Bad Example, the control scheme in Zelda works really well, the Bow definitely does work well and I love it. If you want to pinpoint bad control schemes, then better use another game, Zelda definitely has a good one.
Exactly, I never felt the touch screen to be annoying, especially since I played a lot of games on the PC and I know the merits of a good mouse controle for everything point and click related.
The touch screen finally gives me that. The only thing annoying on the ds are those games which try to mimic an analog stick via the touch screen, which is exactly two games, Metroid Prime Hunters and Super Mario 64, both simply fail because the form factor of the ds simply gives you cramps on this control scheme.
Super Paper Mario... they added a lot of useful functionality to the D-Pad, Zelda also works exceptionally well.
Rayman Raving Rabbits basically lives from the Wiis Control scheme, just check out how poorly the game works on other platforms than the Wii. Resident Evil 4 also works better on the Wii than on any other system.
Also on the DS it finally is possible to play strategy and point and click games decently, many games which use the pad as mouse replacement work exceptionally well, those which dont work are those which try weird control schemes.
Either way if you pump up the electrons issued at this voltage with the energy the average houshold plug can give, you are fucked, no matter being it ac and dc, if you get enough electrons over your heart, you have a good chance of seeing the casket inside...
Ok given it has been 15 years since I had to learn all this but,
My friend you didnt get my posting fully it is not the voltage but the current you push through your body parts, the biggest problem is the heart, pushing,more than five miliampere either dc or ac screams for instant heart attack.
The electric energy is defined by voltage * current, but the main issue hear in being deadly is the physical part which is defined by the current. Hence electroshock devices can issue thousands of volts without being deadly because the actual energy behind it is rather low and issues not a lot of electrons before falling down into oblivion voltagewise (also they are designed to keep the actual electron flow as small as possible, if you hold such a device to the heart, things might be deadly.
On the other hand you need high levels of potential difference to get signifcant amount of electrons (current) over resistors, which the skin in fact is (around 3kohm (take this with a grain of salt)
so go figure after ohms law, in case of electrical outlets you have a bad combination,
you have a lot of energy behind it overall and a rather high voltage, which will not dimish once the first electrons are pushed but will be kept over an infinite period of time...
The effects in this case would be the same if you would trigger the energy over the heart no matter being it dc or ac, because due to the electrons flowing over your heart your nearvs would get a significant false signal and the heart simply would start to act weird or would fail.
Brrr. why do you think DC is non lethal, it is not a question of DC and AC but a question of how many miliampere you push over the heart, the borderline to my knowledge is around 5mA and you have a very high chance of seeing a casket from inside.
The Edison DC vs. Tesla AC quarrel was along the lines that Edison wanted to get a load of patent royalities, while Teslas argument was, that AC was simpler to produce.
Depends on what you want to do with Eclipse, Eclipse has become defacto base for most Java IDEs for a reason, as Java IDE it is top notch.
As C++ IDE it might be bad, but Eclipse really is successful for a reason, because it is excellent for its core job.
IBM also has a history of successful products.
Eclipse, WAS, WSAD, Lotus Notes, Rational Developer etc...
The utterly failed in the office market with Lotus (They probably didnt have a clue on what to do with it)
Good question, I once read an article that bands in this league usually earn more per concert than they do by record/cd sales of a full year. So for him having as much non concert audience as possible is more vital than sold CDs. It probably really is the better deal to get as much audience as possible upfront so that his concerts are full.
Classical example for this is the Grateful Dead, while not having had a huge hit for decades, they constantly had full concerts and probably earned a lot more than many other bands.
Problem is getting that big probably still is impossible without the record industry and their propaganda machinery, but once you are in the contract you hare a slave of them for a period of time.
One word Bonobo, people had to suffer through a broken clone of a broken technology (OLE), while really well working component models already had been existing for a long time, (JavaBeans, KParts etc...)
Same goes for the entire Gnome API which in its early stages was a rather copied Win32 API!
The main problem is SQL is just a description language for set data, and a relational database is exactly that a set data. The main problem is so far nobody really has brought out something more reable to deal with sets in a mathematical sense, you could use mathematical operators but then things would become even less readable than SQL is.
All approaches on the programming side I have seen (criteria objects etc...) make things only easier in some domains, after that you revert to plain sql and its derivates. Elminiating SQL would mean you probably have to eliminate the data storage model of sets as well.
It was not even ET although this game was close to fraud, the main problem was that Atari tried to milk the 2600 way beyound its lifetime and hence basically almost killed the entire market. People are basically stupid, back then they thought videogames = atari, after milking the 2600 way beyound its lifetime, they basically thought atari = trash = all videogames are trash, the other group the hardcore gamers simply moved over to the really open and way better homecomputers.
The video game crash gave rise to the Commodore 64 and later the Atari ST and Amiga as gaming machines.
It definetly was not opening the console to third parties, the PC never ran into those troubles, neither did the Amiga or the C64.
The main problem with the Atari 2600 was its technical limitations, Pitfall did wonders, but Steve Crane knew the machine in and out, and for Pitfall2 they added custom chips on the modules.
But on the average you couldnt do too much with the machine, hence most games on that machine sucked big time.
The 2600 was an open platform after Atari lost the case against Activision, but the PC also is, and
the junk to excellent game ratio is way better on the PC than it ever was on the 2600 for one reason
it simply has more possibilities hardwarewise, and ever had even in the days when it was on the graphical level worse than the 2600.
I see that as well, recently there were news that Nintendo used homeland security to track down wii key vendors, dunno if those news were true, but I assume there are more important things like terrorist tracking instead of wii key busting to do for homeland security.
Add the fact that Europe on average is treated like shit release day wise, I cannot really say Nintendo has changed that much. It is just that Sony currently is king of arrogance.
Actually I didnt say the USA is in such a miserable state, I personally dont even think that states nowadays easily can slide into an autocratic state like Germany 1938 or Sovjet Russia. There are too many factors preventing that nowadays, no general miserable condition of society and economy, lots of people believe into democracy, lots of people playing watchdogs, no streamlined propaganda which does not leave the room open for alternative sources.
I dont even think the USA will run into such a state, the democracy in the USA simply is too strong, Germany pre 1932 had a very weak democracy and lots of people didnt accept it (one main difference, besides a lot of other things, like no clear leaderfigure, generally not a miserable state of society etc...), but it is nevertheless an interesting history lesson to learn, so that in times such patterns occur you should be more watchful about political events.
But generally we have some problems in the western world in a democratic sence, in Europe and the USA the influence of the money holders is way too strong (via lobbyism), which poses a long term thread in my opinion. Terrorism and other external influences, which are not virtual enemies are not really a huge problem, in my opinion (although they cannot be denied), but those are not solvable within a few years, terrorism has to be targeted at the root, and not by war, but by trying to raise the living standards of those who would fall for the terrorist propaganda. War raises just another load of terrorists, but it does not remove the cause. (Which is the exact reason why I dont think that any war on terror in the current sense will have any effect, the same goes for the war on drugs btw.!) Or in other words, you cannot remove violence by introduction of other violence, definitely not in this case!
Ah one last thing I forgot, the uber surveillance organisation which was installed to support the "people" or the government.
In germany it was the Gestapo (Secret National Police) in Russia the KGB.
Btw. in eastern germany this organisation was called Stasi (Staats Sicherheit - Country Security, Homeland Security;-) )
Actually the funny thing is, that the NSDAP can be translated nationalsocialist, in the first years the party was opposed to capitalism it then very soon sided with the big money. Also a very interesting history lesson is how they came to power and then eliminated the democracy slide by slide. They used a catastrophy (probably self inflicted still not proven but likely) the Reichstagsbrand, a fire in the german parliament as an excuse for raising a propaganda enemy, the jews, and with this not really existing but by the media fueled enemy they removed democracy slide by slide, one step after the other. The pretesting of the concentration camps was then the Reichskristallnacht, which was a testing of the government of how far they already could go.
In the end germany anno 1938 didnt look too much different to the Sovjet Union 1938, both were hardline autocratic regimes, and they all look the same, no matter from which political angle they come from. One big leader (in germanies case Hitler, in Russias case Stalin), inherent virtual enemies (in Germanies case Jews, Communits, Gypsies, Gay people, you name it), in Russias case, everyone who was not in Stalins line of yes sayers, which also included liberal communists. Youth organisations for preschooling and indoctrination of the younger people, because they are easier to influence, and mass killings in prison camps and people being locked away without any law based trial.
That doesnt unfortunately change the fact that you have to go through 15-20 seconds of non stoppable animation if you trigger a superstrike, after the 100th time seeing mario jumping into the air you simply dont want to play the game anymore, give me the same game without superstrike animation and it would have been a classic.
It is amazing how such a minor detail can ruin an otherwise excellent game.
I sold super Mario strikers, there was one thing which ruined the game for me, it was the endless super strike animation triggered every 15 seconds if you did intensive super strikes. Needless to say, that such a small detail ruined an otherwise excellent game for me.
Eclipse is more of a toolset, often you have to go plugin shopping, bare eclipse does not bring you very far, and Eclipse Europa while being very extensive still feels unfinished, I usually go for MyEclipse for my Eclipse needs, it always is somewhat better than the pure oss collections.
Netbeans however is nicely integrated, everything feels like being solid, but the 5.5 version falls flat on some areas, like db integration, I have high hopes for version 6.
Anyway if you want to kickstart with JEE coding then Netbeans probably is the better choice if you dont have experience. It is more of a classical ide!
Huh 4 gigs of ram, what are you using, Eclipse is my bread and butter tool for a living and I normally use it on a 1 gig box in conjunction with a database and app server and some testing browsers.
I usually give it 300megs but then everything can be run within Eclipse, also the app server.
Eclipse to my experience (I have been using it since Version 2) is in the same league as most other IDEs ram consumptionwise.
(I use myeclipse btw. which is the best low cost extension for j2ee development)
Of course if you use WAS or something similar then maybe the 4 gig are justified, but normally it is not.
Jepp funny thing is that most of the PS2 buyers were late adapters, or replacement consoles.
Lets face it the PS2 might have sold 110 mio but in reality the number of owners worldwide is more along the lines of 40 mio due to lots of ps2s having broken over time and being rebought. Most of them definitely wont move to the PS3 for the forseeable future, due to its price some of them might move to the Wii and some to the XBox.
I am not a sony hater, I have a psp but this marketing troll definitely has a blurred vision of reality.
Actually it really depends on the OS, I noticed that Swing used to be substantially slower under Linux than Windows. In windows you can run a native app and swing side by side and menus etc... all of this is way faster than the native widgets, while utilizing the native skin, this comes from the fact that Swing basically goes directly into DirectX for rendering, now once you switch to Aero in Vista everything becomes dog slow because Aero is a major pain from the felt performance.
In Linux things might be different, but to my knowledge in Linux Swing has the possibility to add opengl rendering (never tried it since my main work currently is in Windows where swing behaves nicely)
Anyway on either platform I dont think the widget speed really is an issue anymore, at least from a felt perspective, your mileage may vary, but the last complaint I would get nowadays is why is the user interface slow. Mozillas is almost twice as slow and I wont even talk about GTK2 on Windows:-)
Same goes for the mac, but there the limiting factor is Aqua itself which is not the fastest and feels sort of slowish.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad Example, the control scheme in Zelda works really well, the Bow definitely does work well and I love it. If you want to pinpoint bad control schemes, then better use another game, Zelda definitely has a good one.
Exactly, I never felt the touch screen to be annoying, especially since I played a lot of games on the PC and I know the merits of a good mouse controle for everything point and click related. The touch screen finally gives me that. The only thing annoying on the ds are those games which try to mimic an analog stick via the touch screen, which is exactly two games, Metroid Prime Hunters and Super Mario 64, both simply fail because the form factor of the ds simply gives you cramps on this control scheme.
Super Paper Mario... they added a lot of useful functionality to the D-Pad, Zelda also works exceptionally well. Rayman Raving Rabbits basically lives from the Wiis Control scheme, just check out how poorly the game works on other platforms than the Wii. Resident Evil 4 also works better on the Wii than on any other system. Also on the DS it finally is possible to play strategy and point and click games decently, many games which use the pad as mouse replacement work exceptionally well, those which dont work are those which try weird control schemes.
Either way if you pump up the electrons issued at this voltage with the energy the average houshold plug can give, you are fucked, no matter being it ac and dc, if you get enough electrons over your heart, you have a good chance of seeing the casket inside...
Ok given it has been 15 years since I had to learn all this but, My friend you didnt get my posting fully it is not the voltage but the current you push through your body parts, the biggest problem is the heart, pushing ,more than five miliampere either dc or ac screams for instant heart attack.
The electric energy is defined by voltage * current, but the main issue hear in being deadly is the physical part which is defined by the current. Hence electroshock devices can issue thousands of volts without being deadly because the actual energy behind it is rather low and issues not a lot of electrons before falling down into oblivion voltagewise (also they are designed to keep the actual electron flow as small as possible, if you hold such a device to the heart, things might be deadly.
On the other hand you need high levels of potential difference to get signifcant amount of electrons (current) over resistors, which the skin in fact is (around 3kohm (take this with a grain of salt)
so go figure after ohms law, in case of electrical outlets you have a bad combination,
you have a lot of energy behind it overall and a rather high voltage, which will not dimish once the first electrons are pushed but will be kept over an infinite period of time...
The effects in this case would be the same if you would trigger the energy over the heart no matter being it dc or ac, because due to the electrons flowing over your heart your nearvs would get a significant false signal and the heart simply would start to act weird or would fail.
Brrr. why do you think DC is non lethal, it is not a question of DC and AC but a question of how many miliampere you push over the heart, the borderline to my knowledge is around 5mA and you have a very high chance of seeing a casket from inside. The Edison DC vs. Tesla AC quarrel was along the lines that Edison wanted to get a load of patent royalities, while Teslas argument was, that AC was simpler to produce.
I wonder when you focus on upgrading your early nineties computer?
Depends on what you want to do with Eclipse, Eclipse has become defacto base for most Java IDEs for a reason, as Java IDE it is top notch. As C++ IDE it might be bad, but Eclipse really is successful for a reason, because it is excellent for its core job.
IBM also has a history of successful products. Eclipse, WAS, WSAD, Lotus Notes, Rational Developer etc... The utterly failed in the office market with Lotus (They probably didnt have a clue on what to do with it)
Good question, I once read an article that bands in this league usually earn more per concert than they do by record/cd sales of a full year.
So for him having as much non concert audience as possible is more vital than sold CDs.
It probably really is the better deal to get as much audience as possible upfront so that his concerts are full.
Classical example for this is the Grateful Dead, while not having had a huge hit for decades, they constantly had full concerts and probably earned a lot more than many other bands.
Problem is getting that big probably still is impossible without the record industry and their propaganda machinery, but once you are in the contract you hare a slave of them for a period of time.
One word Bonobo, people had to suffer through a broken clone of a broken technology (OLE), while really well working component models already had been existing for a long time, (JavaBeans, KParts etc...) Same goes for the entire Gnome API which in its early stages was a rather copied Win32 API!
The main problem is SQL is just a description language for set data, and a relational database is exactly that a set data.
The main problem is so far nobody really has brought out something more reable to deal with sets in a mathematical sense, you could use mathematical operators but then things would become even less readable than SQL is.
All approaches on the programming side I have seen (criteria objects etc...) make things only easier in some domains, after that you revert to plain sql and its derivates.
Elminiating SQL would mean you probably have to eliminate the data storage model of sets as well.
It was not even ET although this game was close to fraud, the main problem was that Atari tried to milk the 2600 way beyound its lifetime and hence basically almost killed the entire market. People are basically stupid, back then they thought videogames = atari, after milking the 2600 way beyound its lifetime, they basically thought atari = trash = all videogames are trash, the other group the hardcore gamers simply moved over to the really open and way better homecomputers. The video game crash gave rise to the Commodore 64 and later the Atari ST and Amiga as gaming machines. It definetly was not opening the console to third parties, the PC never ran into those troubles, neither did the Amiga or the C64.
The main problem with the Atari 2600 was its technical limitations, Pitfall did wonders, but Steve Crane knew the machine in and out, and for Pitfall2 they added custom chips on the modules. But on the average you couldnt do too much with the machine, hence most games on that machine sucked big time. The 2600 was an open platform after Atari lost the case against Activision, but the PC also is, and the junk to excellent game ratio is way better on the PC than it ever was on the 2600 for one reason it simply has more possibilities hardwarewise, and ever had even in the days when it was on the graphical level worse than the 2600.
I see that as well, recently there were news that Nintendo used homeland security to track down wii key vendors, dunno if those news were true, but I assume there are more important things like terrorist tracking instead of wii key busting to do for homeland security. Add the fact that Europe on average is treated like shit release day wise, I cannot really say Nintendo has changed that much. It is just that Sony currently is king of arrogance.
Actually I didnt say the USA is in such a miserable state, I personally dont even think that states nowadays easily can slide into an autocratic state like Germany 1938 or Sovjet Russia. There are too many factors preventing that nowadays, no general miserable condition of society and economy, lots of people believe into democracy, lots of people playing watchdogs, no streamlined propaganda which does not leave the room open for alternative sources.
I dont even think the USA will run into such a state, the democracy in the USA simply is too strong, Germany pre 1932 had a very weak democracy and lots of people didnt accept it (one main difference, besides a lot of other things, like no clear leaderfigure, generally not a miserable state of society etc...), but it is nevertheless an interesting history lesson to learn, so that in times such patterns occur you should be more watchful about political events.
But generally we have some problems in the western world in a democratic sence, in Europe and the USA the influence of the money holders is way too strong (via lobbyism), which poses a long term thread in my opinion. Terrorism and other external influences, which are not virtual enemies are not really a huge problem, in my opinion (although they cannot be denied), but those are not solvable within a few years, terrorism has to be targeted at the root, and not by war, but by trying to raise the living standards of those who would fall for the terrorist propaganda. War raises just another load of terrorists, but it does not remove the cause. (Which is the exact reason why I dont think that any war on terror in the current sense will have any effect, the same goes for the war on drugs btw.!)
Or in other words, you cannot remove violence by introduction of other violence, definitely not in this case!
Ah one last thing I forgot, the uber surveillance organisation which was installed to support the "people" or the government. In germany it was the Gestapo (Secret National Police) in Russia the KGB. Btw. in eastern germany this organisation was called Stasi (Staats Sicherheit - Country Security, Homeland Security ;-) )
Actually the funny thing is, that the NSDAP can be translated nationalsocialist, in the first years the party was opposed to capitalism it then very soon sided with the big money.
Also a very interesting history lesson is how they came to power and then eliminated the democracy slide by slide. They used a catastrophy (probably self inflicted still not proven but likely) the Reichstagsbrand, a fire in the german parliament as an excuse for raising a propaganda enemy, the jews, and with this not really existing but by the media fueled enemy they removed democracy slide by slide, one step after the other. The pretesting of the concentration camps was then the Reichskristallnacht, which was a testing of the government of how far they already could go.
In the end germany anno 1938 didnt look too much different to the Sovjet Union 1938, both were hardline autocratic regimes, and they all look the same, no matter from which political angle they come from. One big leader (in germanies case Hitler, in Russias case Stalin), inherent virtual enemies (in Germanies case Jews, Communits, Gypsies, Gay people, you name it), in Russias case, everyone who was not in Stalins line of yes sayers, which also included liberal communists.
Youth organisations for preschooling and indoctrination of the younger people, because they are easier to influence, and mass killings in prison camps and people being locked away without any law based trial.
That doesnt unfortunately change the fact that you have to go through 15-20 seconds of non stoppable animation if you trigger a superstrike, after the 100th time seeing mario jumping into the air you simply dont want to play the game anymore, give me the same game without superstrike animation and it would have been a classic.
It is amazing how such a minor detail can ruin an otherwise excellent game.
I sold super Mario strikers, there was one thing which ruined the game for me, it was the endless super strike animation triggered every 15 seconds if you did intensive super strikes. Needless to say, that such a small detail ruined an otherwise excellent game for me.
Eclipse is more of a toolset, often you have to go plugin shopping, bare eclipse does not bring you very far, and Eclipse Europa while being very extensive still feels unfinished, I usually go for MyEclipse for my Eclipse needs, it always is somewhat better than the pure oss collections. Netbeans however is nicely integrated, everything feels like being solid, but the 5.5 version falls flat on some areas, like db integration, I have high hopes for version 6. Anyway if you want to kickstart with JEE coding then Netbeans probably is the better choice if you dont have experience. It is more of a classical ide!
Huh 4 gigs of ram, what are you using, Eclipse is my bread and butter tool for a living and I normally use it on a 1 gig box in conjunction with a database and app server and some testing browsers. I usually give it 300megs but then everything can be run within Eclipse, also the app server. Eclipse to my experience (I have been using it since Version 2) is in the same league as most other IDEs ram consumptionwise. (I use myeclipse btw. which is the best low cost extension for j2ee development) Of course if you use WAS or something similar then maybe the 4 gig are justified, but normally it is not.
Jepp funny thing is that most of the PS2 buyers were late adapters, or replacement consoles.
Lets face it the PS2 might have sold 110 mio but in reality the number of owners worldwide is more along the lines of 40 mio due to lots of ps2s having broken over time and being rebought. Most of them definitely wont move to the PS3 for the forseeable future, due to its price some of them might move to the Wii and some to the XBox.
I am not a sony hater, I have a psp but this marketing troll definitely has a blurred vision of reality.
Good morning Sony marketing departement, already awake from your office slumber?
Actually it really depends on the OS, I noticed that Swing used to be substantially slower under Linux than Windows. In windows you can run a native app and swing side by side and menus etc... all of this is way faster than the native widgets, while utilizing the native skin, this comes from the fact that Swing basically goes directly into DirectX for rendering, now once you switch to Aero in Vista everything becomes dog slow because Aero is a major pain from the felt performance. In Linux things might be different, but to my knowledge in Linux Swing has the possibility to add opengl rendering (never tried it since my main work currently is in Windows where swing behaves nicely) Anyway on either platform I dont think the widget speed really is an issue anymore, at least from a felt perspective, your mileage may vary, but the last complaint I would get nowadays is why is the user interface slow. Mozillas is almost twice as slow and I wont even talk about GTK2 on Windows :-)
Same goes for the mac, but there the limiting factor is Aqua itself which is not the fastest and feels sort of slowish.