws in the main tank were understood, foam has fallen off before. Defects in the application of the ceramic tiles (using spit to speed the process?) are also well know. However the companies responsible for these task are larger and not as easy to push around politcally as Thiokol (then Morton-Thiokol, now part of Alliant, right?) was.
I realize your post was made in jest, but there are some serious differences that this brings up.
Remember how quickly and how harshly politicians jump on Thiokol after Challenger? They wanted to move all shuttle work to a different company. Now that some of the big boys might be at fault with Columbia nobody is up in arms. Why do you think that is?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that some of the programs in the Matrix seem VERY interested in sex. What does that tell you?
That would have been an ok solution. The spacing would still be a bit off unless they changed the size of the buttons. Still better than the current situation.
Do you think that the controls on the Palm are superior or even equal to those on a GameBoy? Do you think that a "gaming Palm" will keep the traditional button arrangement/number?
I think "Use the left-most button to go left and the right-most button to go right" is fairly intuitive.
In some games that would work fine, a thumb on each of those buttons. The submarine game that comes with the Palm is an example. But how do you go up or down in that situation? Reach with one thumb or the other? All direction controls should be easily reachable with one thumb, which you shouldn't even have to lift. It shouldn't take three digits to control up/down/left/right on a mobile gaming system.
Rather than something that is "fairly intuitive" as you put it, and only works for a subset of games, they could have had something that was truely intuitive and would work for nearly every game as well as being useful in the organizer apps.
Given your love of awkward interfaces you probably pine for the days of the C=64 and its two cursor keys which could move the cursor in four directions if you used a modifier key with them.
You have missed my point entirely. They could have easily had somthing resembling a d-pad, instead of the non-intuitive mess that the design forces you to put up with. They didn't make it easy, natural, or obvious. That was dumb. You can bet that the "gaming Palm" or Helix or whatever will not have the same button layout that you are accustomed to.
It would have cost them next to nothing to have a left and right button as well as the up and down. This wouldn't have hurt its organizer functionality at all and would have allowed it to play games more easily. As it was the controls for many Palm based games were terrible hacks that made the games less enjoyable. I am not saying that it would have become a great gaming platform early on, but it wouldn't have hurt it to have two more measily buttons. The sad thing is that it seems so obivious. How did they miss it?
Optimization would not have been a complete waste of time given that if it is able to be run on a lesser machine it will run even better on a fast one. I don't see what it is doing that couldn't be done on a much slower machine.
Did the judges play it during the presentation or did you "present" it?
Anyhow, the game looks pretty fun, I just wish I was able to play it.
No, I was not at the lecture. I am sure it would have been interesting though, if only to compare his speaking style with his writing style.
His stories don't come to a conclusion. They stop. Alternately, he gets less and less descriptive until he simply isn't writing anymore.
I enjoy his books, but his tendancy to "accelerate" makes me think that he gets bored with them far sooner than I do.
As with most student projects, it seems to assume that you have a pretty fast machine. I have a machine that can run Q3A reasonably and this little Zaxxon game gets 12fps on it. They didn't spend much time optimizing or testing on slow machines. Even at 320x240 (windowed) it runs like a dog. Also, the ship goes out of control after a while, with the point of view switching jerkily from one side to the other.
Some of you will say that I need a new machine, which is true, but for what this game is it could run a lot faster.
When I was in school we had an assignment to make an asteroids game. Most of the projects were barely playable they were so slow. There were only a few each quarter that were worth playing. Yet using the same computers my group made a 3d space fighter game in which you pilot a ship through an asteroid field instead of the usual top-down 2d asteroids. Not only was it more ambitious than the normal games, it ran faster too, because we cared about efficiency from the start and made sure it was playable. You can download the Windows port here. It isn't nearly as polished as the Zaxxon game, but it was a 2 week project, and was playable on a 60 MHz Mac Performa with no 3d acceleration.
Even more misleading is the fact that these are still images as opposed to motion pictures. If it were moving you would get the full scene eventually with p&s. Of course you could also see that the effect is annoying.
Interesting how the iPod has become the standard by which other players are judged. Interesting that the submitter has found a player that is both larger than the iPod (a good thing) and also slightly larger than the iPod (a bad thing). Maybe being specific about when we mean capacity in GB and when we mean physical dimensions wouldn't be such a bad thing...
I can't believe that I've never seen that before. That movie deserves its own front page /. article. That is up there with the exploding whale video on the scale of "strange things I've seen on the internet."
Also remember that Steve likes to announce things himself. There is not way he would stand for a leak of this size. The chances of this being real are slim indeed. If it were real they would show us a picture of the machine and its innards. That said, if it is real this might be enough to get me to purchase another Mac.
Did you order the PC you "shopped around for" from Dell or somewehre similar or did you build it yourself? If you are in the build it yourself catergory or even the white-box group then you are probably not in Apple's target market.
As long as I am on the subject, IBM's JCOP (Java Card Open Platform) development tools work on Linux as well as Windows.
You can find JPCSC and other open source smart card stuff at the MUSLCE project.
Also, I happen to be on a team that has implemented a smart card based photo ID system. Contact me through the email on my webpage (linked to in the header of this post) if you have questions and I'll get back to you on my corporate acocunt.
Don't let SNL know this! They would have to stop all their fake ads that reference actual products, like the current "Swiffer Sleeper" ad. BTW, it is a very lame plan.
That seems wrong but isn't.
Also: The contraction is the longer of the two choices.
Again that seems wrong but isn't.
I went without a land line in my house for about six months. Note that I use my house as a home office. So one month I had a lot of conference calls to 800 numbers and my cell bill went through the roof. I got a land line just for conference calls. Now I use it for faxes as well, but if it weren't for work related calls like those I wouldn't have a land line.
I am not saying that blame should (or should not) be assigned. I am simply pointing out how politics plays a part in whether it is assigned. It certainly was assigned last time. And yes, there were people who did know that things were wrong. NASA was aware of foam falling off the old style external tanks on previous flights.
The method above seems like a pretty good way to do it!
It is only a good method if the users are aware of it and act accordingly. How can you discourage someone if they are not aware of the consequences of thier actions? If NetFlix told you about this then it would have a greater impact. So instead of acting as a demotivator, this seems to be a way to cut their losses, by sending you the less popular movies in the queue instead of the new ones. This way they don't have to buy as many new movies. In two years they don't want to be sitting on 10,000 copies of Sweet Home Alabama. This is a clever way of hooking new customers and distributing demand for new movies over a longer period of time, causing them to have to buy fewer copies of new releases.
My point is that flaws in the main tank were understood, foam has fallen off before. Defects in the application of the ceramic tiles (using spit to speed the process?) are also well know. However the companies responsible for these task are larger and not as easy to push around politcally as Thiokol (then Morton-Thiokol, now part of Alliant, right?) was.
I think it is more like:
UHF + Kentucky Fried Movie + Teen Wolf 2 = Real Genius + About a Boy
Remember how quickly and how harshly politicians jump on Thiokol after Challenger? They wanted to move all shuttle work to a different company. Now that some of the big boys might be at fault with Columbia nobody is up in arms. Why do you think that is?
um, he would only recieve UHF if he had chosen it. That is how Netflix works. They dont' send you random movies.