Um. No. Try rereading what I wrote originally. Driving games don't work too well without analogue brake and acceleration.
The best that the current dual shock controllers can offer is steering on one stick, and an analogue brake/accelerator on the other. But occasionally you want to use the brake and accelerator together, which just isn't possible without analogue buttons (or pedals).
Looking at pictures of software in development now there isn't the same sort of generational leap between DC and PS2 as there was between SNES and PSX. Compare Street Fighter EX3 to Soul Calibur, for example. There are some games that are clearly prettier on PS2 (Armored Core 2 or Legion, anyone?) but it's certainly going to be a while before PS2 clearly outshines DC - bear in mind that DC developers will be on to their second generation of software by the time PS2 is released.
Believe it or not, Squaresoft isn't the be all and end all of gaming, either. And that's an estimated price only slightly higher than the tag on Sega's Shen Mue, which looks remarkably pretty itself.
I'd buy it for $370 (or probably considerably less when it finally makes its weary way over to Europe). But if it's competing against an established Dreamcast at half the price (that is, if Sega ever get their European launch together) then a lot of people won't be that interested. Yes, you get DVD capability out of the box. But you don't get a modem. DC is just the other way round.
As for PS2 running a PC emulator, as always, check out this emulator.
The original PSX cost over $300 when its main competition was the Saturn, which was at a similar price and suffered from lack of games. Against a console at half the price with a range of games that includes Soul Calibur (what more do you need?:) $300 may prove a little on the high side.
I'm always a little confused by the way people seem to think backwards compatibility is important. Sony fans claim it's a revolutionary step forward in videogaming (which it isn't), and Sony bashers claim it will destroy the console because nobody will develop for it if they can just make PSX games (which is completely wrong). I maintain backwards compatibility with old consoles by shoving them under the TV and plugging in a splitter, which has seen me through several 8-bit computers and various consoles. The only advantage of backwards compatibility is that it'll let me clear a bit of space under the TV and get rid of the PSX (maybe I can swap it for a Jaguar...)
Different distances rather than strengths, I'd have thought. Should be great for driving games (which don't work that well without analogue brake and acceleration) if nothing else.
The Sega Genesis problems mainly stemmed from the fact that it was a rush job, to catch up with Sony's surprise release of the playstation
Damn straight. Such a rush job they released it several years before the Playstation, and the specs weren't even in the same ballpark. It was more comparable to the SNES. In fact you'd almost think it was a console from the previous generation. Typical Sega for you.
Head over to Gaming Age for the full lineup. And bear in mind that these are all Japanese titles, and the make-up is likely to be very different for the Western launch (can't see there being too much room in the US for a 'Realtime Simulation Game Mahjong').
For me, highlights include Tekken Tag Tournament, Namco's Ridge Racer game (10% development screenshots look spectacular, and by all accounts it's even better in motion), Jade Cocoon 2, GT2000 (almost as pretty as Ridge Racer, but likely to be a lot deeper), Armored Core 2 (again, spectacular screenshots) and The Bouncer. Great stuff.
You seem to be partly confused by Microsoft's position on Linux (and possibly with good cause). Let me summarise it briefly for you:
When it is in Microsoft's interests to portray Linux as a threat (for example, when they're desperately looking to claim they don't hold a monopoly), it is a threat.
When it is in Microsoft's interests to portray Linux as a joke (for example, when they're desperately looking to convince people to suffer the OS that is NT), it is not a threat.
Hope this helps.
As for Sun's logo-usage terms, they don't seem that unreasonable to me. But then, I've had to wade through *real* legal gibberish to use various bits and pieces of software and graphics, so perhaps I'm biased.
Incidentally, on a not-entirely-related note, when you download software from Sun's website, the license you agree to is displayed in a writeable text-box. Which means you can write your own license, then agree to it. Sun now owe me roughly $3,000,000 for using their software according to the terms of the licenses I've agreed to.:)
Not entirely dissimilar to a definition I've often used, which is that a computer is something you can play Tetris on... It works surprisingly well, apart from the minor problem that it also assumes that little LCD tetris games are computers.
Essentially eligible users are presented with 10 comments the moderation done to them. They are then asked to rate the moderation as Fair, or Unfair
But it's hard to tell sometimes. For example, when meta-moderating today I was presented with a Score: 4, Funny post. And lo, verily, it was funny. But it wasn't 4-funny. 2-funny at the most. So what do I do? M2 down the moderator for saying that a funny post was funny?
Come to think of it, does the system provide us with the status of the post at the time of the moderation, or at the current time? Can I even tell whether the moderator was the first person to mark the post as funny (in which case it's definitely fair) or the last (in which case it's probably unfair).
I'm not going to release the specifics as that would defeat the purpose, but essentially, if you vote to heavily in either direction (like say if you vote that all 10 moderations were "Unfair") your M2 may be discarded.
How bizarre. It's always been my impression that the vast majority of moderators moderate fairly, and the main sins commited are those of omission (good posts, particularly at 0, being ignored). Yet if I'm presented with 10 good pieces of moderation, which doesn't seem at all unlikely to me, my M2 doesn't count for anything.
Worse, I might decide that I want my M2 to count for something, and deliberately mis-M2 a few of the posts to average in order for my comments on the others to count. Not that I'd actually do that, of course, but you can see the temptation is there...
What if the moderator controls were always visible, but when you submitted the form, they were only counted if you had moderator points.
I'd be overwhelmed by apathy and not moderate at all. It would also, to my mind, devalue moderation in general: I wouldn't think so hard about any moderation I did.
only the diligent would actually be relevant
Um. I thought moderation currently tried to avoid giving points to obsessive overreaders? Now you're suggesting it awards obsessive overmoderators?
A final comment: this revamp of moderation seems to me to be similar to a very badly written computer program. (And believe me, in the past I've written enough of those to recognise the symptoms:) No good initial design, requirements being allowed to change mid-project, bodges and hacks all over the place, and the initial goal seems to have got lost.
I'd suggest either letting it lie, or sitting down and having a careful and complete redesign. Maybe it wouldn't be as popular among some Slashdot readers, but I can pretty much guarantee that it'll be a better solution.
Indeed. Which is why you don't start teaching Java that way.
I've written and taught a number of Java programming courses for a number of types of customer (Postgrad AI students, 4GL junkies, complete beginners, OO gurus), and even those who have never written a line of code in anger have tended to take to Java like a duck to water.
A few introductory exercises clear up the difficulties with tools (whether it's the command-line tools or an expensive IDE), and the fact that it's difficult to avoid basic OO concepts from the start is a bonus as far as I'm concerned. If I want to teach nasty procedural stuff, there are other languages far better for that.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not claiming that Java is inherently a better language for teaching to beginners than Python (I don't have the background in teaching Python to make a fair judgement on that, and I don't believe you can make that sort of comparison anyway). But I will say that my experience as a trainer is that Java is a good language to teach to those new to programming.
One final point: probably more important than the choice of language is the skill of the teacher/trainer. For whatever reasons (lack of skilled staff almost certainly being the foremost), IT appears to be the one subject where schools are happiest to use sub-standard teachers: I don't think any member of my family was ever taught by an IT teacher who knew more than his/her pupils...
According to the tech specs, PSX2 has 32MB of main memory (in addition to the 4MB of memory on the GS, and a little bird tells me that there's also quite a bit associated with the IO chip). You won't be running Windows NT in it, especially once you've got the overhead of an emulator running on there, but it should be enough to play with.
As for the hard disk option, there are plenty of expansion ports to plug it into. Take your pick. The same goes for keyboard and mouse: I don't know about you, but I already have a USB keyboard which should work fine with PSX2. Between USB and IEEE1394 there shouldn't be much need to emulate peripherals. Not to mention that PCMCIA slot for the modem.
Yes, you'd be very hard pressed to emulate a PC on today's consoles, but believe it or not, things have advanced in the last five years.
The PSX2 has a separate CPU and graphics chip (the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer respectively, hereafter referred to as EE and GS). It's not all combined on one chip (these things are large enough as it is).
The GS has 4MB of embedded memory which is accessed over an 2560-bit wide internal bus (1024-bit read, 1024-bit write, 512-bit texture)
Of course texturing causes a hit. The GPU is supposed to be able to manage 50 million pps for 48 pixel quads with Z-buffering and transparency, but only 25 million pps for the same quads with textures added. In practice, of course, we'll never be seeing that sort of performance
Sony claim a sustainable rate of something in the region of 20mpps with effects. (Which in real terms probably means something closer to 10mpps:)
The 66 million figure applies to the number of polygons the EE can transform under ideal circumstances, not those that GS can draw. It doesn't include lighting (or indeed any extras). It's the theoretical-maximum-not-doing-anything-else-you-wo n't-see-this-in-real-life-ever value. Throw in lighting (38mpps) and fog (36mpps), divide by two because you won't be getting peak performance out of this baby in a hurry (18mpps) and then again because you want some game mechanics in there as well as polygons (9mpps) and you're getting closer to the sort of figures you can expect. Still nothing to sniff at, but not quite 66mpps.
The next-generation console wars hit Slashdot. Wahey. Almost as fun as Amiga vs PC shootouts.
I'll content myself with making two points: the price for the PSX2 hasn't been announced yet, and various reports from allegedly respectable sources vary between $200 and $400.
The second is on the more pleasant topic of interactive fiction. You will find all the interpreters you want at ftp.gmd.de/if-archive, along with Inform (a language for writing games in Infocom's Z-code) and plenty of homebrew games (some of which are as good as the Infocom originals: try Curses or Jigsaw, for example).
There's a wide choice of interpreters for Linux, but to keep on the console topic, you probably ought to be playing them on the *gameboy* infocom interpreter (really) available from the same site.
The problem is, there are a number of designs that work particularly well. In the BBC's Robot Wars series, pretty much every other robot is a wedge, normally with some sort of lifting claw on the front to act as a combination weapon and device for self-righting the robot.
Before that, the classic design was a big box with an engine that used brute force to push opponents about rather than any effective weapons.
Speaking of effective weapons, most of them aren't. The only one I ever saw that caused much in the way of real damage was an extremely powerful set of pincers. Against most well-constructed robots, circular saws and spikes don't seem to do much damage in the brief periods they can be used.
All the fun weapons and strategies I've thought of seem to have been banned (including jamming systems, flamethrowers, any electrical weaponry, and non-tethered projectiles). There doesn't seem to be much that can be done in terms of inventing a strategy for beating wedge-shaped robots (other than making sure yours is self-righting and preferably has limited ground clearance so it's harder to get underneath) either, so it all begins to get a little dull after a while.
It always amuses me slightly that some people are so picky about the date being exactly 2000 years after a date which has no significance to many people (including most of the people I know who are that pedantic about it), and which is probably inaccurate anyway.
You seem remarkably bitter about the whole affair. There is some genuinely useful and interesting research coming out of Edinburgh (and out of AI departments elsewhere). AI projects can have real-world applications which affect 'grown-up' subjects such as computer science (see the work done in Edinburgh on programs such as CYNTHIA, for example).
How much do you actually know about the machine humour research, by the way? Have you read the relevant theses (info available at this page)? FWIW, 99% of the jokes the research was based on were crap, too.:)
As for your claim that "Artificial intelligence lacks a proper definition", I am slightly confused by this. There are any number of good definitions of Artificial Intelligence. They may not all agree on the exact boundaries of the discipline, but nor do definitions of many accepted fields. A definition of AI as taught at Edinburgh can be found here. Minsky provides an often-quoted definition which takes a more practical approach: "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men". Any good AI text book (and many bad ones) spend a chapter or so looking at definitions of the field.
For what it's worth, if every field 'without foundation' were ignored, the grown-up subjects of which you are so proud wouldn't exist. What's wrong with working in a young field? That's where all the discoveries are still waiting to be made...
I feel as qualified to comment as you, given that I went through the best respected MSc course involving AI in Europe (actually there are many other courses, particularly at the undergraduate level that cover AI). Evidently I got more out of my time at the department than you did.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought N64 was charcoal gray, and as a result had almost failed and was still underselling in most markets worldwide.
Um. No. Try rereading what I wrote originally. Driving games don't work too well without analogue brake and acceleration.
The best that the current dual shock controllers can offer is steering on one stick, and an analogue brake/accelerator on the other. But occasionally you want to use the brake and accelerator together, which just isn't possible without analogue buttons (or pedals).
Looking at pictures of software in development now there isn't the same sort of generational leap between DC and PS2 as there was between SNES and PSX. Compare Street Fighter EX3 to Soul Calibur, for example. There are some games that are clearly prettier on PS2 (Armored Core 2 or Legion, anyone?) but it's certainly going to be a while before PS2 clearly outshines DC - bear in mind that DC developers will be on to their second generation of software by the time PS2 is released.
Believe it or not, Squaresoft isn't the be all and end all of gaming, either. And that's an estimated price only slightly higher than the tag on Sega's Shen Mue, which looks remarkably pretty itself.
I'd buy it for $370 (or probably considerably less when it finally makes its weary way over to Europe). But if it's competing against an established Dreamcast at half the price (that is, if Sega ever get their European launch together) then a lot of people won't be that interested. Yes, you get DVD capability out of the box. But you don't get a modem. DC is just the other way round.
As for PS2 running a PC emulator, as always, check out this emulator.
The original PSX cost over $300 when its main competition was the Saturn, which was at a similar price and suffered from lack of games. Against a console at half the price with a range of games that includes Soul Calibur (what more do you need? :) $300 may prove a little on the high side.
I'm always a little confused by the way people seem to think backwards compatibility is important. Sony fans claim it's a revolutionary step forward in videogaming (which it isn't), and Sony bashers claim it will destroy the console because nobody will develop for it if they can just make PSX games (which is completely wrong). I maintain backwards compatibility with old consoles by shoving them under the TV and plugging in a splitter, which has seen me through several 8-bit computers and various consoles. The only advantage of backwards compatibility is that it'll let me clear a bit of space under the TV and get rid of the PSX (maybe I can swap it for a Jaguar...)
Different distances rather than strengths, I'd have thought. Should be great for driving games (which don't work that well without analogue brake and acceleration) if nothing else.
Damn straight. Such a rush job they released it several years before the Playstation, and the specs weren't even in the same ballpark. It was more comparable to the SNES. In fact you'd almost think it was a console from the previous generation. Typical Sega for you.
Head over to Gaming Age for the full lineup. And bear in mind that these are all Japanese titles, and the make-up is likely to be very different for the Western launch (can't see there being too much room in the US for a 'Realtime Simulation Game Mahjong').
For me, highlights include Tekken Tag Tournament, Namco's Ridge Racer game (10% development screenshots look spectacular, and by all accounts it's even better in motion), Jade Cocoon 2, GT2000 (almost as pretty as Ridge Racer, but likely to be a lot deeper), Armored Core 2 (again, spectacular screenshots) and The Bouncer. Great stuff.
- When it is in Microsoft's interests to portray Linux as a threat (for example, when they're desperately looking to claim they don't hold a monopoly), it is a threat.
- When it is in Microsoft's interests to portray Linux as a joke (for example, when they're desperately looking to convince people to suffer the OS that is NT), it is not a threat.
Hope this helps.As for Sun's logo-usage terms, they don't seem that unreasonable to me. But then, I've had to wade through *real* legal gibberish to use various bits and pieces of software and graphics, so perhaps I'm biased.
Incidentally, on a not-entirely-related note, when you download software from Sun's website, the license you agree to is displayed in a writeable text-box. Which means you can write your own license, then agree to it. Sun now owe me roughly $3,000,000 for using their software according to the terms of the licenses I've agreed to.
Not entirely dissimilar to a definition I've often used, which is that a computer is something you can play Tetris on... It works surprisingly well, apart from the minor problem that it also assumes that little LCD tetris games are computers.
But it's hard to tell sometimes. For example, when meta-moderating today I was presented with a Score: 4, Funny post. And lo, verily, it was funny. But it wasn't 4-funny. 2-funny at the most. So what do I do? M2 down the moderator for saying that a funny post was funny?
Come to think of it, does the system provide us with the status of the post at the time of the moderation, or at the current time? Can I even tell whether the moderator was the first person to mark the post as funny (in which case it's definitely fair) or the last (in which case it's probably unfair).
How bizarre. It's always been my impression that the vast majority of moderators moderate fairly, and the main sins commited are those of omission (good posts, particularly at 0, being ignored). Yet if I'm presented with 10 good pieces of moderation, which doesn't seem at all unlikely to me, my M2 doesn't count for anything.
Worse, I might decide that I want my M2 to count for something, and deliberately mis-M2 a few of the posts to average in order for my comments on the others to count. Not that I'd actually do that, of course, but you can see the temptation is there...
I'd be overwhelmed by apathy and not moderate at all. It would also, to my mind, devalue moderation in general: I wouldn't think so hard about any moderation I did.
Um. I thought moderation currently tried to avoid giving points to obsessive overreaders? Now you're suggesting it awards obsessive overmoderators?
A final comment: this revamp of moderation seems to me to be similar to a very badly written computer program. (And believe me, in the past I've written enough of those to recognise the symptoms
I'd suggest either letting it lie, or sitting down and having a careful and complete redesign. Maybe it wouldn't be as popular among some Slashdot readers, but I can pretty much guarantee that it'll be a better solution.
Indeed. Which is why you don't start teaching Java that way.
I've written and taught a number of Java programming courses for a number of types of customer (Postgrad AI students, 4GL junkies, complete beginners, OO gurus), and even those who have never written a line of code in anger have tended to take to Java like a duck to water.
A few introductory exercises clear up the difficulties with tools (whether it's the command-line tools or an expensive IDE), and the fact that it's difficult to avoid basic OO concepts from the start is a bonus as far as I'm concerned. If I want to teach nasty procedural stuff, there are other languages far better for that.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not claiming that Java is inherently a better language for teaching to beginners than Python (I don't have the background in teaching Python to make a fair judgement on that, and I don't believe you can make that sort of comparison anyway). But I will say that my experience as a trainer is that Java is a good language to teach to those new to programming.
One final point: probably more important than the choice of language is the skill of the teacher/trainer. For whatever reasons (lack of skilled staff almost certainly being the foremost), IT appears to be the one subject where schools are happiest to use sub-standard teachers: I don't think any member of my family was ever taught by an IT teacher who knew more than his/her pupils...
BASIC is exceptionally good for learning all sorts of bad programming habits. Aside from that there doesn't seem to be much point...
Of course that'll be the name. As in 'The W2K bug'.
Let's cover those points one at a time, shall we?
According to the tech specs, PSX2 has 32MB of main memory (in addition to the 4MB of memory on the GS, and a little bird tells me that there's also quite a bit associated with the IO chip). You won't be running Windows NT in it, especially once you've got the overhead of an emulator running on there, but it should be enough to play with.
As for the hard disk option, there are plenty of expansion ports to plug it into. Take your pick. The same goes for keyboard and mouse: I don't know about you, but I already have a USB keyboard which should work fine with PSX2. Between USB and IEEE1394 there shouldn't be much need to emulate peripherals. Not to mention that PCMCIA slot for the modem.
Yes, you'd be very hard pressed to emulate a PC on today's consoles, but believe it or not, things have advanced in the last five years.
You mean like this one?
Should read 'Not caring that the games run at less than one frame per second'. Oops.
You can find the tech specs at the Playstation Europe website.
It's fine for checking whether things are working, but don't expect to be playing Tekken IV on it any time soon.
The next-generation console wars hit Slashdot. Wahey. Almost as fun as Amiga vs PC shootouts.
I'll content myself with making two points: the price for the PSX2 hasn't been announced yet, and various reports from allegedly respectable sources vary between $200 and $400.
The second is on the more pleasant topic of interactive fiction. You will find all the interpreters you want at ftp.gmd.de/if-archive, along with Inform (a language for writing games in Infocom's Z-code) and plenty of homebrew games (some of which are as good as the Infocom originals: try Curses or Jigsaw, for example).
There's a wide choice of interpreters for Linux, but to keep on the console topic, you probably ought to be playing them on the *gameboy* infocom interpreter (really) available from the same site.
The problem is, there are a number of designs that work particularly well. In the BBC's Robot Wars series, pretty much every other robot is a wedge, normally with some sort of lifting claw on the front to act as a combination weapon and device for self-righting the robot.
Before that, the classic design was a big box with an engine that used brute force to push opponents about rather than any effective weapons.
Speaking of effective weapons, most of them aren't. The only one I ever saw that caused much in the way of real damage was an extremely powerful set of pincers. Against most well-constructed robots, circular saws and spikes don't seem to do much damage in the brief periods they can be used.
All the fun weapons and strategies I've thought of seem to have been banned (including jamming systems, flamethrowers, any electrical weaponry, and non-tethered projectiles). There doesn't seem to be much that can be done in terms of inventing a strategy for beating wedge-shaped robots (other than making sure yours is self-righting and preferably has limited ground clearance so it's harder to get underneath) either, so it all begins to get a little dull after a while.
It's always going to be your unlucky day if you say something like that. (Grammatical, by the way.
It always amuses me slightly that some people are so picky about the date being exactly 2000 years after a date which has no significance to many people (including most of the people I know who are that pedantic about it), and which is probably inaccurate anyway.
You seem remarkably bitter about the whole affair. There is some genuinely useful and interesting research coming out of Edinburgh (and out of AI departments elsewhere). AI projects can have real-world applications which affect 'grown-up' subjects such as computer science (see the work done in Edinburgh on programs such as CYNTHIA, for example).
:)
How much do you actually know about the machine humour research, by the way? Have you read the relevant theses (info available at this page)? FWIW, 99% of the jokes the research was based on were crap, too.
As for your claim that "Artificial intelligence lacks a proper definition", I am slightly confused by this. There are any number of good definitions of Artificial Intelligence. They may not all agree on the exact boundaries of the discipline, but nor do definitions of many accepted fields. A definition of AI as taught at Edinburgh can be found here. Minsky provides an often-quoted definition which takes a more practical approach: "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men". Any good AI text book (and many bad ones) spend a chapter or so looking at definitions of the field.
For what it's worth, if every field 'without foundation' were ignored, the grown-up subjects of which you are so proud wouldn't exist. What's wrong with working in a young field? That's where all the discoveries are still waiting to be made...
I feel as qualified to comment as you, given that I went through the best respected MSc course involving AI in Europe (actually there are many other courses, particularly at the undergraduate level that cover AI). Evidently I got more out of my time at the department than you did.