That sensor's not for primary communication. The Rev controller uses RF. My guess is that the it's there so it can 'see' the reciever you'll have to attach to your TV. In other words, that's for the 'point' feature of the controller. Judging from the hands-on report over at cube.ign.com, it's clear that the controller works very well.
On a side note, have a peek at this comment I wrote a while back. I regurgitated a few rumors going around about the Rev controller, and the "point" ability of the controller is one of the things that was mentioned. I'm relieved to say that the concern I had about the controller working with modern/future TVs has been addressed. (This isn't speculation, this was confirmed. It'll work with LCD and plasma TVs.)
I know it won't happen, but I'd love to play San Andreas with this controller. Oh well.
"Look, I love Nintendo (and I mean *love*) as much the next/.er, but did i miss the joke? Or is this TV remote thing actually intentional? In that case, I prefer Sony's version. http://www.esato.com/board/img.php?id=35821"
You wouldn't prefer playing the next Metroid game with Sony's 'version'.
Btw, just in case it isn't clear enough, yes you did miss something. Comparing this to the CDi, Sony, or Intellivision controller is like comparing an iPod to a mini-disc player. I'd recommend going to cube.ign.com and checking out the demo video Nintendo put together.
"Off topic, I was at a Meijer (similar to a Wal*Mart for those that don't have them) and they had a DS set up at a kiosk. I swear, someone must've played the thing with a pocket knife. The touch screen was totally unresponsive except for the corners. This nintendog must've done something horribly wrong to someone..."
I don't think I've seen an NDS display that didn't look like this. I can't believe there are shitheads out there that actively seek to vanadalize this stuff.
"Wonder if, secretly, Bill Gates runs Firefox.....and his "engineers" are buying copying, I mean, Innovating for the next version of Internet Explorer."
a.) I seriously doubt Bill Gates is worrying about the minutia of IE's features.
b.) Duh. Somebody at Microsoft is using FireFox, looking at its strengths, and making sure Microsoft isn't behind. Just like the FireFox team did with IE. It looked at what IE does and duplicated it. This is typical of products in competition.
I wonder if anybody was ever modded interesting for complaining about Open Office stealing features from Office.
"Not that it makes it right, but gross exaggerations aren't limited to just Atari."
Never implied that. The difference between Atari and Sony, however, is that Sony's systems clearly outclassed the other systems of the day. Jaguar owners felt ripped off. There's exagerrating and there's setting false expectations.
"Was it exaggerated? Well, we'll never really know."
That's the problem, iddn't it. What good is capability if it's never used? Meanwhile, they did have games like Somethingmoprh (I forget what 'something' was...) and Iron... err. Iron Soldier? (the big mech game) that were full 3D. Both those games relied on goraud shaded polys and used very little (if any) fully textured polygons. Both those games had a hard time maintaining 30fps, and to be honest, I don't recall the morph game going much past 20. Frankly, given some of the numbers involved, I'm not surprised. It didn't have the dedicated hardware it needed to pull off anything really snazzy.
"And I would actually say that your cell phone can work as a digital camera - not a good one mind you, but it's there."
That's not what I was referring to. I'm saying "this is a digital camera". That would be incorrect even though I could rationalize it. There's a difference between saying something is 64-bit because it has 64-bit pipelines or other gobbledegook and there's saying is 64-bit because it performs all of the tasks that a 64-bit processor was really needed to perform. My point? You're right, the Jaguar had some 64-bit goodies. BFD. In the end, it didn't do anything earth shattering. I know, I had one of these things, and I was horribly disappointed. My 3DO was far more impressive.
The reason why the post you responded to likened the Jaquar to the TG-16 was quite interesting. The TG-16 did have a 16-bit graphics chip. That meant it had a bigger color palette. (the color palette on the TG-16 was arguably nicer than the palette available for the Genesis.) Unfortunately, with '16-bit' gaming machines game bigger characters and several layers of parallax scrolling. You could look at any given game and go "Oh, that's on a 16-bit machine." The TG-16, however, didn't have a 16-bit processor. It couldn't handle the parallax. It had a nice color palette, but in the ways that mattered when upgrading to a 16-bit machine, it wasn't '16-bit'.
In other words, I don't think somebody is calling the Jaguar 16-bit because it was completely devoid of 64-bit elements, it's because it simply behaved like a 16-bit machine that had aspirations of doing 32-bit graphics. Correcting people using the term like this isn't really doing any practical good. Their point still stands.
Not in any way that mattered to a gamer. Correcting anybody on interals of the machine won't take away the fact that the machine's power was grossly exaggerated by Atari. If handed you my cell phone and called it a digital camera, you'd likely correct me by saying "No, it's a cell phone with a crappy ass camera built into it." If I were to say "But technically it has a CCD, so it's a digital camera!" you'd think I was a twerp. Ponder on that.
"In my history of owning devices that do multiple things, it is always the case that they do each poorly. It is less than the sum of the parts."
Duh. Seriously, duh. The reason the extra stuff in the cell phone is interesting is that not everybody has all their fancy doodads at every given moment. A cell phone typically goes with people EVERYWHERE, but it's difficult to imagine anybody walking around with a cell phone, Game Boy, iPod, digital camera, PDA, and GPS.
You're sitting here saying "It does everything poorly" and I'm sitting here thinking "It does it less poorly than nothing at all." I've got some pictures of my nephew acting silly when we went out to dinner. I have a nice digital camera, but I wouldn't have gotten those photos if my phone didn't have a camera. Why? Because I'm not lugging that thing around everywhere I go. Okay, they're 640 by 480 and a little blurry, they're still amusing photos.
Of-freaking-course they're not going to be as good as a much more expensive dedicated device. It's like saying "I don't want a Game Boy because it's nowhere near a PS2."
Re:I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish.
on
First UMD Movie/Game Combo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Promote the UMDs that no one wants, or sell a 3 level demo for half what the game would cost... either way, it's a shitty deal."
It really is a bummer that Sony didn't think this through a little more. They've got 1.8 gigs to play with here. They have enough space to encode both a PSP version and a TV version of a movie on any given UMD. They could even swing the extras etc. Then they could have included a video out on the PSP (or maybe a peripheral...) so that UMD movies could be played on it. Then they could have made a DVD/UMD combo player. That would have been kinda neat. You could buy UMDs INSTEAD of DVDs. Heck, I might have gone for that.
"Dual core" and "dual processor" are two very different things."
Is there a practical difference between the two? I mean, if I sat down and used a dual processor machine for a day, then somebody magically swapped it for a dual core machine the next day, would I notice?
" That alone should reveal that even trying to write about science is a wasted effort."
Um, no, all it reveals is that some people find entertainment in it. I wouldn't mind but you're using a rather un-scientific method to determine whether or not scientific articles are ever going to show up in newspapers.
"Convergence is, and always has been, overrated. The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence."
Good gravy. I'm truely amazed at some of the 'black and white' attitudes around here. Convergance is not about destroying a category of device. Never was, never will be. (Seriously, if it were, you'd think there would be much stronger attempts.) Instead, it's about convenience. My cell phone, for example, has a crappy camera. But you know what? 640 by 480 is better than 0 by 0. Why? Because I don't have the pocket space to carry my digital camera around. The 'pda' in the phone, well it's lame. However, it's far better than the other non-existent PDA I own. At least it does keep track of contacts and alarms. Cool. Music player in a phone? Is it better than an iPod? Nope, it's better than no-iPod.
Why is cell phone convergance so attractive? For the simple reason that the phone is there all the time. Pay a few more bucks, get a few basic features. Okay, they're not top of the line features, but they're still useful. The phone becomes more valuable. This is a simple premise. No need to go all "it'll never replace the real thing!". That's not the point.
I really wish these rantings came with a small dose of common sense. All this uppitiness over attempts to make your cell phone more useful. Oh those bastards.
"More like, "isn't it cheaper to just buy the book?"."
A thousand sheets of paper is $5. I'm not sure how long the toner cartridge would last, but I've beaten that with my current laser printer. (Actually, I still haven't replaced the toner cartridge in it even though I've had it 3 years.)
No, it wouldn't be cheaper to buy the book unless you bought the printer for the sole purpose of printing that book.
"This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?"
I think most would agree that once you start getting that many songs, having to weed out a bunch to make room for new music sucks. For music, 120 gigs is practicaly infinite. Although, I think it'd be pretty hard core for somebody to find 40 gigs (just for music, most of these HD based mp3 players are neat little external drives, too...) to not be enough for music, but 120 gigs would be. Heh.
The thing is, though, there are some neat little doohickeys out right now that would benefit from having that much giggage. Archos, today, has a handheld device out that plays MPEG 4 files. It even has a little cradle so it'll act as a PVR. Unfortunately, that's upwards of $800 for the 80 gig model. When that comes down, boooooy will I be tempted. You can even hook it up to a TV. Neat stuff. Then again, I'm seriously hoping an iTunes for series of TV shows is somewhere on the horizon.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I felt bad about the unhelpfulness of my previous comment. I headed over to Visioneer's site (www.visioneer.com) and found a few scanners that handle like 25 pages at a time. The more you spend, the faster it scans. Sorry, I cannot personally recommend a scanner in particular. Never had one like this.
Okay, I don't know of a 'mass scanner' sort of device where you can dump a bunch of paper into it and it'll automatically handle it. But I can tell you that my aunt has a scanner that had a feeder that would accomodate one sheet at a time. She had it set up so she'd just feed the paper through, push a button, and it'd scan it for her and save it somewhere.
Unfortunately, I'm having a terrible time remembering the brand of it. I also don't know if they're even made these days. It's not a great solution to your problem, but I imagine it'd be a bit easier than using a flatbed scanner.
Apologies, this isn't that helpful of post. I'm just hoping I can spark a memory or two in somebody who knows the answer and can post it.
Slashdot Mirror
That sensor's not for primary communication. The Rev controller uses RF. My guess is that the it's there so it can 'see' the reciever you'll have to attach to your TV. In other words, that's for the 'point' feature of the controller. Judging from the hands-on report over at cube.ign.com, it's clear that the controller works very well.
On a side note, have a peek at this comment I wrote a while back. I regurgitated a few rumors going around about the Rev controller, and the "point" ability of the controller is one of the things that was mentioned. I'm relieved to say that the concern I had about the controller working with modern/future TVs has been addressed. (This isn't speculation, this was confirmed. It'll work with LCD and plasma TVs.)
I know it won't happen, but I'd love to play San Andreas with this controller. Oh well.
"Look, I love Nintendo (and I mean *love*) as much the next /.er, but did i miss the joke? Or is this TV remote thing actually intentional? In that case, I prefer Sony's version. http://www.esato.com/board/img.php?id=35821"
You wouldn't prefer playing the next Metroid game with Sony's 'version'.
Btw, just in case it isn't clear enough, yes you did miss something. Comparing this to the CDi, Sony, or Intellivision controller is like comparing an iPod to a mini-disc player. I'd recommend going to cube.ign.com and checking out the demo video Nintendo put together.
"Isn't this going to really help people who are left handed when it comes to playing video games?"
Not only that, but no more "It's too small/big!" complaints.
"historical performance is a reasonable basis for prediction."
Ah, this is an interesting rule. Well, in that case, I'd like to point out that next year will not be the year for Linux on the desktop.
"Off topic, I was at a Meijer (similar to a Wal*Mart for those that don't have them) and they had a DS set up at a kiosk. I swear, someone must've played the thing with a pocket knife. The touch screen was totally unresponsive except for the corners. This nintendog must've done something horribly wrong to someone..."
I don't think I've seen an NDS display that didn't look like this. I can't believe there are shitheads out there that actively seek to vanadalize this stuff.
"The damned 360 isn't even out yet, and already I'm sick of it. Thanks for ruining it for me, zonk."
I'm sick of stories about FireFox, but there's still a significant number of people who think an incremental version number is headline news.
There, now we both know the world's population is greater than 1.
"Wonder if, secretly, Bill Gates runs Firefox.....and his "engineers" are buying copying, I mean, Innovating for the next version of Internet Explorer."
a.) I seriously doubt Bill Gates is worrying about the minutia of IE's features.
b.) Duh. Somebody at Microsoft is using FireFox, looking at its strengths, and making sure Microsoft isn't behind. Just like the FireFox team did with IE. It looked at what IE does and duplicated it. This is typical of products in competition.
I wonder if anybody was ever modded interesting for complaining about Open Office stealing features from Office.
"Not that it makes it right, but gross exaggerations aren't limited to just Atari."
Never implied that. The difference between Atari and Sony, however, is that Sony's systems clearly outclassed the other systems of the day. Jaguar owners felt ripped off. There's exagerrating and there's setting false expectations.
"Was it exaggerated? Well, we'll never really know."
That's the problem, iddn't it. What good is capability if it's never used? Meanwhile, they did have games like Somethingmoprh (I forget what 'something' was...) and Iron... err. Iron Soldier? (the big mech game) that were full 3D. Both those games relied on goraud shaded polys and used very little (if any) fully textured polygons. Both those games had a hard time maintaining 30fps, and to be honest, I don't recall the morph game going much past 20. Frankly, given some of the numbers involved, I'm not surprised. It didn't have the dedicated hardware it needed to pull off anything really snazzy.
"And I would actually say that your cell phone can work as a digital camera - not a good one mind you, but it's there."
That's not what I was referring to. I'm saying "this is a digital camera". That would be incorrect even though I could rationalize it. There's a difference between saying something is 64-bit because it has 64-bit pipelines or other gobbledegook and there's saying is 64-bit because it performs all of the tasks that a 64-bit processor was really needed to perform. My point? You're right, the Jaguar had some 64-bit goodies. BFD. In the end, it didn't do anything earth shattering. I know, I had one of these things, and I was horribly disappointed. My 3DO was far more impressive.
The reason why the post you responded to likened the Jaquar to the TG-16 was quite interesting. The TG-16 did have a 16-bit graphics chip. That meant it had a bigger color palette. (the color palette on the TG-16 was arguably nicer than the palette available for the Genesis.) Unfortunately, with '16-bit' gaming machines game bigger characters and several layers of parallax scrolling. You could look at any given game and go "Oh, that's on a 16-bit machine." The TG-16, however, didn't have a 16-bit processor. It couldn't handle the parallax. It had a nice color palette, but in the ways that mattered when upgrading to a 16-bit machine, it wasn't '16-bit'.
In other words, I don't think somebody is calling the Jaguar 16-bit because it was completely devoid of 64-bit elements, it's because it simply behaved like a 16-bit machine that had aspirations of doing 32-bit graphics. Correcting people using the term like this isn't really doing any practical good. Their point still stands.
"They called it 64-bit BECAUSE IT IS."
Not in any way that mattered to a gamer. Correcting anybody on interals of the machine won't take away the fact that the machine's power was grossly exaggerated by Atari. If handed you my cell phone and called it a digital camera, you'd likely correct me by saying "No, it's a cell phone with a crappy ass camera built into it." If I were to say "But technically it has a CCD, so it's a digital camera!" you'd think I was a twerp. Ponder on that.
"And hopefully it will fall in with the 50% of their controller ideas that actually work."
Yeah, it'll save Sony and Microsoft a few R&D dollars.
"I'm just glad that the very first image was of a nice set of cartoon tubes. Made the whole click thing worth it."
That's the first time, if you don't count immediately after posting something really boneheaded, that somebody convinced me to RTFA.
"He's already calling the Nano his precious. "
It really is flattering, but...
"How about the Vista Porn Edition?"
Go on....
"In my history of owning devices that do multiple things, it is always the case that they do each poorly. It is less than the sum of the parts."
Duh. Seriously, duh. The reason the extra stuff in the cell phone is interesting is that not everybody has all their fancy doodads at every given moment. A cell phone typically goes with people EVERYWHERE, but it's difficult to imagine anybody walking around with a cell phone, Game Boy, iPod, digital camera, PDA, and GPS.
You're sitting here saying "It does everything poorly" and I'm sitting here thinking "It does it less poorly than nothing at all." I've got some pictures of my nephew acting silly when we went out to dinner. I have a nice digital camera, but I wouldn't have gotten those photos if my phone didn't have a camera. Why? Because I'm not lugging that thing around everywhere I go. Okay, they're 640 by 480 and a little blurry, they're still amusing photos.
Of-freaking-course they're not going to be as good as a much more expensive dedicated device. It's like saying "I don't want a Game Boy because it's nowhere near a PS2."
"Promote the UMDs that no one wants, or sell a 3 level demo for half what the game would cost... either way, it's a shitty deal."
It really is a bummer that Sony didn't think this through a little more. They've got 1.8 gigs to play with here. They have enough space to encode both a PSP version and a TV version of a movie on any given UMD. They could even swing the extras etc. Then they could have included a video out on the PSP (or maybe a peripheral...) so that UMD movies could be played on it. Then they could have made a DVD/UMD combo player. That would have been kinda neat. You could buy UMDs INSTEAD of DVDs. Heck, I might have gone for that.
Oh well.
"Dual core" and "dual processor" are two very different things."
Is there a practical difference between the two? I mean, if I sat down and used a dual processor machine for a day, then somebody magically swapped it for a dual core machine the next day, would I notice?
" That alone should reveal that even trying to write about science is a wasted effort."
Um, no, all it reveals is that some people find entertainment in it. I wouldn't mind but you're using a rather un-scientific method to determine whether or not scientific articles are ever going to show up in newspapers.
"Convergence is, and always has been, overrated. The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence."
Good gravy. I'm truely amazed at some of the 'black and white' attitudes around here. Convergance is not about destroying a category of device. Never was, never will be. (Seriously, if it were, you'd think there would be much stronger attempts.) Instead, it's about convenience. My cell phone, for example, has a crappy camera. But you know what? 640 by 480 is better than 0 by 0. Why? Because I don't have the pocket space to carry my digital camera around. The 'pda' in the phone, well it's lame. However, it's far better than the other non-existent PDA I own. At least it does keep track of contacts and alarms. Cool. Music player in a phone? Is it better than an iPod? Nope, it's better than no-iPod.
Why is cell phone convergance so attractive? For the simple reason that the phone is there all the time. Pay a few more bucks, get a few basic features. Okay, they're not top of the line features, but they're still useful. The phone becomes more valuable. This is a simple premise. No need to go all "it'll never replace the real thing!". That's not the point.
I really wish these rantings came with a small dose of common sense. All this uppitiness over attempts to make your cell phone more useful. Oh those bastards.
"I'm gonna stop using condoms too while I'm at it."
;)
Bet you outlive your computer.
"More like, "isn't it cheaper to just buy the book?"."
A thousand sheets of paper is $5. I'm not sure how long the toner cartridge would last, but I've beaten that with my current laser printer. (Actually, I still haven't replaced the toner cartridge in it even though I've had it 3 years.)
No, it wouldn't be cheaper to buy the book unless you bought the printer for the sole purpose of printing that book.
"This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?"
I think most would agree that once you start getting that many songs, having to weed out a bunch to make room for new music sucks. For music, 120 gigs is practicaly infinite. Although, I think it'd be pretty hard core for somebody to find 40 gigs (just for music, most of these HD based mp3 players are neat little external drives, too...) to not be enough for music, but 120 gigs would be. Heh.
The thing is, though, there are some neat little doohickeys out right now that would benefit from having that much giggage. Archos, today, has a handheld device out that plays MPEG 4 files. It even has a little cradle so it'll act as a PVR. Unfortunately, that's upwards of $800 for the 80 gig model. When that comes down, boooooy will I be tempted. You can even hook it up to a TV. Neat stuff. Then again, I'm seriously hoping an iTunes for series of TV shows is somewhere on the horizon.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I felt bad about the unhelpfulness of my previous comment. I headed over to Visioneer's site (www.visioneer.com) and found a few scanners that handle like 25 pages at a time. The more you spend, the faster it scans. Sorry, I cannot personally recommend a scanner in particular. Never had one like this.
Good luck!
Okay, I don't know of a 'mass scanner' sort of device where you can dump a bunch of paper into it and it'll automatically handle it. But I can tell you that my aunt has a scanner that had a feeder that would accomodate one sheet at a time. She had it set up so she'd just feed the paper through, push a button, and it'd scan it for her and save it somewhere.
Unfortunately, I'm having a terrible time remembering the brand of it. I also don't know if they're even made these days. It's not a great solution to your problem, but I imagine it'd be a bit easier than using a flatbed scanner.
Apologies, this isn't that helpful of post. I'm just hoping I can spark a memory or two in somebody who knows the answer and can post it.
"So why do you paste the link to the porn into your post instead of just putting it in your sig?"
I can think of a couple of reasons:
1.) Sigs have a 120 character limit.
2.) People can turn of sigs, but they cannot prevent the link in the post from being posted.