" I'm a failing engineering student at Iowa State University- or at least I was.. My failing point: math. "
Change majors. No, I'm serious, get out. Now. Engineering is math and what you just said is like saying "I could be a great basketball player if I could dribble, pass and shoot baskets."
So you can't do math. How much longer before your other classes require that math you're not learning? Forget second semester calculus, what happens when your lack of trigonometry keeps you from understanding your mechanics classes? For statics and dynamics, you need vectors. And if you expect to actually do anything with the degree you're pursuing, you need statics and dynamics.
What are you taking right now in your degree program that doesn't need the math your failing? Your humanities requirements? History?
"I can out code some of the instructors in my classes,"
So? We've been building things for 10,000 years, before even four-function calculators, let alone computers to code. And just as with the calculators, if you don't understand the basics and the limits of what the machine is trying to do, the machine is all but useless to you.
You can outcode your instructors? Odds are they don't need to code. There are probably even a few left that learned to do everything on sliderules. And if you're incapable of doing the same, then it's time to change majors. Spare yourself the humiliation (and the tuition costs) of taking the same math class two or three times, especially when that math class is the lynchpin needed to get into the last three years of your degree program.
"If this book pans out, it would ultimately change Calculus for the better"
No. Calculus is a lot more than trigonometry, it's a branch of mathematics all to itself. It may make some integrations easier (such as those of the inverse functions), but I can only see integrating sine and cosine functions becoming harder, not easier. Math is, well, a zero-sum field, and making some parts easier will only make others harder, just like changing back and forth between Cartesian and polar coordinates.
The Virtual Boy failed as a console. The Dreamcast failed as a console. The GameCube will live through its natural lifespan and continue to turn a profit for Nintendo.
"now promoting the chip as a high-performance replacement for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors in Unix servers from companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM."
Weren't they sayin the same damned thing when the first 32-bit Pentium chips came out over a decade ago? They've been catching up to RISC for how long now?
"The video looked cool, but those actors weren't actually controlling anything,"
Uh... yes, they were. And then they handed the controllers to members of the press, who also controlled things.
"and those are game concepts, not actual games."
They weren't showing off games, they were showing off the controller. They were there to demonstrate that the controller worked and how well. According to first-hand press reports, they did the job.
"This type of technology has always been rather fiddly when you use it in real life."
So have wireless controllers. Then the WaveBird came out. Of course, non-Nintendo wireless controllers still have the habit of sucking...
"People's kids are going to be slamming these things,"
Ignoring for the moment the history of durability of Nintendo hardware, "so?" Peoples' kids won't be the only ones using these things.
"and it has to be reasonably cheap too."
Console + 1 controller will have a price point of $200, much like the GameCube was. An extra controller's price will probably resemble the WaveBird's.
Exotic for whom? It may be exotic by abandoning existing video game controller dogma, it certainly isn't exotic to most of the possible players out there. Everybody who looked at the picture, their first reaction was "What, a remote control?" Admit it, your first reaction wasn't "exotic," It was "mundane." And this thing has far, far fewer buttons than my parents' a/v remote that I've had to train my mother to use. And orienting objects on the screen by manually orienting the controller in the same manner can only be described as intuitive.
As the Nintendo execs pointed out in TFA, this is something peoples' mothers wouldn't be afraid to pick up, which cannot be said for any other video game controller to date.
And if potential customers don't see it as exotic, then montetary incentives will force developers to learn to love it.
"Do you really think you can play fighting games with this thing?
Move your arm in a punching motion. Rotation of your wrist dictates what manner of punch is portrayed on the screen.
"Sports games?"
Throw the ball by moving the controller over your head in a throwing motion. Swing the bat by swinging the controller.
"There will be few, if any, ports of popular games on the other platforms."
Double-edged sword. Popular Revolution games won't be able to be ported to the other consoles without great difficulty, making you buy the Revolution to play the game.
"People don't just want to play these "unique" types of games, they want to play games like Grand Theft Auto."
How's GTA:SA currently selling compared to Nintendogs right now?
"Along with this controller announcement, Nintendo shares fell by 2.5% today."
Nintendo's presentation was scheduled for 11:00 to 11:50. It took time for the information to trickle from the show floor to journalists to publishers to the investors (unlike, say, quarterly reports made to the exchange/investors directly). The market closes at 15:00. For a point of reference, this article hit Slashdot at 14:36, 24 minutes before close. So the market likely had little (if any) time to react.
The price you seem to be touting about was before close; most news services, right now, are reporting the 14:10 price, which was down 2.741% (even lower than the 2.25% you mention). However, information from the TSE itself says it closed at 15:00 down only 1.40%. Something happened in those last 50 minutes to cause a rally, and odds are it's news on the controller. So if the controller had an influence on trading today, it was positive.
But if you want to see the real market reaction to the controller, wait until tomorrow. I'd wager it goes up, though.
"People always seem to think that aiming with your whole arm is easier or more accurate than aiming with a mouse... Well, as anyone who has played a lot of FPSes and shoots real guns will tell you, nothing is further from the truth."
That solves the camping problem. The camper will give his position away with his first shot, which will likely miss, allowing opponents to dive for cover and have a reasonable chance of storming the camper's position successfully.
Alternatively, the software can tweak the aiming tolerances, so you don't need such precision. A lot of the older FPS games (Wolfenstein, Doom, etc) had a "close enough" mechanism.
"Alas the skill does not translate to a real pistol."
It's a pistol. Rifles are braced at the shoulder for a reason. No reason someone couldn't create a collapsable stock for the controller if it ever gets that far.
"My other concern is how precise and repeatable the hand-gesture controls will be. It's a really superb idea, but it's going to require deployment of sensors on either side of the TV. I wonder how well Nintendo is going to handle the gamut of televisions, from 13" B&W up to 100" projection models. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, but doing it right, and giving it the kind of sensitivity you have with mice and analog thumbsticks, will be very hard."
I think the answer to this is "it's not a light gun."
From what I gather, the motion-sensing capabilities of the controller isn't so much as the console figuring out where the controller is with respect to the sensors placed by the TV, but the inertial sensors within the controller telling the console where it has been moved with respect to itself. As I mentioned in another post, I suspect the "home" button on the controller is to tell the screen where the "home" position of the controller is, and I suspect the console also has a calibration mechanism where it figures out where the "home zone" is, that space where the software can expect the controller to move through during the course of a given game.
So how much you move the controller depends on how much you yourself intend to move around (actually swinging your sword or simply flicking your wrist a little bit) and has little to do with the size of the television you're playing on.
"Your fine motor skills can be trained to a much higher degree of acumen than your whole arm/shoulder/hand."
There are a whole lot of kids stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan right now that are using their whole arm/shoulder/hand motor skills to a fine degree just fine.
I mean, have you looked at what the characters in these FPS games are doing? The implements of destruction players are unleashing on each other are braced at or on the shoulder, not at the wrist.
Ultimately, it all depends on the aiming tolerence of the game code.
First off, if you RTFM, the author already made the point that you can rest your hands on your lap just fine and continue playing, just like with more orthodox ("bourgeois?") controller designs.
Secondly, so you'll have to burn a few calories to play the game. Oh well. I for one am actually looking forward to combine more exercise with my favorite leisure activity.
Dude, it's George we're talking about. It won't control a lightsaber, it will control some Jar-Jar racing pod thingie. What you're looking for won't be implemented for another 20-25 years, after the prequel movies have all been re-released 2-3 times each to show us George's "true" vision.
Actually, I'd more compare it to the even more bizarre U-Force. But still, if Nintendo can redefine wireless controllers, they can do this.
Maybe it's just the rabid (very, very rabid) Nintendo fanboy inside me speaking, but my God, it's beautiful. Even if I find myself mostly playing with the "nunchaku" setup the article was talking about, just the idea of having the controller split up into two, independent components (one for each hand) makes me wonder why it wasn't implemented so well before. It's as small or as big as you like it.
The article suggests that maybe the button is for menu navigation, but I figure if the controller is sensitive to where it is in space with relation to the TV/console/whatever, then the "home" button obviously tells the console what the controller's home position in that space is. Not some menu's home, the controller's.
His life is so devoid of meaning that he hacked the handheld of some rich strumpet that everybody now knows isn't even a good lay. Isn't that punishment enough?
You're thinking "hand grenade in a vacuum." There was no space-time before the Big Bang, that's what it created. We're not racing away from everything, the space-time between us is spreading out. The two-dimensional analogy used in Sphereland is that of the universe being the surface of a balloon that's being inflated.
This is why the cosmic background radiation, which is a relic from the Big Bang, is visible in all directions with the same intensity.
"If this massive gamma-ray burst resulted in a black hole, then how did the light escape enough to reach us here on earth,"
Only stuff inside the event horizon after a star has collapsed that far gets trapped. The bits of the implosion/explosion outside that radius gets out. Newton dictates that whatever pushes in against the core of a star to collapse it into a black hole also pushes the pusher in the opposite direction.
"I would love to see some pictures or even video of this event,"
A new pinpoint of light appears, then goes away after 3 minutes (assuming you can see gamma rays). Even the most powerful telescopes looking at Alpha Centauri only sees a pinpoint of light. They can get brighter or dimmer, but never "larger."
"Another question comes to mind, what if Earth and the entire Milky Way Galaxy itself, was actually trapped inside of a giant blackhole???"
Things closer to the center wouldn't be visible to us, because the light would be going the other way. Things farther away than us would only be visible as high-energy stuff, with other galaxies probably blue-shifted well into the gamma radiation range of the EM spectrum. Laterally, we might be able to see ourselves with powerful enough telescopes.
"yet the black hole swallowed up a majority of the explosion and what we see, is just a small glimpse of it?"
It's an all-too-big part of it. If the gamma ray burst that we saw was in our galaxy and still pointed at us, we'd be dead.
So am I right in assuming you're also one of those people that believed what Condi Rice had to say about WHM in Iraq? Or are you picking and choosing to support a bias?
At any rate, it's difficult to conduct talks with a regime when you're simultaneously saying "This guy is nucking futs!" in public documents. Looking at how the man runs his country, I suspect this is more an attempt to placate the man than any desire to give an honest description.
Slashdot Mirror
" I'm a failing engineering student at Iowa State University- or at least I was.. My failing point: math. "
Change majors. No, I'm serious, get out. Now. Engineering is math and what you just said is like saying "I could be a great basketball player if I could dribble, pass and shoot baskets."
So you can't do math. How much longer before your other classes require that math you're not learning? Forget second semester calculus, what happens when your lack of trigonometry keeps you from understanding your mechanics classes? For statics and dynamics, you need vectors. And if you expect to actually do anything with the degree you're pursuing, you need statics and dynamics.
What are you taking right now in your degree program that doesn't need the math your failing? Your humanities requirements? History?
"I can out code some of the instructors in my classes,"
So? We've been building things for 10,000 years, before even four-function calculators, let alone computers to code. And just as with the calculators, if you don't understand the basics and the limits of what the machine is trying to do, the machine is all but useless to you.
You can outcode your instructors? Odds are they don't need to code. There are probably even a few left that learned to do everything on sliderules. And if you're incapable of doing the same, then it's time to change majors. Spare yourself the humiliation (and the tuition costs) of taking the same math class two or three times, especially when that math class is the lynchpin needed to get into the last three years of your degree program.
"If this book pans out, it would ultimately change Calculus for the better"
No. Calculus is a lot more than trigonometry, it's a branch of mathematics all to itself. It may make some integrations easier (such as those of the inverse functions), but I can only see integrating sine and cosine functions becoming harder, not easier. Math is, well, a zero-sum field, and making some parts easier will only make others harder, just like changing back and forth between Cartesian and polar coordinates.
"The GameCube failed as a console."
The Virtual Boy failed as a console. The Dreamcast failed as a console. The GameCube will live through its natural lifespan and continue to turn a profit for Nintendo.
Where are you getting your info, Netcraft?
"now promoting the chip as a high-performance replacement for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors in Unix servers from companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM."
Weren't they sayin the same damned thing when the first 32-bit Pentium chips came out over a decade ago? They've been catching up to RISC for how long now?
"The video looked cool, but those actors weren't actually controlling anything,"
Uh... yes, they were. And then they handed the controllers to members of the press, who also controlled things.
"and those are game concepts, not actual games."
They weren't showing off games, they were showing off the controller. They were there to demonstrate that the controller worked and how well. According to first-hand press reports, they did the job.
"This type of technology has always been rather fiddly when you use it in real life."
So have wireless controllers. Then the WaveBird came out. Of course, non-Nintendo wireless controllers still have the habit of sucking...
"People's kids are going to be slamming these things,"
Ignoring for the moment the history of durability of Nintendo hardware, "so?" Peoples' kids won't be the only ones using these things.
"and it has to be reasonably cheap too."
Console + 1 controller will have a price point of $200, much like the GameCube was. An extra controller's price will probably resemble the WaveBird's.
FUD much?
... from side to side, come on it's time to go do the Mario!
"The controller is far too exotic,"
Exotic for whom? It may be exotic by abandoning existing video game controller dogma, it certainly isn't exotic to most of the possible players out there. Everybody who looked at the picture, their first reaction was "What, a remote control?" Admit it, your first reaction wasn't "exotic," It was "mundane." And this thing has far, far fewer buttons than my parents' a/v remote that I've had to train my mother to use. And orienting objects on the screen by manually orienting the controller in the same manner can only be described as intuitive.
As the Nintendo execs pointed out in TFA, this is something peoples' mothers wouldn't be afraid to pick up, which cannot be said for any other video game controller to date.
And if potential customers don't see it as exotic, then montetary incentives will force developers to learn to love it.
"Do you really think you can play fighting games with this thing?
Move your arm in a punching motion. Rotation of your wrist dictates what manner of punch is portrayed on the screen.
"Sports games?"
Throw the ball by moving the controller over your head in a throwing motion. Swing the bat by swinging the controller.
"There will be few, if any, ports of popular games on the other platforms."
Double-edged sword. Popular Revolution games won't be able to be ported to the other consoles without great difficulty, making you buy the Revolution to play the game.
"People don't just want to play these "unique" types of games, they want to play games like Grand Theft Auto."
How's GTA:SA currently selling compared to Nintendogs right now?
"Along with this controller announcement, Nintendo shares fell by 2.5% today."
Nintendo's presentation was scheduled for 11:00 to 11:50. It took time for the information to trickle from the show floor to journalists to publishers to the investors (unlike, say, quarterly reports made to the exchange/investors directly). The market closes at 15:00. For a point of reference, this article hit Slashdot at 14:36, 24 minutes before close. So the market likely had little (if any) time to react.
The price you seem to be touting about was before close; most news services, right now, are reporting the 14:10 price, which was down 2.741% (even lower than the 2.25% you mention). However, information from the TSE itself says it closed at 15:00 down only 1.40%. Something happened in those last 50 minutes to cause a rally, and odds are it's news on the controller. So if the controller had an influence on trading today, it was positive.
But if you want to see the real market reaction to the controller, wait until tomorrow. I'd wager it goes up, though.
"People always seem to think that aiming with your whole arm is easier or more accurate than aiming with a mouse... Well, as anyone who has played a lot of FPSes and shoots real guns will tell you, nothing is further from the truth."
That solves the camping problem. The camper will give his position away with his first shot, which will likely miss, allowing opponents to dive for cover and have a reasonable chance of storming the camper's position successfully.
Alternatively, the software can tweak the aiming tolerances, so you don't need such precision. A lot of the older FPS games (Wolfenstein, Doom, etc) had a "close enough" mechanism.
"Alas the skill does not translate to a real pistol."
It's a pistol. Rifles are braced at the shoulder for a reason. No reason someone couldn't create a collapsable stock for the controller if it ever gets that far.
"My other concern is how precise and repeatable the hand-gesture controls will be. It's a really superb idea, but it's going to require deployment of sensors on either side of the TV. I wonder how well Nintendo is going to handle the gamut of televisions, from 13" B&W up to 100" projection models. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, but doing it right, and giving it the kind of sensitivity you have with mice and analog thumbsticks, will be very hard."
I think the answer to this is "it's not a light gun."
From what I gather, the motion-sensing capabilities of the controller isn't so much as the console figuring out where the controller is with respect to the sensors placed by the TV, but the inertial sensors within the controller telling the console where it has been moved with respect to itself. As I mentioned in another post, I suspect the "home" button on the controller is to tell the screen where the "home" position of the controller is, and I suspect the console also has a calibration mechanism where it figures out where the "home zone" is, that space where the software can expect the controller to move through during the course of a given game.
So how much you move the controller depends on how much you yourself intend to move around (actually swinging your sword or simply flicking your wrist a little bit) and has little to do with the size of the television you're playing on.
"Your fine motor skills can be trained to a much higher degree of acumen than your whole arm/shoulder/hand."
There are a whole lot of kids stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan right now that are using their whole arm/shoulder/hand motor skills to a fine degree just fine.
I mean, have you looked at what the characters in these FPS games are doing? The implements of destruction players are unleashing on each other are braced at or on the shoulder, not at the wrist.
Ultimately, it all depends on the aiming tolerence of the game code.
First off, if you RTFM, the author already made the point that you can rest your hands on your lap just fine and continue playing, just like with more orthodox ("bourgeois?") controller designs.
Secondly, so you'll have to burn a few calories to play the game. Oh well. I for one am actually looking forward to combine more exercise with my favorite leisure activity.
Dude, it's George we're talking about. It won't control a lightsaber, it will control some Jar-Jar racing pod thingie. What you're looking for won't be implemented for another 20-25 years, after the prequel movies have all been re-released 2-3 times each to show us George's "true" vision.
Actually, I'd more compare it to the even more bizarre U-Force. But still, if Nintendo can redefine wireless controllers, they can do this.
Maybe it's just the rabid (very, very rabid) Nintendo fanboy inside me speaking, but my God, it's beautiful. Even if I find myself mostly playing with the "nunchaku" setup the article was talking about, just the idea of having the controller split up into two, independent components (one for each hand) makes me wonder why it wasn't implemented so well before. It's as small or as big as you like it.
... it's rotated 90 degrees from what we'd expect?
Well, that and it looks absolutely nothing like what Sony and Microsoft would have us play with.
The article suggests that maybe the button is for menu navigation, but I figure if the controller is sensitive to where it is in space with relation to the TV/console/whatever, then the "home" button obviously tells the console what the controller's home position in that space is. Not some menu's home, the controller's.
His life is so devoid of meaning that he hacked the handheld of some rich strumpet that everybody now knows isn't even a good lay. Isn't that punishment enough?
Obviously it's release is intended to commemorate the death of President Kennedy!
Or my mother's birthday (which is the only reason I remember the JFK thing). But it's more likely the assassination thing.
"I have to side with the Americans here."
I'm sorry, you must be new to Slashdot.
I have two words for you: cold fusion.
Whoever lands on it first wins.
You're thinking "hand grenade in a vacuum." There was no space-time before the Big Bang, that's what it created. We're not racing away from everything, the space-time between us is spreading out. The two-dimensional analogy used in Sphereland is that of the universe being the surface of a balloon that's being inflated.
This is why the cosmic background radiation, which is a relic from the Big Bang, is visible in all directions with the same intensity.
"Marketing 101 class that I took oh so many years ago."
Quick, get the holy water!
No, special relativity says that it happened 2005-09-06, and the gamma ray burster's calendar is 13 billion years slow.
I Am Not an Astronomer/Cosmologist
"If this massive gamma-ray burst resulted in a black hole, then how did the light escape enough to reach us here on earth,"
Only stuff inside the event horizon after a star has collapsed that far gets trapped. The bits of the implosion/explosion outside that radius gets out. Newton dictates that whatever pushes in against the core of a star to collapse it into a black hole also pushes the pusher in the opposite direction.
"I would love to see some pictures or even video of this event,"
A new pinpoint of light appears, then goes away after 3 minutes (assuming you can see gamma rays). Even the most powerful telescopes looking at Alpha Centauri only sees a pinpoint of light. They can get brighter or dimmer, but never "larger."
"Another question comes to mind, what if Earth and the entire Milky Way Galaxy itself, was actually trapped inside of a giant blackhole???"
Things closer to the center wouldn't be visible to us, because the light would be going the other way. Things farther away than us would only be visible as high-energy stuff, with other galaxies probably blue-shifted well into the gamma radiation range of the EM spectrum. Laterally, we might be able to see ourselves with powerful enough telescopes.
"yet the black hole swallowed up a majority of the explosion and what we see, is just a small glimpse of it?"
It's an all-too-big part of it. If the gamma ray burst that we saw was in our galaxy and still pointed at us, we'd be dead.
"Hey Dell, we just fucked your girlfriend."
Considering Dell is Microsoft's and Intel's crack whore, I hope Sun wore protection.
So am I right in assuming you're also one of those people that believed what Condi Rice had to say about WHM in Iraq? Or are you picking and choosing to support a bias?
At any rate, it's difficult to conduct talks with a regime when you're simultaneously saying "This guy is nucking futs!" in public documents. Looking at how the man runs his country, I suspect this is more an attempt to placate the man than any desire to give an honest description.