I don't think anyone has a huge amount of "faith" in dark matter. The problem is that there is a conflict between theory and observation; gravity as we understand it doesn't predict the shape of the universe that we see, so we try to figure out what it is that we don't understand. That is how science progresses.
Our theories of gravity have held up well under testing many times, though it's fair to say that we don't know as much about it as we would like. Alternate gravity is also a matter of uncertainty, though, as we don't have any solid data showing that our gravity theories are wrong. Quantum physics has shown that there are many types of particles and many different interactions, suggesting that not all matter is structured the same way, so it's not unreasonable to suggest that there might be a type of matter that we don't understand.
Naturally there are physicists exploring both possibilities and they can be fans of one idea or the other, but that doesn't mean that they are acting on "faith". It's just how science has always progressed. There was a time before relativity was tested when it was controversial, and to some degree it still is.
Well, minor nitpick: I don't see why neutrinos would interact with other particles just because they had some small amount of mass. It's not as if they would produce more than a truly tiny amount of gravity, and they obviously don't interact electromagnetically with anything.
Nintendo has scheduled a press conference for September 14th during which they will almost certainly announce a Wii release date and price. As that is 8 days from now, it seems like a perfect time.
While what you say is basically true, I should note that bit errors in a digital signal are different in nature from signal loss inherent to analog signals. Loss of data in an analog signal is perceived as a loss of clarity, contrast, etc whereas a significant rate of bit errors in a digital signal would be perceived as more obvious noise (flashes of snow, etc).
People buy expensive cables hoping for an improved visual experience, and in the case of digital signals they aren't likely to see a difference unless they are noticing a specific problem with the cheap cable.
Re:Duke is like JonBenet to the gaming media
on
Duke in Trouble?
·
· Score: 1
I guess it's a great story because it's so obviously silly. The very notion of a commercial game without a deadline is really ridiculous in the first place, and DNF's development to date provides a striking example of why this is the case. Yet still, after throwing away not only lots of money but also the reputation of a once-valuable franchise, they continue to repeat the "when it's done" mantra like a broken vinyl recording of a George Bush speech.
You'd think that they would learn something after all these years, and set a deadline after which the game would be shipped off to Korea for completion into shovelware so that they could focus on something else. You would have expected such a thing fully five years ago, and still they truck on. It's like a stupidity vortex has descended, and one can only imagine how long it can possibly last.
I think that when most people say "fail" in the context of the PS3, they don't mean that it will go the way of the Dreamcast. Everyone is aware that Sony has huge momentum coming off the PS1 and 2, and it seems unlikely that there would be any mass exodus of developers. Expecting crickets chirping at launch (as seen with the N-Gage) is completely irrational.
The problem with TFA's thinking, though, is that Sony is in a completely different position from Microsoft and Nintendo. Nintendo spent relatively little developing the Wii, they will probably sell the console at a small loss if any, and their existing console has almost no momentum at all. From this position, if Nintendo captures 30% of the market they will have achieved a massive success.
Sony spent a fortune developing the PS3, they will spend a fortune selling it at well below cost, and the PS2 is still a huge success. From this position, capturing only 30% of the market would be an unmitigated disaster for the company, and I wouldn't expect any future Sony consoles.
This is why it's short-sighted to speak of the console war in terms of #1, #2, #3. Each of the consoles represents a large financial investment that must be evaluated on its own terms. From where I stand, the PS3 looks like a poor investment that may not bring Sony returns to justify the expense. It's not unreasonable to consider that a failure.
When the console was released, there weren't any games for it. Remember? Yeah, we buy consoles for games, I know that, I have a PS2, everybody has a PS2, duh. But if you evaluate the console on the merits of the hardware itself, as I was attempting to do, it's not very good.
There's reason to say that the PS2 was pretty shitty, despite the fact that developers eventually made great games for it (though I should mention that there weren't even any good games available at launch). Despite the substantially higher production price (and higher retail price) it was a long time before developers made graphics that looked any better than those on the Dreamcast. Many lower-budget PS2 games simply look terrible. In addition, the console had a high failure rate, makes an awful noise at startup, and has poor DVD playing at best.
Basically, if you compare the PS2 to the Dreamcast (released a year earlier), in a hardware sense it can only be seen as a slight improvement with caveats. Considered among the GameCube and XBox, it seems a rather weak entry as even the GameCube was significantly more powerful (and cheaper), and the PS2 was the least reliable of the three, and also the hardest to develop for.
US public debt is too large, but hardly unimaginably so. Nations with an even higher ratio of debt to GDP include France, Germany, especially Italy, and especially^2 Japan. The UK is much better, so I suppose it's no surprise that they don't want to join the Eurozone.
News may not have made it across the pond, but the SUV fad is over (resulting in financial catastrophe at the companies that invented the fad in the first place).
No, I don't think so. If the user is just flailing, they aren't paying any attention anyway. If they are paying attention, then they can get used to the feel of the controls. If they are looking at the screen, then they can see what is happening, just like I can see when Mario is up against a wall and easily understand why pushing right isn't doing anything.
I still don't understand why people claim that you couldn't have a swordfighting game for the Wiimote because people would just flail around. This is easily countered with decent game design, just like button-mashing in fighting games was. Honestly, I don't understand your comment at all, because a limitation on the speed of the in-game sword movement doesn't create a situation where "nothing is happening".
So you don't believe somebody could come up with a swordfighting AI good enough to take advantage of random flailing? It doesn't seem too hard to me.
And sure, a sword is heavier than a wiimote, but that doesn't matter TOO much. Mario can only jump so high no matter how hard I push the button; it wouldn't be a problem if the character inside the game had limited speed or strength.
It would be one thing for them to claim to have found a way to unbind and release the energy in some abundant form of matter; after all, that's basically what nuclear reactors do today. That's not the typical meaning of the term "free energy"; usually people say "free energy" when they are talking about breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
And when someone goes on about magnets, it's time to call the cops and get some snake oil salesmen arrested.
There's no point to the motion-sensing in the Dual Shake, as it's a two-handed controller. When holding a controller with both hands, making all but the simplest motions is unnatural because you can't use your wrists.
The only comfortable motion is to tilt the controller, which will basically limit its function to driving games.
I'm amazed at the sheer audacity of your post. What you are saying is that any OS MUST have a security model that prohibits the machine's administrator from installing any software which could conceivably break the OS's security. While such systems do exist, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think that such a system would make sense for a consumer or business computer. You're talking military security here, and it would be plain stupid for Apple or Microsoft to design their systems that way.
I guess huge games are kind of nice, but they are not cheap to develop. If you spend $100 million making a game, you are taking a huge risk as you'd need to sell 4 million copies to break even, and few games sell so well. It's far better to spend, say, $35 million per game and make three. That way you can take more creative risks and increase your chances of a surprise hit.
So there is a limit to how big a game can be, and we've basically reached it -- how many DVD games run to multiple disks? Sure, there might be a market for one or two games that could have a budget of $500 million and still make a profit, but those are so rare that it's not worth including an expensive drive just for them. Besides, I'll probably be bored with your $500 million, 400-hour masterpiece after a few weeks anyway. Give me a cool game like Advance Wars, made with care by hopelessly obsessive-compulsive Japanese minimax nerds, and I'll be playing it years later.
Well, when the DS was announced everyone was skeptical that the touchscreen would go anywhere. Many people were predicting that after a while most games wouldn't bother with touch controls and that we would end up with an overclocked GBA.
The success of the DS, and in particular the success of the touchscreen interface, has caused people to rethink the idea of innovative controls. The Wii seems like an obvious extension of that; now the PS3 looks like little more than an overclocked PS2 (regardless of the changes in its internal architecture).
Since the pattern of DS vs PSP seems almost identical to the Wii vs PS3, we figure that we can make a pretty good prediction.
You seem to have missed the point -- if this research is true, it suggests that games could be useful as a treatment for chronic pain, or that they might have a place (along with other painkillers) as part of post-op pain treatment. This can be a very major health benefit as these useless forms of pain can have serious side effects by themselves and the drugs used to treat them also have side effects.
First of all, your condition ("when idiots are involved") is unneccessary. See, you mention a "full-witted individual", but this is like a frictionless surface. Not only does such a thing not exist in the real world, but it's also impossible to have more than full wits.
I only use the number pad on my keypad to dial a phone number about once a month, if that. Most everyone I call is in my address book, or recent calls if I'm calling someone back.
So I don't think it's a big deal to "learn" a new button layout, especially since a phone number is only ten digits anyway.
It's ended up as "Funny", which is rather bizarre.
It's offtopic because the topic is "Astronomers make important dark matter discovery", not "talk about whether upcoming astrophysics press conferences are News for Nerds or not".
There is obviously plenty to discuss, as lots of Slashdotters will want to get up to speed on current dark matter theories in advance of this conference, so that they can understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone has a huge amount of "faith" in dark matter. The problem is that there is a conflict between theory and observation; gravity as we understand it doesn't predict the shape of the universe that we see, so we try to figure out what it is that we don't understand. That is how science progresses.
Our theories of gravity have held up well under testing many times, though it's fair to say that we don't know as much about it as we would like. Alternate gravity is also a matter of uncertainty, though, as we don't have any solid data showing that our gravity theories are wrong. Quantum physics has shown that there are many types of particles and many different interactions, suggesting that not all matter is structured the same way, so it's not unreasonable to suggest that there might be a type of matter that we don't understand.
Naturally there are physicists exploring both possibilities and they can be fans of one idea or the other, but that doesn't mean that they are acting on "faith". It's just how science has always progressed. There was a time before relativity was tested when it was controversial, and to some degree it still is.
Well, minor nitpick: I don't see why neutrinos would interact with other particles just because they had some small amount of mass. It's not as if they would produce more than a truly tiny amount of gravity, and they obviously don't interact electromagnetically with anything.
Man, you are dumb. On Mars, you can't BREATHE outside the box.
Nintendo has scheduled a press conference for September 14th during which they will almost certainly announce a Wii release date and price. As that is 8 days from now, it seems like a perfect time.
While what you say is basically true, I should note that bit errors in a digital signal are different in nature from signal loss inherent to analog signals. Loss of data in an analog signal is perceived as a loss of clarity, contrast, etc whereas a significant rate of bit errors in a digital signal would be perceived as more obvious noise (flashes of snow, etc).
People buy expensive cables hoping for an improved visual experience, and in the case of digital signals they aren't likely to see a difference unless they are noticing a specific problem with the cheap cable.
I guess it's a great story because it's so obviously silly. The very notion of a commercial game without a deadline is really ridiculous in the first place, and DNF's development to date provides a striking example of why this is the case. Yet still, after throwing away not only lots of money but also the reputation of a once-valuable franchise, they continue to repeat the "when it's done" mantra like a broken vinyl recording of a George Bush speech.
You'd think that they would learn something after all these years, and set a deadline after which the game would be shipped off to Korea for completion into shovelware so that they could focus on something else. You would have expected such a thing fully five years ago, and still they truck on. It's like a stupidity vortex has descended, and one can only imagine how long it can possibly last.
I think that when most people say "fail" in the context of the PS3, they don't mean that it will go the way of the Dreamcast. Everyone is aware that Sony has huge momentum coming off the PS1 and 2, and it seems unlikely that there would be any mass exodus of developers. Expecting crickets chirping at launch (as seen with the N-Gage) is completely irrational.
The problem with TFA's thinking, though, is that Sony is in a completely different position from Microsoft and Nintendo. Nintendo spent relatively little developing the Wii, they will probably sell the console at a small loss if any, and their existing console has almost no momentum at all. From this position, if Nintendo captures 30% of the market they will have achieved a massive success.
Sony spent a fortune developing the PS3, they will spend a fortune selling it at well below cost, and the PS2 is still a huge success. From this position, capturing only 30% of the market would be an unmitigated disaster for the company, and I wouldn't expect any future Sony consoles.
This is why it's short-sighted to speak of the console war in terms of #1, #2, #3. Each of the consoles represents a large financial investment that must be evaluated on its own terms. From where I stand, the PS3 looks like a poor investment that may not bring Sony returns to justify the expense. It's not unreasonable to consider that a failure.
When the console was released, there weren't any games for it. Remember? Yeah, we buy consoles for games, I know that, I have a PS2, everybody has a PS2, duh. But if you evaluate the console on the merits of the hardware itself, as I was attempting to do, it's not very good.
There's reason to say that the PS2 was pretty shitty, despite the fact that developers eventually made great games for it (though I should mention that there weren't even any good games available at launch). Despite the substantially higher production price (and higher retail price) it was a long time before developers made graphics that looked any better than those on the Dreamcast. Many lower-budget PS2 games simply look terrible. In addition, the console had a high failure rate, makes an awful noise at startup, and has poor DVD playing at best.
Basically, if you compare the PS2 to the Dreamcast (released a year earlier), in a hardware sense it can only be seen as a slight improvement with caveats. Considered among the GameCube and XBox, it seems a rather weak entry as even the GameCube was significantly more powerful (and cheaper), and the PS2 was the least reliable of the three, and also the hardest to develop for.
US public debt is too large, but hardly unimaginably so. Nations with an even higher ratio of debt to GDP include France, Germany, especially Italy, and especially^2 Japan. The UK is much better, so I suppose it's no surprise that they don't want to join the Eurozone.
News may not have made it across the pond, but the SUV fad is over (resulting in financial catastrophe at the companies that invented the fad in the first place).
No, I don't think so. If the user is just flailing, they aren't paying any attention anyway. If they are paying attention, then they can get used to the feel of the controls. If they are looking at the screen, then they can see what is happening, just like I can see when Mario is up against a wall and easily understand why pushing right isn't doing anything.
I still don't understand why people claim that you couldn't have a swordfighting game for the Wiimote because people would just flail around. This is easily countered with decent game design, just like button-mashing in fighting games was. Honestly, I don't understand your comment at all, because a limitation on the speed of the in-game sword movement doesn't create a situation where "nothing is happening".
So you don't believe somebody could come up with a swordfighting AI good enough to take advantage of random flailing? It doesn't seem too hard to me.
And sure, a sword is heavier than a wiimote, but that doesn't matter TOO much. Mario can only jump so high no matter how hard I push the button; it wouldn't be a problem if the character inside the game had limited speed or strength.
It could be open to tons of abuse, and mainly people just flailing the wiimote about, scoring hits as they swing randomly.
So, why don't people do that in real sword fights?
It would be one thing for them to claim to have found a way to unbind and release the energy in some abundant form of matter; after all, that's basically what nuclear reactors do today. That's not the typical meaning of the term "free energy"; usually people say "free energy" when they are talking about breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
And when someone goes on about magnets, it's time to call the cops and get some snake oil salesmen arrested.
There's no point to the motion-sensing in the Dual Shake, as it's a two-handed controller. When holding a controller with both hands, making all but the simplest motions is unnatural because you can't use your wrists.
The only comfortable motion is to tilt the controller, which will basically limit its function to driving games.
I'm amazed at the sheer audacity of your post. What you are saying is that any OS MUST have a security model that prohibits the machine's administrator from installing any software which could conceivably break the OS's security. While such systems do exist, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think that such a system would make sense for a consumer or business computer. You're talking military security here, and it would be plain stupid for Apple or Microsoft to design their systems that way.
I guess huge games are kind of nice, but they are not cheap to develop. If you spend $100 million making a game, you are taking a huge risk as you'd need to sell 4 million copies to break even, and few games sell so well. It's far better to spend, say, $35 million per game and make three. That way you can take more creative risks and increase your chances of a surprise hit.
So there is a limit to how big a game can be, and we've basically reached it -- how many DVD games run to multiple disks? Sure, there might be a market for one or two games that could have a budget of $500 million and still make a profit, but those are so rare that it's not worth including an expensive drive just for them. Besides, I'll probably be bored with your $500 million, 400-hour masterpiece after a few weeks anyway. Give me a cool game like Advance Wars, made with care by hopelessly obsessive-compulsive Japanese minimax nerds, and I'll be playing it years later.
Well, when the DS was announced everyone was skeptical that the touchscreen would go anywhere. Many people were predicting that after a while most games wouldn't bother with touch controls and that we would end up with an overclocked GBA.
The success of the DS, and in particular the success of the touchscreen interface, has caused people to rethink the idea of innovative controls. The Wii seems like an obvious extension of that; now the PS3 looks like little more than an overclocked PS2 (regardless of the changes in its internal architecture).
Since the pattern of DS vs PSP seems almost identical to the Wii vs PS3, we figure that we can make a pretty good prediction.
You seem to have missed the point -- if this research is true, it suggests that games could be useful as a treatment for chronic pain, or that they might have a place (along with other painkillers) as part of post-op pain treatment. This can be a very major health benefit as these useless forms of pain can have serious side effects by themselves and the drugs used to treat them also have side effects.
Inside the article there is a link to an article about why they are planning for a more intense solar cycle. It's not "purely conjecture".
r mwarning.htm
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_sto
PS3 Linux is going to be exactly like PS2 Linux. Lots of ballyhoo and hype, but in the end it will amount to almost nothing of interest to anyone.
First of all, your condition ("when idiots are involved") is unneccessary. See, you mention a "full-witted individual", but this is like a frictionless surface. Not only does such a thing not exist in the real world, but it's also impossible to have more than full wits.
I only use the number pad on my keypad to dial a phone number about once a month, if that. Most everyone I call is in my address book, or recent calls if I'm calling someone back.
So I don't think it's a big deal to "learn" a new button layout, especially since a phone number is only ten digits anyway.
No, it's the same number. For every game that's released, they release a firmware update to prevent you from playing it.
It's ended up as "Funny", which is rather bizarre.
It's offtopic because the topic is "Astronomers make important dark matter discovery", not "talk about whether upcoming astrophysics press conferences are News for Nerds or not".
There is obviously plenty to discuss, as lots of Slashdotters will want to get up to speed on current dark matter theories in advance of this conference, so that they can understand it.