Perhaps Nintendo has done some surveying and realized that the majority of their users don't use the headphone jack? For example, I've never used it, and I'm glad that I won't have to pay for the extra bloat in size and price just because of a small minority that does.
You'll still be paying for it. The DSP is still onboard... there is no way that headphone jack is anything other than a wire-to-wire direct adapter. By the looks of it, the adapter takes up more space on the back of the unit than a simple headphone jack would. Essentially, Nintendo is selling a cool, sleek unit usable in public situations, and requiring you to pay extra in order to not annoy the people around you. They're crippling hardware and selling a fix, essentially.
You mean the original GameBoy and GameBoy Pocket didn't require you to be around direct sunlight? That's odd, because I thought only the GameBoy Pocket light was self-emitting.
The original Gameboy screen didn't update nearly enough, but it also handled low-light situations far better than the GameBoy Advance. I remember sitting in a hotel room in 1988 playing the Game Boy in bed by the light of the Desklamp. I also remember getting the GBA home and having to focus two of the three lights from a handy light tree onto the screen to get an acceptable image. The screen problem has never been as pronounced as it was with the GBA.
I don't think anyone is arguing that Nintendo doesn't deserve to make money... and I have yet to see a Cube game that got a real functionality boost from being attached to a GBA. But charging for an adapter that obviously is only there to create a graduated pricing scale is a good way to upset your clients. You can pay 70 dollars for the GBA with the worthless screen, and 25 dollars for an afterburner, or you can pay 100 dollars for a backlit GBA, and an extra 15 for a headphone dongle. You also now have to keep track of the headphone dongle, and if you find yourself without the dongle at any time you can forget about using anyone else's headphones.
It's milking, plain and simple. They're making billions on this thing, and they want to milk it *just* a little more, and by adding problems rather than adding value. That's really annoying, especially because most people buying this thing are doing so to fix problems with the piece of... hardware Nintendo already sold us.
In theory, yes, convergence can be good. In practice in the Gaming industry, convergence has generally meant trying to force a console to buy and sell stocks over a proprietary network or edit documents on the worst text editor known to man. Consoles are optimized for playing games, which means they do sprite manipulation, polygon manipulation, texturing, and backgrounds particularly well, and everything else absolutely horribly. If you look up homebrew code to get the GBA to display text, you will find it would make a miserable PDA. Absolutely nothing is optimized for text insertion, highlighting, etc... And this is markedly worse than your average PDA, as they are intended to be general computing devices. Even the TI-8x calculator series has more generalized routines.
Convergence comes up so often in the gaming world that it has become a hated word. Convergence means that somebody doesn't get it. Somebody doesn't feel that gaming alone is worth having a console for, and so they must go and make a sub-par printer attachment or Saturn-Based e-mail client or Trackball with encyclopedia sets or Markie Mark make-your-own-video game... Convergence means more Hollywood types are on the prowl, and that is never a good thing.
Convergence can be a good thing, when it extends naturally from the course of developing good dedicated hardware. PS2 DVD playback is a good thing. XBOX MP3 playback is a good thing. A GBA digital video entertainment hub borders on the asinine.
Overpriced MP3 harddrive players? When the 20GB Archos Jukebox can be had for 200 dollars, the same as this dinky little 600 MB thing? Compact Flash MP3 players lame? When they can be used in constant vibration situations like jogging, mountain biking, or tennis? No X minutes antishock, just complete shock ambivalence. Why mention the antishock anyway? 6 minutes is about minimum for MP3 hard drive systems. I believe you meant 16 minutes, which isn't bad, but the Archos Jukebox takes about 2 seconds to spin up, 1 second to fill the 8 mb buffer with data, and 2 seconds to spin down. The MP3CD players all have to spin up a much larger disk, skim data at much slower rates, and spin the disk back down, or have constant spinning rates. HD players are therefore quite, quite skip resistant under adverse conditions.
23 hour battery life must be for listening to the radio. If they are anything like other MP3 CD players, it gets 4 hours from a standard set of batteries, which isn't any better than a Hard Drive system. So, for 200 dollars (which is outrageously high for an MP3 CD player, BTW), you less capacity than a hard-disk based drive, less upgradability, similar anti-shock, and the same battery life, and the benifit of having to burn a new disk everytime you want to listen to something different, rather than just having your entire MP3 collection with you at any time.
This is why MP3 CD players are relegated to the low end of the MP3 spectrum. They can't beat hard disk systems on convienience, but they can do so on price. This one, oddly, doesn't. So they get tagged onto inexpensive portable CD players, and everyone forgets that they were once cool. How can that create buzz when someone whips out a little brick with a lifetime supply of music?
Who modded this insightful? They must have meant inciteful.
A: the article in question says that a consortium of 3rd party companies (Toshiba, Imagica, and Bandai), none of which are related to Nintendo, have created essentially an MP3 / media player for the Game Boy Advance.
B: MP3 players for the original Game Boy have been available for many years, and never sold particularly well. This was probably due to the decompression being done in hardware, driving prices up. 40 dollars for an MP3 player isn't bad.
C: The article mentions Museum tours and Manga as potential content to be distributed on this system, none of which compete in any way with the IPod.
D: The article says you will be able to get 5 hours of audio on a 32 MB smartmedia card. Either this means the compression level will be rediculously high and the output quite, quite bad, or they are using MIDI / Mod techniques, or (and this is my personal opinion), Planet GameCube just doesn't have a factchecker on staff.
DMCA Pandering? Competition for the 20GB gee-I-sound-and-look-sleek Ipod? Are people throwing random buzzwords into stories theses days in order to get them posted? What does this even have to do with PDAs?
Come on Filmsmith and Timothy... Justify yourselves. What do you know that we don't?
P.S. The article that this article is based upon can be found, with pictures, here.
Back in the heady days before Enterprise was released / revealed / rehashed, there was an interesting theory that the reason one would do a prequal to ST:TOS was because there would be an inherent frailty in the crew and in the technology that would be utilized to build dramatic tension and put everyone into genuinely interesting and complicated situations. Knowing the future of Star Trek, we could have longer story arcs revealing in detail the depths which necessitated the creation of the federation and the failures of early human explorers from which this glorious and successful universe would expand.
ST:TNG started with an episode proving that human beings were frail, weak little things subject to the whims of godlike aliens, and the wars of those stronger than us. The Borg dominated Trek lore for so long, due to their indestructable nature. And legend of the Klingon tenacity in pre TOS days is far and wide.
So when Enterprise turned out to be more boring happy-happy nothing bad ever happens stuff, people realized that it wasn't resonating with them. Spiderman not only took people on a fantastic, original journey, but turned what could have been a stock kissy kissy ending into something complicated and real. Insurrection? They took something that by definition should have been complicated and painful (the reprocussions of the crew's actions WRT what was basically an order from starfleet), and turned it into a glossed over kissy-kissy ending. First Contact? Started the movie by destroying the indestructable Borg, ended the movie by destroying indestructable Borg lore, and in the middle destroyed the Borg several more times. Generations? Picard wasn't even slightly torn, Soren wasn't even slightly torn, Guinan wasn't even slightly torn...
It's almost like Star Trek has been too afraid to be tense. It's too valuable a property to the studios to allow anything controversial, interesting, or potentially unpopular to come of it. You can't get much further away from the "Star Trek" formula than collecting whales in a modern day Monterey, but it is that sort of creativity and willingness to explore what defines the characters and the universe they find themselves in that made TOS so great. Wrath of Kahn? Very human scale with an epic presentation. Undiscovered Country? A truly epic scale brought focus in a human way. Insurrection? A good episode, but not worth 8 bucks. The Search for Spock? No dramatic tension at all.
Sadly the 3 movies preceeding this one have all been duds. No disrespect to Frakes, who directed the last two movies and who did a decent job of turning badly underwritten scripts into something watchable, but there has been no return on the moviegoer's money since the Undiscovered Country over 12 years ago. Why does Berman feel he deserves the moviegoer's money? What has he done for us lately? All of the memorable Star Trek scenes have taken place in person to person shots, yet the past 3 movies have all emphasized spaceship crashes, explosions, and easy exits. "From hell's heart I stab at thee," was a beautiful line delivered by a man about to kill himself in order to destroy his enemy. To save the crew from the explosion a much beloved character is forced to give his life. The modern filmmakers took that to mean crowds like big, ringed explosions, and narrow escapes.
Hire writers that value human interactions over plot convieniences, know what a federation is and how to work one into a script, and can utilize pain and suffering to resonate with an audience. Underbudget the movie so that it is forced to rely upon plot rather than effects. Capture human responses to events, rather than jumping into scenes directly after the painful part.
And after all, if Star Trek goes on a 20 year hiatus... who cares? There will always be science fiction epics about man's interactions with the unknown. Star Trek has been dominating that scene for too long now, keeping more original shows like Andromeda or Babalon 5 relegated to the backwaters of TNN. Perhaps it is time, like Kirk dramatically stepping down for the captain of the new Enterprise, for the series to be laid to rest... for now.
The subject of the article isn't VOD, though it mentions VOD capabilities in two places as buzzwords for the industry. The article is about how the set-top manufacturers want their boxes to be the home network conduit of the future, and are trying (in many cases successfully) to replace the computer as the hub of your digital world. The analogy is of course a false one, as the set-top box is merely functioning as the digital-video hub of the house, rather than the fileserver or the highly trafficed websurfing box. Of course, scrambling to become the "hub" just reminds me of how we had to replace our actual hub a few weeks ago, which was a painless procedure costing $20. Why anyone would see that as a desireable business position to be in is beyond me.
I'm very happy with set-top boxes coming with additional capability assuming they can be made with the capacity to handle it, which obviously wasn't true of the painfully slow 1st generation digital set-top boxes. My hope is that cable operators will continue to offer vanilla devices, in order to aviod redundant hardware and unnecessary noise in the house. But additional capabilities for an entertainment device that can still output over RCA and co-ax can only be a positive thing... I don't see why it is even an issue.
And no, Gnutella isn't VOD. To think so is somewhere between Naieve and MPAA propaganda. Demand means I want it now, Gnutella / FastTrack means it may or may not be finished in three days.
God plays Duke Nukem Forever, of course. It'll ship when he sends someone to come get us.
Actually, a 4D-tetris does exist, and was supposedly created by a man by the name of Greg Kaiser. However, besides several references, I have been completely unable to locate any code. If anyone has any information on how to make a make Google search at right angles to reality, I would greatly appreciate a line. 3D tetris just isn't challenging anymore.:)
-C
Talk to developers. There are a lot of companies who gave up programming projects for the PS2 because the investment in programmers in both time to market and cash expenditure was significant. The PS2 has a tremendous installed userbase, which is why it is financially beneficial for many companies to program for it, but that benefit is offset by the resources necessary. If the PS2 didn't have a lot of hype behind it, and a userbase transfer from the PS1, it would be dead in the water. Why is the X-Box getting lots of exclusive titles from edgy developers? Because the PS2 was too hard to code for.
"Its hard to code for" is a perfectly valid reason to not do a project, both from a programmer perspective and from a business perspective. Any developer worth his salt knows when to walk away. Your programming talent shouldn't be wasted trying to figure out the obscurities of timing processor instructions to use the DSP as a co-processor in a non-threaded environment. For more information on wasted genius, look up the Game Developer's in-depth technical issue on fitting Resident Evil onto a N64 cartridge.
Closed box, proprietary, non-upgradable computing devices should be anathema, especially on Slashdot of all places...
Sadly, what is an upgrade for a box? You need a new processor, so you need a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a new power supply and a faster type of RAM. Your removable media drive has been surpassed by far larger / faster / more funtional types, and so that should be replaced. And with the larger media drive you need a new Hard disk of sufficient size. All you've kept is the networking card, and the little aluminum box which is recyclable anyway.
Upgradable computing solutions all wind up in the trash, just one piece at a time rather than all at once. Personally, I'd rather see them put to some use rather than thrown out, but console boards are optimized to play videogames: NESs would make crappy routers.
And they are not the worst example of planned obsolescence. That distinction goes to alternatively the Car or the Toaster. The technology exists right now to create a $20 toaster that will outlive the owner, simply by using a thick enough band on the heating elements. Many toasters from the 70's are still around for this very reason. Modern toasters are intentionally down-tuned to last for 2 years, to keep the production cycle up. Cars are designed to last 5 years, despite the fact that 5 year old cars do exactly the same thing that modern cars do. You throw out your 4,000 pound car every 5 years, much like you throw out your 3 lb console, yet you are replacing the car with a functionally identical product. Consoles are obsolete because they have been replaced by functionally significantly improved versions, and console owners are hesitant to replace an existing system without that significant bonus.
The two things are very different. The obsolescence of consoles isn't intentional.
In addition to the ones you mentioned there was also Teleroboxer, a truly AAA title that unfortunately was doomed to obscurity by being released on this platform. Still, if you can find a copy, that one game is worth buying a $15 Virtua Boy in and of itself.
The aptly misnamed Virtual Boy . Net has a full list of all 22 distinct Virtual Boy games ever released.
The SuperGraphics was actually one of the coolest game systems released. I can't seem to track down all 6 games it played (exclusively), but I remember better than arcade perfect renditions of Ghouls 'n Ghosts, 1941, Darius... and several other very, very well done games. A system cannot be considered a total bomb if it has wonderful games for it... Like the Sega CD or the Lynx. The SuperGrafx failed in part because the TurboDuo was doing so well in Japan where it was released that the demand for a new NEC system was low. Odd thing that, the Japanese are willing to upgrade older systems through attachments but the rest of the world will only replace older hardware.
The TurboDuo does deserve dishonorable mention as the only system so badly marketed as to try and sell itself in the US with a version of "Camp California." But the rest of NEC's line had lots and lots of good games. Y's I and II? Loom? Lords of Thunder? Classics.
I still have the NEC US promotional "Power Up!!!" video. It's hilarious. Lots of shots of hyperactive, sugar riddled, pasty white 6 year olds mashing randomly on controllers while a deep-throated announcer invites you to "Power Up!" to "Camp California, Dude!" Just the thing to sell a system to self-conscious teenagers.
The really big problem in this space is the stupid business model of razor and blades. People won't pay an economic price for the console so they are sold below cost but tricked out so the vendor can recoup their costs selling overpriced games.
So anyone trying to sell a really innovative platform is going to end up charging way more than the market will bear.
I don't follow you here. Gillette gives away razor handles which cost them very little and yolk consumers to the tune of nearly $1 per blade (for dual-bladed designs), a full 100% markup above blades without handles.
Sony, Nintendo, et.al make hardware that they sell for little or no profit, but that they make back $5 licencing fee per game released. That brings a $45 dollar game to $50 dollars, or a markup of %10. Successful consoles are also self-subsidizing, as over their lifespan they transition from being loss-leaders to profitable items in and of themselves.
I don't see why you would say that anyone selling an innovative platform will do so at above what the market can bear, with the implication that they wouldn't be tricking the consumer into buying overpriced games? The PC market continues to exist, and despite a glut of options PC market prices aren't significantly lower than Console prices. They actually have a significantly higher TCO, if you factor the difference in price between the two platforms across the number of games for the platform you have purchased (On average, 10 for a console).
2,000 is too much for a console box. After the cost of the television, audio system, et.al, it isn't bad, but even computers are multi-purpose items. If you buy 20 games for a $2,000 system at $50 each, you have still spent $150 dollars per game. Those are NeoGeo prices, the amazing system that didn't have a shot in heck because they had solid-state cartridges comparable in size to CD's... in 92. You cannot sell a $2,000 gaming console, period. It wouldn't matter anyway, as the technology of that console would be within $400 reach in just 2 years after it was released. $2,000 is just too far up the curve to be worth it.
Consoles do not have a stupid business model. They have a very intelligent and market-driven model. Pippin, 3D0, Indrema, Computers, and Cell-Phone makers have all tried different models, with varying degrees of success, but none as successful as this, the "razor blade" model.
And so that you know, the glut of games for the 2600 which caused the horrible average quality and the great gaming crash of 83 was caused becase anyone who wanted to exploit gaming an the innocence of consumers could make a game for that system. From then on, Systems carried authentication chips which publishers had to not just buy access to, but had to submit their code for an extensive approval process. While there may be some pretty bad games released today, without this approval process it would be a wasteland of bad games.
If you read the instruction manual that came with the unit, on seven out of the ten pages it warns you that it will make you nauseous. On two out of the remaining three it mentions that it may permanently damage the vision of small children. I think the last page was blank.
I played the Virtual boy for long enough that it no longer effects me, but it took a *long* time for that to happen. My roommate played the thing for an hour and was unable to do anything requiring depth perception for the rest of the day.
Part of the problem was that the system wasn't designed to display 3D polygons at its core... It's a slightly beefier Sprite-based Game Boy at heart. Warioland was one of the best games available, yet in many places that which was deeper in the background wouldn't parallax at all (despite the left-eye, right-eye separation), or the deeper image would parallax horizontally but not vertically. The botched effects could be quite, quite nauseating.
On the bright side, they had (and still have) an excellent 4D tetris, and perhaps the best boxing videogames to date (Teleroboxer). But with the assorted physical ills associated with playing, and the fact that depth never really effected gameplay, the system probably shouldn't have made it out of the prototype phase. Gumpei Yokoi, I salute your creativity and your energy, but the time is not right just yet.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a championship Teleroboxer to defend.
The update site you refer to is the proper way of handling updates, though I choose to update once a month in a batch, rather than immediately after a patch is released, as a few of Microsoft's high-profile patches have been patched within days of release. I was referring to the auto-update feature, which doesn't bring up such warnings, instead opting to install said updates without user intervention. In your case, it would have convieniently crashed your system overnight, leaving little indication of what went wrong. Even when set to prompt for each installation, the information presented isn't nearly as comprehensive as one would find on the Windows Update site.
We need to prod more users and administrators to check the Windows Update site once a month as a routine part of their work cycle. But auto-update should be kept off until further notice.
If copyright owners are not allowed to control what happens to their work, we could not enfoce the GPL. Free software would die.
No matter what the GPL says, it still doesn't preclude someone from making a copy for personal use. If the law treated code the same way it does other media, someone could make a copy of binary, compiled GPL software for a friend and not make the source available (gasp!).
Ok, there aren't many ways you could violate the GPL and still fall under fair-use rulings, but the point is that fair use laws trump the GPL in this and all other circumstances. The GPL is based upon granting additional rights contingent upon additional restrictions built upon a solid base of copyright laws... but that doesn't mean the GPL can be more restrictive than existing copyrights.
Copyrights are not "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED," stop parroting paid off lawyers. Copyrights are a specific, carefully defined set of rights afforded to copyright holders and withheld from everyone else for a limited period of time for the specific purpose of making monH^H^H^H^ encouraging the production of useful arts.
No university has the right to distribute or publically perform a modified work (unless there is significant educational or intellectual value) but the crux of that is the modification / public performance. Brigham Young was not within its rights due to that very specific combination of issues. Courts have been very, very liberal about modifications for personal use. Universal has the exclusive rights to public performance, which enacts far fewer fair-use clauses.
It is your media. You OWN the DVD, the media that the copyrighted material resides on. The media is just a means of communication, and copyrights do not refer directly to the media. I do not have the copyright to the amorphous video pattern, but that copyrighted pattern is a way to control electron beams, not the electron beams themselves. Patterns do not have ownership, irrespective of their complexity or the cost of creating them. Mathematical equations do not have ownership in this society, and THIS is how it should be. The producer of the movie is granted specific rights to encourage production, but these are different rights than those afforded to owners of physical objects. Physical objects are afforded a specific set of rights to help create plenty in a world of scarcity, and copyrights to create scarcity in a world of plenty... different tasks, different jobs, different rights / restrictions.
Learn the rights you have, or you won't know what you are losing.
Microsoft has helped the situation by creating the automatic update service. It is a small app that runs every day (roughly the equivalent of code run by a cron job, but handled as a windows service) and checks to see if any security patches have been released.
I'd tend to agree that in theory these things can help. However, as I have had windows systems behead themselves more than once due to self-updating problems, it is not a feature I would run on a mission-critical system. From the people I have spoken to this is not an entirely rare occurrence.
I would rather have a patch in the wild for a few days and risk getting a virus, than installing a first-run patch and risk the entire system. Perhaps if there was a bi-weekly digest, consisting of patches 2 to 4 weeks old that hasn't had major problems? However, as it stands today, auto-update is not a feature that most professionals trust.
The design philosophy of software needs to change to make these kinds of exploits unfeasable. Except for specific updating programs, no worldfacing software should be allowed to install software with or without user intervention. They should not run scripting languages that were designed to run programs on individual computers. They should not be allowed to muck with the system folder. Programs should not have more access than they need to do what they want to do, but this is especially true of programs that could become compromised. Access and security restrictions should be set at maximum by default and be reduced by the user as needed.
Yes, that was the point. All the functionality of a Clie, none of Ericsson's hideous design issues. Ericsson was acquired by Sony several years ago, but was never fully taken in and given a red jacket, so to speak. You'll notice sonystyle.com doesn't list cell phones or link to Ericsson anywhere. And even at sonyericsson.com, they don't sell anything approaching a Nokia Communicator, or a treo, or a Clie.
Well, chalk another missed opportunity to Sony... While the rest of the world is clamboring for cellphone PDA's like the sidekick, Sony continues to work on the camera aspect... now so much so that the PDA has exceeded the cost of a 5mp camera. It is also up to a hefty 10 oz, from the previously high 8 and the SL-10's reasonable 3.6 oz. While the previous NR-70 bled cool, this one (ironically) just looks cheap. The camera doesn't have a lensecover, a problem with the overall design that doesn't hamper a 320x200 camera very much. They have re-designed the keyboard to be ugly, I mean functional.
Being in the NR-60/70 style, it is longer than your average PDA... 6 inches long. That's up 1/2 inch from the previous camera model, and a full inch taller than your average PDA. It is also a pocket-filling 1" deep. They have changed the L-Ion from an internal to an external, an overall positive engineering move.
I'm a little disappointed with this release... Many of us are breathlessly awaiting an Ericson / sony style crossover, in the hopes of picking up a very stylish, very functional treo mp3 equivalent.
Fortunately, as with any new Sony release, this should push the price of the rest of their line down a bit... You can charge a premium for the latest and greatest, but you have to back off when you release something later and greater. Let's hope they back away from that black magnesium.
How about an integrated spelling checker into all textboxes? It would sure improve the quality of Slashdot...
System wide bookmarks would also be nice, as would the ability to have bookmarks in multiple folders. So too, would be the ability to remove menu items, and otherwise prune the interface down to what you want. Quick cookie swapping would allow you to change identities on the fly, without the tedious task of logging out / logging in.
But then we're talking about the power user, and not the simplicity and elegance of OSX. We're talking about Opera.
1) Opera is out playing on the playground and bragging about how fast he is. 2) A new kid shows up and is actually fast. 3) Opera yells some obsenities. 4) Opera takes his ball and goes home.
That's a pretty unfair comparison. ICab absolutely rocks, and is lightning fast compared to any other browser I have ever used, including Opera 3.62, Netscape 4.75, I.E. 3, and Konqueror. Opera has been competing in ICab's home turf now for some time, and with a ported codebase always a step behind the excellent windows version.
The problem, is that Apple is now bundling something that doesn't suck, thereby reducing demand for an alternative. Apple's bundling of iTunes reduced demand for Audion, an excellent alternative that does basically the same thing. Audion is every bit as good as iTunes, and a bit better, but people don't have a major need to switch. Microsoft's bundling of that horrible little video editor with XP has done nothing to hurt sales of other video editing suites, because other products on the market were significantly better. Opera really is being punted out of the Mac market, a move they should have expected with Apple's suprising propensity to attempt to satisfy customers and the absolute garbage that is I.E. for the Mac. Even if they are "a little bit better" than one of the best, if the best ships as default on most computers there is very little reason to change.
I'm personally in love with the amazingly configurable Opera7, that really does address major issues we have been complaining about since the inception of the project. All of the buttons on all of the toolbars can be easily interchanged, thereby eliminating several bars and making an efficient use of space. Unrequested pop-up blocking has been implemented, and the bookmark pane now combines folders and bookmarks into one view. Links can be dragged to the bookmark pane, entire sessions of windows can be easily saved and played back (finally, there is an easy way to do this). There is an inline print-preview, an inline find ("g opera" searches for opera via google, "f opera" searches for the text "opera" on the foremost window), a new mail client that is *almost* usable, a feat far greater than can be said for Mozilla's...
In short, it is very cool. Is it cool enough to lure people away from the default I.E.? Most definitely. Is it cool enough to lure people away from iCab? Probably not, but it may if they like the functionality. Is it cool enough to lure people away from Safari?...
That's the problem with Apple for small developers. MS is big enough to satisfy only the most base needs of its customers (wordpad? Paint?), but Apple has always had to strive to outperform. Apple tends to create and bundle the best software available for the platform with the OS... Which satisfies customers but pushes out developers. While I will be sad to see Opera leave OSX, I can understand both company's decisions, and just wish they had negotiated with eachother to make a modified Opera the default browser a long time ago.
-c
Re:Anyone tried a programmable game controller?
on
Tetris AI System
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There are lots of ways that you could make a computer-controlled controller... Not all of them cheap. You could, for example, dedicate a section of the screen to I/O, and use a series of photogates to open / close the bridge across the controller pads. You don't get analog sensitivity, but it works. I was sketching out ideas for ways of recording to standard audio tape, using pitch in and pitch out filters for the line... or a simple big-ass array of tape decks connected together by common buttons. This would allow for playback of controller imputs, which would be a boon to testing.
However, I'm not so sure that simple playback of keyboard combinations would be good for anything but leveling. The dedicated programmable pads in vogue several years back were quite gimmocky, and was less responsive than was acceptable for fighting games at the time. Since then, fighters have gotten significantly faster, and even more picky about timing issues. It's easier just to imput the gamepad commands yourself.
This is not to say that programmable controllers don't have their place... a programmable controller took my Castlevania: SOTN character to level 92 in just under a week. Programmable controllers continue to exist, and can had for a reasonable amount of money.
But the problem with visual recognition on modern 3d games is staggering... MIT has entire departments devoted to similar topics. You might be able to do it if you could convince the game to output stereoscopic images, (there was an article recently on a stereoscopic voxel technology), but a subsection of this sort of problem is what you would write your doctorate on. If you can get your hands on the base textures for the game, and redo the graphics engine to give depth and object clues along color lines, you could do it. But not as it stands, and not to a remote box.
But a little controller hacking is always fun. Good luck!
Everyone here seems to be opposed to this idea, but I would like to ask the navy officers of Slashdot what the benifit of having wireless access would be? Since nobody has mentioned any positives yet, why has this been implemented at all? Is it the convienience? Are destroyers buried under a deluge of wires? How does this improve your survivability / effectiveness?
What are you all looking forward to when you finally have 802.11b?
Human error, not Microsoft Windows NT, was the cause of a LAN failure...
What, like a programmer too lazy / overburdened / forgetful to check for valid imput data before passing it on?
If the "Human Error" mentality is pervasive in the Navy, I can see why they would have problems. In certain circumstances it may be important to alter values in such a way as to push equipment dangerously beyond its limits. On the other hand, you should never accept a value, under any circumstances, that will simply result in a locked up system.
This probably isn't NT's fault, but it certainly doesn't bode well for the kind of code created by the Navy's Canadian contractor.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll still be paying for it. The DSP is still onboard... there is no way that headphone jack is anything other than a wire-to-wire direct adapter. By the looks of it, the adapter takes up more space on the back of the unit than a simple headphone jack would. Essentially, Nintendo is selling a cool, sleek unit usable in public situations, and requiring you to pay extra in order to not annoy the people around you. They're crippling hardware and selling a fix, essentially.
You mean the original GameBoy and GameBoy Pocket didn't require you to be around direct sunlight? That's odd, because I thought only the GameBoy Pocket light was self-emitting.
The original Gameboy screen didn't update nearly enough, but it also handled low-light situations far better than the GameBoy Advance. I remember sitting in a hotel room in 1988 playing the Game Boy in bed by the light of the Desklamp. I also remember getting the GBA home and having to focus two of the three lights from a handy light tree onto the screen to get an acceptable image. The screen problem has never been as pronounced as it was with the GBA.
I don't think anyone is arguing that Nintendo doesn't deserve to make money... and I have yet to see a Cube game that got a real functionality boost from being attached to a GBA. But charging for an adapter that obviously is only there to create a graduated pricing scale is a good way to upset your clients. You can pay 70 dollars for the GBA with the worthless screen, and 25 dollars for an afterburner, or you can pay 100 dollars for a backlit GBA, and an extra 15 for a headphone dongle. You also now have to keep track of the headphone dongle, and if you find yourself without the dongle at any time you can forget about using anyone else's headphones.
It's milking, plain and simple. They're making billions on this thing, and they want to milk it *just* a little more, and by adding problems rather than adding value. That's really annoying, especially because most people buying this thing are doing so to fix problems with the piece of... hardware Nintendo already sold us.
In theory, yes, convergence can be good. In practice in the Gaming industry, convergence has generally meant trying to force a console to buy and sell stocks over a proprietary network or edit documents on the worst text editor known to man. Consoles are optimized for playing games, which means they do sprite manipulation, polygon manipulation, texturing, and backgrounds particularly well, and everything else absolutely horribly. If you look up homebrew code to get the GBA to display text, you will find it would make a miserable PDA. Absolutely nothing is optimized for text insertion, highlighting, etc... And this is markedly worse than your average PDA, as they are intended to be general computing devices. Even the TI-8x calculator series has more generalized routines.
Convergence comes up so often in the gaming world that it has become a hated word. Convergence means that somebody doesn't get it. Somebody doesn't feel that gaming alone is worth having a console for, and so they must go and make a sub-par printer attachment or Saturn-Based e-mail client or Trackball with encyclopedia sets or Markie Mark make-your-own-video game... Convergence means more Hollywood types are on the prowl, and that is never a good thing.
Convergence can be a good thing, when it extends naturally from the course of developing good dedicated hardware. PS2 DVD playback is a good thing. XBOX MP3 playback is a good thing. A GBA digital video entertainment hub borders on the asinine.
Overpriced MP3 harddrive players? When the 20GB Archos Jukebox can be had for 200 dollars, the same as this dinky little 600 MB thing? Compact Flash MP3 players lame? When they can be used in constant vibration situations like jogging, mountain biking, or tennis? No X minutes antishock, just complete shock ambivalence. Why mention the antishock anyway? 6 minutes is about minimum for MP3 hard drive systems. I believe you meant 16 minutes, which isn't bad, but the Archos Jukebox takes about 2 seconds to spin up, 1 second to fill the 8 mb buffer with data, and 2 seconds to spin down. The MP3CD players all have to spin up a much larger disk, skim data at much slower rates, and spin the disk back down, or have constant spinning rates. HD players are therefore quite, quite skip resistant under adverse conditions.
23 hour battery life must be for listening to the radio. If they are anything like other MP3 CD players, it gets 4 hours from a standard set of batteries, which isn't any better than a Hard Drive system. So, for 200 dollars (which is outrageously high for an MP3 CD player, BTW), you less capacity than a hard-disk based drive, less upgradability, similar anti-shock, and the same battery life, and the benifit of having to burn a new disk everytime you want to listen to something different, rather than just having your entire MP3 collection with you at any time.
This is why MP3 CD players are relegated to the low end of the MP3 spectrum. They can't beat hard disk systems on convienience, but they can do so on price. This one, oddly, doesn't. So they get tagged onto inexpensive portable CD players, and everyone forgets that they were once cool. How can that create buzz when someone whips out a little brick with a lifetime supply of music?
Who modded this insightful? They must have meant inciteful.
B: MP3 players for the original Game Boy have been available for many years, and never sold particularly well. This was probably due to the decompression being done in hardware, driving prices up. 40 dollars for an MP3 player isn't bad.
C: The article mentions Museum tours and Manga as potential content to be distributed on this system, none of which compete in any way with the IPod.
D: The article says you will be able to get 5 hours of audio on a 32 MB smartmedia card. Either this means the compression level will be rediculously high and the output quite, quite bad, or they are using MIDI / Mod techniques, or (and this is my personal opinion), Planet GameCube just doesn't have a factchecker on staff.
DMCA Pandering? Competition for the 20GB gee-I-sound-and-look-sleek Ipod? Are people throwing random buzzwords into stories theses days in order to get them posted? What does this even have to do with PDAs?
Come on Filmsmith and Timothy... Justify yourselves. What do you know that we don't?
P.S. The article that this article is based upon can be found, with pictures, here.
Back in the heady days before Enterprise was released / revealed / rehashed, there was an interesting theory that the reason one would do a prequal to ST:TOS was because there would be an inherent frailty in the crew and in the technology that would be utilized to build dramatic tension and put everyone into genuinely interesting and complicated situations. Knowing the future of Star Trek, we could have longer story arcs revealing in detail the depths which necessitated the creation of the federation and the failures of early human explorers from which this glorious and successful universe would expand.
ST:TNG started with an episode proving that human beings were frail, weak little things subject to the whims of godlike aliens, and the wars of those stronger than us. The Borg dominated Trek lore for so long, due to their indestructable nature. And legend of the Klingon tenacity in pre TOS days is far and wide.
So when Enterprise turned out to be more boring happy-happy nothing bad ever happens stuff, people realized that it wasn't resonating with them. Spiderman not only took people on a fantastic, original journey, but turned what could have been a stock kissy kissy ending into something complicated and real. Insurrection? They took something that by definition should have been complicated and painful (the reprocussions of the crew's actions WRT what was basically an order from starfleet), and turned it into a glossed over kissy-kissy ending. First Contact? Started the movie by destroying the indestructable Borg, ended the movie by destroying indestructable Borg lore, and in the middle destroyed the Borg several more times. Generations? Picard wasn't even slightly torn, Soren wasn't even slightly torn, Guinan wasn't even slightly torn...
It's almost like Star Trek has been too afraid to be tense. It's too valuable a property to the studios to allow anything controversial, interesting, or potentially unpopular to come of it. You can't get much further away from the "Star Trek" formula than collecting whales in a modern day Monterey, but it is that sort of creativity and willingness to explore what defines the characters and the universe they find themselves in that made TOS so great. Wrath of Kahn? Very human scale with an epic presentation. Undiscovered Country? A truly epic scale brought focus in a human way. Insurrection? A good episode, but not worth 8 bucks. The Search for Spock? No dramatic tension at all.
Sadly the 3 movies preceeding this one have all been duds. No disrespect to Frakes, who directed the last two movies and who did a decent job of turning badly underwritten scripts into something watchable, but there has been no return on the moviegoer's money since the Undiscovered Country over 12 years ago. Why does Berman feel he deserves the moviegoer's money? What has he done for us lately? All of the memorable Star Trek scenes have taken place in person to person shots, yet the past 3 movies have all emphasized spaceship crashes, explosions, and easy exits. "From hell's heart I stab at thee," was a beautiful line delivered by a man about to kill himself in order to destroy his enemy. To save the crew from the explosion a much beloved character is forced to give his life. The modern filmmakers took that to mean crowds like big, ringed explosions, and narrow escapes.
Hire writers that value human interactions over plot convieniences, know what a federation is and how to work one into a script, and can utilize pain and suffering to resonate with an audience. Underbudget the movie so that it is forced to rely upon plot rather than effects. Capture human responses to events, rather than jumping into scenes directly after the painful part.
And after all, if Star Trek goes on a 20 year hiatus... who cares? There will always be science fiction epics about man's interactions with the unknown. Star Trek has been dominating that scene for too long now, keeping more original shows like Andromeda or Babalon 5 relegated to the backwaters of TNN. Perhaps it is time, like Kirk dramatically stepping down for the captain of the new Enterprise, for the series to be laid to rest... for now.
The subject of the article isn't VOD, though it mentions VOD capabilities in two places as buzzwords for the industry. The article is about how the set-top manufacturers want their boxes to be the home network conduit of the future, and are trying (in many cases successfully) to replace the computer as the hub of your digital world. The analogy is of course a false one, as the set-top box is merely functioning as the digital-video hub of the house, rather than the fileserver or the highly trafficed websurfing box. Of course, scrambling to become the "hub" just reminds me of how we had to replace our actual hub a few weeks ago, which was a painless procedure costing $20. Why anyone would see that as a desireable business position to be in is beyond me.
I'm very happy with set-top boxes coming with additional capability assuming they can be made with the capacity to handle it, which obviously wasn't true of the painfully slow 1st generation digital set-top boxes. My hope is that cable operators will continue to offer vanilla devices, in order to aviod redundant hardware and unnecessary noise in the house. But additional capabilities for an entertainment device that can still output over RCA and co-ax can only be a positive thing... I don't see why it is even an issue.
And no, Gnutella isn't VOD. To think so is somewhere between Naieve and MPAA propaganda. Demand means I want it now, Gnutella / FastTrack means it may or may not be finished in three days.
Actually, a 4D-tetris does exist, and was supposedly created by a man by the name of Greg Kaiser. However, besides several references, I have been completely unable to locate any code. If anyone has any information on how to make a make Google search at right angles to reality, I would greatly appreciate a line. 3D tetris just isn't challenging anymore. :)
-C
Talk to developers. There are a lot of companies who gave up programming projects for the PS2 because the investment in programmers in both time to market and cash expenditure was significant. The PS2 has a tremendous installed userbase, which is why it is financially beneficial for many companies to program for it, but that benefit is offset by the resources necessary. If the PS2 didn't have a lot of hype behind it, and a userbase transfer from the PS1, it would be dead in the water. Why is the X-Box getting lots of exclusive titles from edgy developers? Because the PS2 was too hard to code for.
"Its hard to code for" is a perfectly valid reason to not do a project, both from a programmer perspective and from a business perspective. Any developer worth his salt knows when to walk away. Your programming talent shouldn't be wasted trying to figure out the obscurities of timing processor instructions to use the DSP as a co-processor in a non-threaded environment. For more information on wasted genius, look up the Game Developer's in-depth technical issue on fitting Resident Evil onto a N64 cartridge.
Sadly, what is an upgrade for a box? You need a new processor, so you need a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a new power supply and a faster type of RAM. Your removable media drive has been surpassed by far larger / faster / more funtional types, and so that should be replaced. And with the larger media drive you need a new Hard disk of sufficient size. All you've kept is the networking card, and the little aluminum box which is recyclable anyway.
Upgradable computing solutions all wind up in the trash, just one piece at a time rather than all at once. Personally, I'd rather see them put to some use rather than thrown out, but console boards are optimized to play videogames: NESs would make crappy routers.
And they are not the worst example of planned obsolescence. That distinction goes to alternatively the Car or the Toaster. The technology exists right now to create a $20 toaster that will outlive the owner, simply by using a thick enough band on the heating elements. Many toasters from the 70's are still around for this very reason. Modern toasters are intentionally down-tuned to last for 2 years, to keep the production cycle up. Cars are designed to last 5 years, despite the fact that 5 year old cars do exactly the same thing that modern cars do. You throw out your 4,000 pound car every 5 years, much like you throw out your 3 lb console, yet you are replacing the car with a functionally identical product. Consoles are obsolete because they have been replaced by functionally significantly improved versions, and console owners are hesitant to replace an existing system without that significant bonus.
The two things are very different. The obsolescence of consoles isn't intentional.
Just my $1/50.
The aptly misnamed Virtual Boy . Net has a full list of all 22 distinct Virtual Boy games ever released.
Motion tracking? You're giving the Virtual Boy far, far too much credit. It was a pair of red GameBoys strapped to your face.
Motion tracking... Next thing you are going to tell me they did something productive with that 175 dollars!
The SuperGraphics was actually one of the coolest game systems released. I can't seem to track down all 6 games it played (exclusively), but I remember better than arcade perfect renditions of Ghouls 'n Ghosts, 1941, Darius... and several other very, very well done games. A system cannot be considered a total bomb if it has wonderful games for it... Like the Sega CD or the Lynx. The SuperGrafx failed in part because the TurboDuo was doing so well in Japan where it was released that the demand for a new NEC system was low. Odd thing that, the Japanese are willing to upgrade older systems through attachments but the rest of the world will only replace older hardware.
The TurboDuo does deserve dishonorable mention as the only system so badly marketed as to try and sell itself in the US with a version of "Camp California." But the rest of NEC's line had lots and lots of good games. Y's I and II? Loom? Lords of Thunder? Classics.
I still have the NEC US promotional "Power Up!!!" video. It's hilarious. Lots of shots of hyperactive, sugar riddled, pasty white 6 year olds mashing randomly on controllers while a deep-throated announcer invites you to "Power Up!" to "Camp California, Dude!" Just the thing to sell a system to self-conscious teenagers.
So anyone trying to sell a really innovative platform is going to end up charging way more than the market will bear.
I don't follow you here. Gillette gives away razor handles which cost them very little and yolk consumers to the tune of nearly $1 per blade (for dual-bladed designs), a full 100% markup above blades without handles.
Sony, Nintendo, et.al make hardware that they sell for little or no profit, but that they make back $5 licencing fee per game released. That brings a $45 dollar game to $50 dollars, or a markup of %10. Successful consoles are also self-subsidizing, as over their lifespan they transition from being loss-leaders to profitable items in and of themselves.
I don't see why you would say that anyone selling an innovative platform will do so at above what the market can bear, with the implication that they wouldn't be tricking the consumer into buying overpriced games? The PC market continues to exist, and despite a glut of options PC market prices aren't significantly lower than Console prices. They actually have a significantly higher TCO, if you factor the difference in price between the two platforms across the number of games for the platform you have purchased (On average, 10 for a console). 2,000 is too much for a console box. After the cost of the television, audio system, et.al, it isn't bad, but even computers are multi-purpose items. If you buy 20 games for a $2,000 system at $50 each, you have still spent $150 dollars per game. Those are NeoGeo prices, the amazing system that didn't have a shot in heck because they had solid-state cartridges comparable in size to CD's... in 92. You cannot sell a $2,000 gaming console, period. It wouldn't matter anyway, as the technology of that console would be within $400 reach in just 2 years after it was released. $2,000 is just too far up the curve to be worth it.
Consoles do not have a stupid business model. They have a very intelligent and market-driven model. Pippin, 3D0, Indrema, Computers, and Cell-Phone makers have all tried different models, with varying degrees of success, but none as successful as this, the "razor blade" model.
And so that you know, the glut of games for the 2600 which caused the horrible average quality and the great gaming crash of 83 was caused becase anyone who wanted to exploit gaming an the innocence of consumers could make a game for that system. From then on, Systems carried authentication chips which publishers had to not just buy access to, but had to submit their code for an extensive approval process. While there may be some pretty bad games released today, without this approval process it would be a wasteland of bad games.
-C
If you read the instruction manual that came with the unit, on seven out of the ten pages it warns you that it will make you nauseous. On two out of the remaining three it mentions that it may permanently damage the vision of small children. I think the last page was blank.
I played the Virtual boy for long enough that it no longer effects me, but it took a *long* time for that to happen. My roommate played the thing for an hour and was unable to do anything requiring depth perception for the rest of the day.
Part of the problem was that the system wasn't designed to display 3D polygons at its core... It's a slightly beefier Sprite-based Game Boy at heart. Warioland was one of the best games available, yet in many places that which was deeper in the background wouldn't parallax at all (despite the left-eye, right-eye separation), or the deeper image would parallax horizontally but not vertically. The botched effects could be quite, quite nauseating.
On the bright side, they had (and still have) an excellent 4D tetris, and perhaps the best boxing videogames to date (Teleroboxer). But with the assorted physical ills associated with playing, and the fact that depth never really effected gameplay, the system probably shouldn't have made it out of the prototype phase. Gumpei Yokoi, I salute your creativity and your energy, but the time is not right just yet.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a championship Teleroboxer to defend.
-C
The update site you refer to is the proper way of handling updates, though I choose to update once a month in a batch, rather than immediately after a patch is released, as a few of Microsoft's high-profile patches have been patched within days of release. I was referring to the auto-update feature, which doesn't bring up such warnings, instead opting to install said updates without user intervention. In your case, it would have convieniently crashed your system overnight, leaving little indication of what went wrong. Even when set to prompt for each installation, the information presented isn't nearly as comprehensive as one would find on the Windows Update site.
We need to prod more users and administrators to check the Windows Update site once a month as a routine part of their work cycle. But auto-update should be kept off until further notice.
No matter what the GPL says, it still doesn't preclude someone from making a copy for personal use. If the law treated code the same way it does other media, someone could make a copy of binary, compiled GPL software for a friend and not make the source available (gasp!).
Ok, there aren't many ways you could violate the GPL and still fall under fair-use rulings, but the point is that fair use laws trump the GPL in this and all other circumstances. The GPL is based upon granting additional rights contingent upon additional restrictions built upon a solid base of copyright laws... but that doesn't mean the GPL can be more restrictive than existing copyrights.
Copyrights are not "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED," stop parroting paid off lawyers. Copyrights are a specific, carefully defined set of rights afforded to copyright holders and withheld from everyone else for a limited period of time for the specific purpose of making monH^H^H^H^ encouraging the production of useful arts.
No university has the right to distribute or publically perform a modified work (unless there is significant educational or intellectual value) but the crux of that is the modification / public performance. Brigham Young was not within its rights due to that very specific combination of issues. Courts have been very, very liberal about modifications for personal use. Universal has the exclusive rights to public performance, which enacts far fewer fair-use clauses.
It is your media. You OWN the DVD, the media that the copyrighted material resides on. The media is just a means of communication, and copyrights do not refer directly to the media. I do not have the copyright to the amorphous video pattern, but that copyrighted pattern is a way to control electron beams, not the electron beams themselves. Patterns do not have ownership, irrespective of their complexity or the cost of creating them. Mathematical equations do not have ownership in this society, and THIS is how it should be. The producer of the movie is granted specific rights to encourage production, but these are different rights than those afforded to owners of physical objects. Physical objects are afforded a specific set of rights to help create plenty in a world of scarcity, and copyrights to create scarcity in a world of plenty... different tasks, different jobs, different rights / restrictions.
Learn the rights you have, or you won't know what you are losing.
- c
I'd tend to agree that in theory these things can help. However, as I have had windows systems behead themselves more than once due to self-updating problems, it is not a feature I would run on a mission-critical system. From the people I have spoken to this is not an entirely rare occurrence.
I would rather have a patch in the wild for a few days and risk getting a virus, than installing a first-run patch and risk the entire system. Perhaps if there was a bi-weekly digest, consisting of patches 2 to 4 weeks old that hasn't had major problems? However, as it stands today, auto-update is not a feature that most professionals trust.
The design philosophy of software needs to change to make these kinds of exploits unfeasable. Except for specific updating programs, no worldfacing software should be allowed to install software with or without user intervention. They should not run scripting languages that were designed to run programs on individual computers. They should not be allowed to muck with the system folder. Programs should not have more access than they need to do what they want to do, but this is especially true of programs that could become compromised. Access and security restrictions should be set at maximum by default and be reduced by the user as needed.
Just a thought, YMMV.
-C
I'm a little disappointed with this release... Many of us are breathlessly awaiting an Ericson / sony style crossover, in the hopes of picking up a very stylish, very functional treo mp3 equivalent.
NZ-90 Demo
And for comparison, the NR-70
Fortunately, as with any new Sony release, this should push the price of the rest of their line down a bit... You can charge a premium for the latest and greatest, but you have to back off when you release something later and greater. Let's hope they back away from that black magnesium.
System wide bookmarks would also be nice, as would the ability to have bookmarks in multiple folders. So too, would be the ability to remove menu items, and otherwise prune the interface down to what you want. Quick cookie swapping would allow you to change identities on the fly, without the tedious task of logging out / logging in.
But then we're talking about the power user, and not the simplicity and elegance of OSX. We're talking about Opera.
Opera: Baffling newbies since 1995
-C
That's a pretty unfair comparison. ICab absolutely rocks, and is lightning fast compared to any other browser I have ever used, including Opera 3.62, Netscape 4.75, I.E. 3, and Konqueror. Opera has been competing in ICab's home turf now for some time, and with a ported codebase always a step behind the excellent windows version.
The problem, is that Apple is now bundling something that doesn't suck, thereby reducing demand for an alternative. Apple's bundling of iTunes reduced demand for Audion, an excellent alternative that does basically the same thing. Audion is every bit as good as iTunes, and a bit better, but people don't have a major need to switch. Microsoft's bundling of that horrible little video editor with XP has done nothing to hurt sales of other video editing suites, because other products on the market were significantly better. Opera really is being punted out of the Mac market, a move they should have expected with Apple's suprising propensity to attempt to satisfy customers and the absolute garbage that is I.E. for the Mac. Even if they are "a little bit better" than one of the best, if the best ships as default on most computers there is very little reason to change.
I'm personally in love with the amazingly configurable Opera7, that really does address major issues we have been complaining about since the inception of the project. All of the buttons on all of the toolbars can be easily interchanged, thereby eliminating several bars and making an efficient use of space. Unrequested pop-up blocking has been implemented, and the bookmark pane now combines folders and bookmarks into one view. Links can be dragged to the bookmark pane, entire sessions of windows can be easily saved and played back (finally, there is an easy way to do this). There is an inline print-preview, an inline find ("g opera" searches for opera via google, "f opera" searches for the text "opera" on the foremost window), a new mail client that is *almost* usable, a feat far greater than can be said for Mozilla's...
In short, it is very cool. Is it cool enough to lure people away from the default I.E.? Most definitely. Is it cool enough to lure people away from iCab? Probably not, but it may if they like the functionality. Is it cool enough to lure people away from Safari?...
That's the problem with Apple for small developers. MS is big enough to satisfy only the most base needs of its customers (wordpad? Paint?), but Apple has always had to strive to outperform. Apple tends to create and bundle the best software available for the platform with the OS... Which satisfies customers but pushes out developers. While I will be sad to see Opera leave OSX, I can understand both company's decisions, and just wish they had negotiated with eachother to make a modified Opera the default browser a long time ago.
-c
However, I'm not so sure that simple playback of keyboard combinations would be good for anything but leveling. The dedicated programmable pads in vogue several years back were quite gimmocky, and was less responsive than was acceptable for fighting games at the time. Since then, fighters have gotten significantly faster, and even more picky about timing issues. It's easier just to imput the gamepad commands yourself.
This is not to say that programmable controllers don't have their place... a programmable controller took my Castlevania: SOTN character to level 92 in just under a week. Programmable controllers continue to exist, and can had for a reasonable amount of money.
But the problem with visual recognition on modern 3d games is staggering... MIT has entire departments devoted to similar topics. You might be able to do it if you could convince the game to output stereoscopic images, (there was an article recently on a stereoscopic voxel technology), but a subsection of this sort of problem is what you would write your doctorate on. If you can get your hands on the base textures for the game, and redo the graphics engine to give depth and object clues along color lines, you could do it. But not as it stands, and not to a remote box.
But a little controller hacking is always fun. Good luck!
What are you all looking forward to when you finally have 802.11b?
-C
What, like a programmer too lazy / overburdened / forgetful to check for valid imput data before passing it on?
If the "Human Error" mentality is pervasive in the Navy, I can see why they would have problems. In certain circumstances it may be important to alter values in such a way as to push equipment dangerously beyond its limits. On the other hand, you should never accept a value, under any circumstances, that will simply result in a locked up system.
This probably isn't NT's fault, but it certainly doesn't bode well for the kind of code created by the Navy's Canadian contractor.