Yeah, look up scalers. TV's usually provide a lot of extra video-processing hardware that computer monitors don't (more scaling options (eg. add or remove black bars, and change aspect ratios as needed), ability to deinterlace and do inverse telecine, and ability to convert between RGB and YPbPr colorspace as needed). Scalers are external boxes that do all this. There are quite a few scalers that are over $1000, but there are some decent ones at $500, and maybe a few below that. Examples: one, two
Honestly, even if there were multiplayer games, they'd still be hampered by friend codes. I understand Nintendo's motivations for using friend codes, but still, they're a pretty big drag on online multiplayer, especially for adults want to play by some other schedule than when their handful of friends are on.
I can't tell you're serious or not. I've always found navigating MSDN to be pretty frustrating, from the 100 copies of documentation for the same function (none of which are the version you want), to the hours I've spent searching for something only to find that it's not documented anywhere, to the same convoluted thinking that brought us VB and batch file syntax. At least with open source apps, I know there's some upper limit to the amount of frustration I have to endure, since you can just look at the code to get your answer if it comes to that.
One answer is that there are many wikis out there. For almost everything that Wikipedia says it's not, there's another wiki out there that will cover the information you're interested in working on. For many of them, Wikimedia itself hosts those wikis, so it's not always a matter of DELETE DELETE, sometimes it's a matter of finding the right wiki. For instance, Wikipedia might not like to have really detailed programming guides on its site, but the content would be perfectly suitable for Wikimedia's Wikibooks. Wikipedia is a little too straight-laced sometimes, but there's Uncyclopedia if you want to add a joke to an article or otherwise go overboard with a subject. Wikibooks no longer takes game walkthroughs, but there's Strategy wiki for that.
The legal issues weren't the only issue with YouTube links. YouTube links are generally not reliable sources (just because a video has the CNN logo in the corner doesn't mean the video hasn't been modified or fabricated, whereas if it comes from cnn.com, that's much less likely to happen). Also, Wikipedia in general tries to be very respectful of copyright. WP:EL does mention the contributory infringement issue, but as much as we internally argue over fair use gray areas and open content, it seems like it's part of the culture to avoid copyvio issues.
For what it's worth, the set of topics that are Notable is a subset of the topics that are Verifiable... they're not the same thing. [1] Verifiable facts include that 923049123581435834435803984 is an integer, the data on my passport, and the gross income of Walmart in February 1982. However, most of those aren't generally considered encyclopedic, and if we open up the possibility for storing all those, Wikipedia would eventually have over a billion pages, and it might be hard to maintain all of them (rarely-read articles are spam and vandal magnets as it is). And in the case of integers, it's not possible to have enough space to store all of them. [2]
As an aside, Citizendium has decided to not use Notability as an inclusion criteria, but rather to focus more on whether an article is maintainable. Presumably with restricted logins, spam and vandalism will be much less of a problem, so this might work for them.
Technically, it's Wikipedia policy to delete libellous revisions from the page history, [1] since it could be a legal issue. The same thing happened on the Seigenthaler page, as soon as Seigenthaler notified Wikipedia about the problem with his page, the libelous versions were deleted from history. [2][3] In practice, there's a ton of vandalism, and libelous versions don't necessarily get deleted unless/until they're pointed out as being a problem...and as you pointed out, it's not like this particular bit of information isn't recorded on Slashdot for posterity's sake.
Wikipedia has funding not directly related to Wikipedia, and in a way that can exert no possible editorial control or ownership over Wikipedia, eg. from wikia and answers.com. Having a decent amount of revenue on the side ensures that Wikipedia won't be at risk of needing on-site advertisements or otherwise having to cede any hint of editorial control to corporate interests.
The article doesn't say... Do they know if it came from a reactor near Moscow, or if it came from a reactor on the periphery of Russia? That is, does Russia have plausible deniability by saying that rogue agents unattached to the central government did it? Or is it clear that the assassination was ordered by the higher-ups in the Russian government?
200,000 units worldwide is not a "launch". Almost nobody is talking about the PS3 online because almost nobody has one. 3DO sold 6 million units and is considered a miserable failure. It's taken how many months of manufacturing for Sony to produce 200,000 units... How long do we have to wait for Sony to manufacture 6 million units? 2.5 years?
Any word on whether their anti-cheat software detects use of Linux-based tools that can enable cheats, like/dev/kmem? I would guess they do not.
If they don't have the ability to check whether cheat are being used on Linux, then cheaters will flock to it at some point. And the only thing Blizzard can do is observe behavior on their end and try to divine whether someone appears to be cheating, and try to guess if this is the oncoming wave of cheaters. And that's pretty much what happened, and how they described what happened (except they left out the "cheaters may flock to this tool" part).
"Every time I sighted down the controller at the TV, the crosshairs were off-center."
The Wii-mote isn't designed for this, period. While there is minimal configuration for the Wii-mote's sensitivity, there is no way to make the Wii-mote's pointer line up pixel-perfectly. The Wii-mote is pretty accurate, but it's more of a relative movement like a mouse. Games aren't designed to require pixel-perfect accuracy. If you needed pixel-perfect accuracy, you'd need a more complicated setup to calibrate for the size of your TV, the orientation of the TV and sensor bar, and to take in account the fact that players will be playing from different angles. It's just not needed.
I definitely think Sony shouldn't have tried to launch in the U.S. and Japan so close together. With as few units as they had, they should have sold them all either in Japan, or all in the U.S. Though, from what I hear, it sounds like even the retailers (eg. GameStop, Best Buy) didn't know until ~a week before the U.S. launch that the numbers were going to be a fair bit less than what they were originally promised. So I guess even people at Sony were being much more optimistic than they should have been.
* Having them physically separate wasn't dumb. It's actually kind of nice... it automatically means the controller works for left-handed people just as well as right-handed people, and it lets you sit in a variety of comfortable positions (not restricted to having your two hands right next to each other). Selling them separately may or may not have been a bad idea, I don't know.
On the same note, the 360 and PS3 are both pretty much a graphics upgrade.
Actually, the Xbox's network service has a definite step forward, better even than what PC's have (other than not being free). It's got 1) integrated IM that works the same across all games, 2) seamless brain-dead demos and xbox live games, 3) worldwide leaderboards in just about every game, 4) achievements and gamerscore.
I'm curious about the reason that PS3 can't scale 720p to 1080i. Almost every HD component these days, all the way down to $50 DVD players, include a passable scaler. There's been some speculation that the limitation is that the 360 has analog outputs (which may be easier to scale in hardware) while the PS3 has digital outputs (which might be harder to do?)
I'm not sure how this is news. Anonymous and very new users can't edit the entries, but all accounts older than 4 days can, so the articles are still updated almost as fast as before. And numerous pages are semi-protected every day as vandalism flares up and dies down. Judging by semi-protection only, the consoles aren't any worse off than Lucille Ball, Tundra, or Michelangelo...
Maybe I'm still in the mindset of the political elections, but I see the headline "PS3 network service added as an afterthought" out of this. I'm sure Sony didn't want to release it until it was thoroughly tested. But the Xbox 360 network service really seems like it was standardized early on (so games knew how many achievement points they had, they knew they had to send the achievements text and icons to xbox networking, they knew how much CPU drop they had to deal with when you start IM'ing friends in the middle of a game, etc). How much game integration is there if the networking service is offered as a patch?
Or driven near other cars. Or purchased a product from anything other than a locally owned company. Or installed software written by someone other than you personally know.
He lists where they're plagiarized from on his website... click on each article and read the box at the top.
He's got a bit more information at these threads: [1], [2], [3] I don't agree with his conclusions, but he said he did put around three weeks of effort going over these by hand to make sure they were legitimate copyvios.
It's at least internal Wikipedia policy that there needs to be verification that the original author is posting the article (either by modifying the original site to note that the article is released under the GFDL, or by sending an email to the Wikimedia Foundation confirming its GFDL status). Without more formal confirmation, it's difficult to say whether the off-wiki author is the same as the on-wiki one, either from a plagiarism standpoint or a legal one.
The actual contents of the deleted versions obviously won't be visible, since it's a legal issue. The edit history metadata used to be visible to everyone, until vandals started being "funny", and leaving personal information in edit summaries, so unfortunately the edit history isn't automatically visible now. But admins may cut-n-paste the history on request. Here's that one:
07:17, 23 October 2006 Alphachimp (Talk | contribs | block) deleted "Alonzo M. Clark" (g12)
Microsoft is paying for repairs for the first batch of 360's shipped. [1] I've had the three-redlights problem that had to be shipped in to MS, and it sounds like quite a few others online have as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, look up scalers. TV's usually provide a lot of extra video-processing hardware that computer monitors don't (more scaling options (eg. add or remove black bars, and change aspect ratios as needed), ability to deinterlace and do inverse telecine, and ability to convert between RGB and YPbPr colorspace as needed). Scalers are external boxes that do all this. There are quite a few scalers that are over $1000, but there are some decent ones at $500, and maybe a few below that. Examples: one, two
Honestly, even if there were multiplayer games, they'd still be hampered by friend codes. I understand Nintendo's motivations for using friend codes, but still, they're a pretty big drag on online multiplayer, especially for adults want to play by some other schedule than when their handful of friends are on.
I can't tell you're serious or not. I've always found navigating MSDN to be pretty frustrating, from the 100 copies of documentation for the same function (none of which are the version you want), to the hours I've spent searching for something only to find that it's not documented anywhere, to the same convoluted thinking that brought us VB and batch file syntax. At least with open source apps, I know there's some upper limit to the amount of frustration I have to endure, since you can just look at the code to get your answer if it comes to that.
One answer is that there are many wikis out there. For almost everything that Wikipedia says it's not, there's another wiki out there that will cover the information you're interested in working on. For many of them, Wikimedia itself hosts those wikis, so it's not always a matter of DELETE DELETE, sometimes it's a matter of finding the right wiki. For instance, Wikipedia might not like to have really detailed programming guides on its site, but the content would be perfectly suitable for Wikimedia's Wikibooks. Wikipedia is a little too straight-laced sometimes, but there's Uncyclopedia if you want to add a joke to an article or otherwise go overboard with a subject. Wikibooks no longer takes game walkthroughs, but there's Strategy wiki for that.
The legal issues weren't the only issue with YouTube links. YouTube links are generally not reliable sources (just because a video has the CNN logo in the corner doesn't mean the video hasn't been modified or fabricated, whereas if it comes from cnn.com, that's much less likely to happen). Also, Wikipedia in general tries to be very respectful of copyright. WP:EL does mention the contributory infringement issue, but as much as we internally argue over fair use gray areas and open content, it seems like it's part of the culture to avoid copyvio issues.
For what it's worth, the set of topics that are Notable is a subset of the topics that are Verifiable... they're not the same thing. [1] Verifiable facts include that 923049123581435834435803984 is an integer, the data on my passport, and the gross income of Walmart in February 1982. However, most of those aren't generally considered encyclopedic, and if we open up the possibility for storing all those, Wikipedia would eventually have over a billion pages, and it might be hard to maintain all of them (rarely-read articles are spam and vandal magnets as it is). And in the case of integers, it's not possible to have enough space to store all of them. [2]
As an aside, Citizendium has decided to not use Notability as an inclusion criteria, but rather to focus more on whether an article is maintainable. Presumably with restricted logins, spam and vandalism will be much less of a problem, so this might work for them.
Technically, it's Wikipedia policy to delete libellous revisions from the page history, [1] since it could be a legal issue. The same thing happened on the Seigenthaler page, as soon as Seigenthaler notified Wikipedia about the problem with his page, the libelous versions were deleted from history. [2] [3] In practice, there's a ton of vandalism, and libelous versions don't necessarily get deleted unless/until they're pointed out as being a problem ...and as you pointed out, it's not like this particular bit of information isn't recorded on Slashdot for posterity's sake.
Wikipedia has funding not directly related to Wikipedia, and in a way that can exert no possible editorial control or ownership over Wikipedia, eg. from wikia and answers.com. Having a decent amount of revenue on the side ensures that Wikipedia won't be at risk of needing on-site advertisements or otherwise having to cede any hint of editorial control to corporate interests.
The article doesn't say... Do they know if it came from a reactor near Moscow, or if it came from a reactor on the periphery of Russia? That is, does Russia have plausible deniability by saying that rogue agents unattached to the central government did it? Or is it clear that the assassination was ordered by the higher-ups in the Russian government?
200,000 units worldwide is not a "launch". Almost nobody is talking about the PS3 online because almost nobody has one. 3DO sold 6 million units and is considered a miserable failure. It's taken how many months of manufacturing for Sony to produce 200,000 units... How long do we have to wait for Sony to manufacture 6 million units? 2.5 years?
That's the misstatement of the year. Do you really intend to suggest that everyone does their work on a cell-phone screen?
No, graphics do matter, they're just not the only thing that matters (or even the most important thing).
More importantly, is/will there be a link we can read them at?
Any word on whether their anti-cheat software detects use of Linux-based tools that can enable cheats, like /dev/kmem? I would guess they do not.
If they don't have the ability to check whether cheat are being used on Linux, then cheaters will flock to it at some point. And the only thing Blizzard can do is observe behavior on their end and try to divine whether someone appears to be cheating, and try to guess if this is the oncoming wave of cheaters. And that's pretty much what happened, and how they described what happened (except they left out the "cheaters may flock to this tool" part).
"Every time I sighted down the controller at the TV, the crosshairs were off-center."
The Wii-mote isn't designed for this, period. While there is minimal configuration for the Wii-mote's sensitivity, there is no way to make the Wii-mote's pointer line up pixel-perfectly. The Wii-mote is pretty accurate, but it's more of a relative movement like a mouse. Games aren't designed to require pixel-perfect accuracy. If you needed pixel-perfect accuracy, you'd need a more complicated setup to calibrate for the size of your TV, the orientation of the TV and sensor bar, and to take in account the fact that players will be playing from different angles. It's just not needed.
I definitely think Sony shouldn't have tried to launch in the U.S. and Japan so close together. With as few units as they had, they should have sold them all either in Japan, or all in the U.S. Though, from what I hear, it sounds like even the retailers (eg. GameStop, Best Buy) didn't know until ~a week before the U.S. launch that the numbers were going to be a fair bit less than what they were originally promised. So I guess even people at Sony were being much more optimistic than they should have been.
* Having them physically separate wasn't dumb. It's actually kind of nice... it automatically means the controller works for left-handed people just as well as right-handed people, and it lets you sit in a variety of comfortable positions (not restricted to having your two hands right next to each other). Selling them separately may or may not have been a bad idea, I don't know.
And if you can pretty much get the controller for the PC via the Gyration mouse. http://youtube.com/watch?v=piEz74G6WPA http://youtube.com/watch?v=HUGabGDLg8g
I'm curious about the reason that PS3 can't scale 720p to 1080i. Almost every HD component these days, all the way down to $50 DVD players, include a passable scaler. There's been some speculation that the limitation is that the 360 has analog outputs (which may be easier to scale in hardware) while the PS3 has digital outputs (which might be harder to do?)
I'm not sure how this is news. Anonymous and very new users can't edit the entries, but all accounts older than 4 days can, so the articles are still updated almost as fast as before. And numerous pages are semi-protected every day as vandalism flares up and dies down. Judging by semi-protection only, the consoles aren't any worse off than Lucille Ball, Tundra, or Michelangelo...
Maybe I'm still in the mindset of the political elections, but I see the headline "PS3 network service added as an afterthought" out of this. I'm sure Sony didn't want to release it until it was thoroughly tested. But the Xbox 360 network service really seems like it was standardized early on (so games knew how many achievement points they had, they knew they had to send the achievements text and icons to xbox networking, they knew how much CPU drop they had to deal with when you start IM'ing friends in the middle of a game, etc). How much game integration is there if the networking service is offered as a patch?
Or driven near other cars. Or purchased a product from anything other than a locally owned company. Or installed software written by someone other than you personally know.
He lists where they're plagiarized from on his website... click on each article and read the box at the top.
He's got a bit more information at these threads: [1], [2], [3] I don't agree with his conclusions, but he said he did put around three weeks of effort going over these by hand to make sure they were legitimate copyvios.
It's at least internal Wikipedia policy that there needs to be verification that the original author is posting the article (either by modifying the original site to note that the article is released under the GFDL, or by sending an email to the Wikimedia Foundation confirming its GFDL status). Without more formal confirmation, it's difficult to say whether the off-wiki author is the same as the on-wiki one, either from a plagiarism standpoint or a legal one.
Microsoft is paying for repairs for the first batch of 360's shipped. [1] I've had the three-redlights problem that had to be shipped in to MS, and it sounds like quite a few others online have as well.