I know there are capacitive styluses in existence for sale online, and i know it's possible to make one yourself if you want to deal with the hassle, but why isn't it possible to walk into _any_ cell phone store and just grab one off the shelf? Multi-touch is great for some applications, but in a lot of cases you only need to touch one spot at a time, and a stylus is much more accurate and obscures a lot less of the screen. I don't understand why there isn't more of a market for them. And it would solve the cold weather issue without requiring you to get a special style of gloves.
I've got a Nexus One and i'm quite happy with it, but i have no interest in a Chrome OS device in any format, notebook, netbook, tablet or anything else. The cloud can be convenient i'm sure, but i'm not enamored of an entire OS designed around the idea. I do not want to be dependent on internet access to run my apps and access my data.
It would be amusing if the 3D printers actually had a reasonable pricing structure such that, when tolerances became fine enough, it would be cheaper to print out a plastic sheet with the "ink" actually embedded in the sheet. After all, if you need to be able to print out large physical objects at a reasonable cost then a thin sheet of plastic would have to be just a fraction of the price. Wouldn't that just ruin the day for all the companies that manufacture regular ink cartridges?
And suddenly i'm reminded of the plastic "flimsies" used in the Vorkosigan universe instead of paper:)
Everyone in the 10-30 range? So they're targeting absolutely everyone who grew up with the internet? That's a nice goal, but not really practical. Everyone who's comfortable with the level of social networking involved in MySpace has already moved on to Facebook, and everyone else is holding on desperately to their LiveJournal/DreamWidth or their Wordpress or their IRC or whatever they use for their communication with the world. One group has already moved on to something "bigger and better" and the other group is quite happy with what they have already.
Sorry about that, i originally had the second link, which includes a video of the unwrapping, as the first link. But then i decided to swap them because the (currently) second one went into more detail about the version confusion. I spent some time looking for a good article with a picture of the entire lineup of statues as well, but decided i already had too many links. As you seem to have noticed already there are a lot of copies of the video around but not a lot of simple pictures, at least not associated with decent articles so far.
"It is also true that 500 mil years ago, Earth was a ball of ice despite the fact that atmospheric CO2 was ~4200ppm (about 12 times higher than today). Oh yeah, you guys always forget to include that 'law of physics.'"
I am certainly not an expert in the subject, but my basic understanding of snowball earth is that first the continents got into a position that led to a runaway glaciation. More ice on the ground/water equals more light reflected equals more ice forming. Once the entire earth was covered in ice there was no photosynthesis going on, so carbon dioxide started to build up, mostly from volcanic activity. In fact according to the citations on wikipedia it didn't build just up to 12 times higher than today, but might have been more than 300 times higher before there was enough greenhouse heating to overcome the cooling effects of reflection from all the ice.
You seem to be implying that high levels of CO2 at the same time the earth was frozen over somehow contradicts global warming when in fact it supports the idea. Were you not aware of that? Or were you just hoping that we weren't? (And in any case, how is a fact or set of conditions a "law of physics"?)
A lot of details about _Gingerbread_ are beginning to leak. One of the things that is not confirmed, about which there has not even been a substantive leak, is that it will be version 3.0. A lot of people are assuming that, but it hasn't been confirmed and some people think that Gingerbread will actually be 2.5 and Honeycomb will be 3.0.
Opinions differ obviously. I saw Avatar in the theatres in 3D, and the graphics were pretty good, but i thought the movie was pretty mediocre and i didn't find it any more real, absorbing or dreamlike than any other movie.
"after much kerfuffle and uncertainty, the Hobbit film has finally been greenlit"
Sure there were some troubles, but it was inevitable it would eventually get made. After all you know what they say, "where there's a whip, there's a way."
Well part of the problem is that everyone agrees FF13 was rather busted, but people can't agree on _how_. I loved the open world of FF12, but i _hated_ the combat engine. Just program the AI and sit back and do nothing. I thought FF13 actually fixed the combat, at least _after_ the 10-20 hour "tutorial" was finished. I do miss the turn based battles (though that was something FF12 didn't have either) and not being able to directly control the other characters, but at least i felt like i was actively involved in the combat. To me a great game would be FF12's world and story (except maybe focused on Basch instead of Vaan, like they'd originally planed) but FF13's combat and leveling. Or FF10's combat and leveling. Anything but the boring mess that was FF12's system.
Obviously that kind of game wouldn't appeal to you however, which is why Squenix is always going to be upsetting _someone_ when they make a new game. It's kind of unfortunate however when they manage to upset _everyone_, which seems to have happened somewhat with FF13 and even more so with FF14.
Given the Isaac Newton article posted a couple days ago and my current reading material of the Baroque Cycle, i'm suddenly thinking that these guys are the modern day equivalents of people who clipped and scraped coins in order to melt the residue into bullion. Everyone else is busy trying to make an honest living while they are ripping out the foundation of the economic infrastructure. It's an activity that seems aggravating but somewhat trivial in small doses but can (and has in the past) destroy entire economies when allowed to get out of hand.
"and some were just batshit crazy by our current standards. For example; he [...] stuck pins in his eyes to investigate the nature of light"
Given that he's one of the founders of the whole field of optics, sticking pins in his eyes (or rather his eye sockets) to study how they worked may have taken an insane amount of guts on his part, but it definitely led to great scientific achievement so i wouldn't call it exactly "batshit crazy."
"XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration."
You know, reading your summation (which i totally agree with) makes me think that perhaps they would have had another stellar game if they'd just taken the gameplay from 13 (minus the 10 hour long tutorial!!!) and combined it with the story and open world of 12.
Imagine, if you will, a train barreling down the tracks towards a helpless puppy. When the train is 1,000 miles away from the puppy, nobody really knows what is going to happen. You can't see the big picture. The folks looking at the puppy don't see the train, and the folks looking at the train can't see the puppy. If somebody were to shout out "oh no, the puppy's gonna get squished!" at that moment in time, it would be genius.
So the real geniuses are people like Babbage, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before that train was even built, and Leonardo da Vinci, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before the idea of trains was even invented. Of course people thought Babbage was a bit of a nutter at the time, and we probably wouldn't even know who Leonardo da Vinci was today if he hadn't also been a great artist. Clearly being a real genius isn't of much practical value. The real money is in doing a good job at what someone else already thought up.
Several times in "The Door Into Summer" (1957) Heinlein used variations of the statement "Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad - but not before." He attributed it to Charles Fort, who apparently phrased it as "If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." (1931)
So people were thinking the same thing almost 80 years ago, and i would not be at all surprised if others had stated the same idea in different ways even earlier. (Victor Hugo coined the phrase "One cannot resist an idea whose time has come" in 1851, even if it wasn't specifically about technology.) In terms of the idea of people coming up with the same ideas simultaneously, this guy is a little slow out the gate:)
"Seriously, why doesn't paste work in this stupid box any more? (Google Chrome 6.0.472.63, btw)"
Well there's your problem. It works just fine for me in Firefox 3.6.10. IMHO Chrome has gotten one thing right (splitting different tabs into different processes so you can kill them and get the memory back) and about a dozen other things wrong. Prime among them, switching back to Chrome after working on something else for a little while will cause my ENTIRE COMPUTER to freeze while Chrome slowly refreshes the page one scanline at a time. I'm really not surprised to hear it has other problems as well.
And to follow up on what hedwards said, it's not like they shut down their servers overnight and cut off everyone's access to their content. They informed everyone that they _would_ be shutting down a couple months from now in order to give everyone time to find alternatives and back up their data. Very different from the crap GOG was pulling, real or not.
As well as being an interesting (albeit divisive) RPG itself, the indication that PSP games will be getting ported to 3DS in general is very good news. I'm hoping to see a port of Jeanne d'Arc myself, and maybe the re-translated FF Tactics.
It's sad that they've reached the point of having to shut down, but i've got to say that at least they've handled the situation with a lot of class. They're giving their users several months warning rather than just shutting down the servers overnight, and when they did market research that indicated there wouldn't be enough demand for a subscription version to sustain them they just decided not to offer one and shut down gracefully. As opposed to what seems to be the more common tactic of convincing their biggest supporters to hand over money for a little while and then having to shut down anyways, and then figure out how to do refunds or just tell everyone to go suck it.
For all that it was a rather buggy clone of Civilization (albeit an officially sanctioned one) "Call to Power" introduced a lot of new ideas to the genre that the main Civilization series still hasn't picked up on. One of the best of those was the "public works" system. Civilization has been trying pretty much from the beginning to streamline management of Engineers but has always kept them around. Call to Power completely revamped the system by getting rid of the Engineer unit and allowing you to "tax" your production in order to accumulate "public works" points. At any time you could spend the points you'd accumulated to purchase improvements for tiles anywhere in your territory. They made the system even more interesting by having various upgrades to the basic improvements unlocked by advanced technologies. I'd be very happy to see this system brought over to Civilization.
The only improvement i can think of would be the addition of "Combat Engineers," who would allow you to build improvements on whatever tile they occupied, even if it wasn't under your control at the time. (Doing so inside another civ's borders would be an act of war of course.) That would allow you to build roads to a prospective new city site and improve the area around it while the Settler was still being built or in transit, or expand roads into an enemy's territory while at war with them.
But at least Civ 5 has Giant Death Robots now, even if it's a far cry short of underwater cities and orbital assault units.
I don't recall the technical details (i'm sure someone else will come along at some point and fill in the details) but Impulse has "light" DRM. I believe there's some kind of registration check at install, but nothing after that. You don't have to keep checking into some internet server to keep playing your game after it's installed. So worse than GOG but better than Steam in that regard.
My usual buying pattern when looking for games was to check first GOG, then Impulse, and finally Steam, and buy it from the first place i found it. However as i said, a lack of DRM doesn't mean i'm willing to put up with an infinite amount of bad treatment in other areas. I want to let GOG know that i'm unhappy, but i want to encourage them to improve their behaviour. "You're on my blacklist now and i'm gonna boycott you forever!" sounds kind of childish and doesn't provide much incentive for change. Either you're overrating and will eventually recant on your own, or you're serious and nothing they do will make a difference anyways. I intend to present them with a complaint about specific actions on their part, and evidence of a specific but finite amount of financial harm they have incurred because of it. Maybe they'll care, maybe they won't, but i think it's more productive than threatening some kind of boycott.
This is the second time GOG has treated me in a somewhat crappy manner, though at least this time i've got a lot of company. (Yay?) However i'm not willing to boycott them permanently because of this stunt since they're the only ones trying to do the no DRM thing, even if they are sometimes asses about the way in which they do business.
However i do think i shall compare their catalog to Impulse's, find several games i want that both sites have, purchase those games from Impulse, ("Age of Wonders" seems like a good place to start) and then be sure to inform GOG about what i did and why i did it. Being DRM free can only make up for a certain amount of bad behaviour in other areas.
That really wouldn't surprise me. I love the service GOG provides, but their PR sucks. I wrote them an email suggesting that they ought to include at least some regular text in their emails so those of us reading it with clients like Pine, or those of us using a web based mail browser at work where the images would be blocked by services like Websense, would have some idea of what their weekly updates were about. The whole point of such emails is to get people interested enough to check out the site, which is rather difficult with just the title of the email.
Their response was something to the effect of: sorry, we're trying to sell old games so we need to use newest and best marketing techniques to advertise them. We can't be bothered with people who read email using antiquated systems.
Both the tone and the attitude bothered me, and every time i visited the site after that i was torn between my interest in the games and my annoyance at the stupidity of the people running the place. If this is just a marketing stunt to announce their coming out of beta that conflict of emotions will only be amplified.
Slashdot Mirror
I know there are capacitive styluses in existence for sale online, and i know it's possible to make one yourself if you want to deal with the hassle, but why isn't it possible to walk into _any_ cell phone store and just grab one off the shelf? Multi-touch is great for some applications, but in a lot of cases you only need to touch one spot at a time, and a stylus is much more accurate and obscures a lot less of the screen. I don't understand why there isn't more of a market for them. And it would solve the cold weather issue without requiring you to get a special style of gloves.
I've got a Nexus One and i'm quite happy with it, but i have no interest in a Chrome OS device in any format, notebook, netbook, tablet or anything else. The cloud can be convenient i'm sure, but i'm not enamored of an entire OS designed around the idea. I do not want to be dependent on internet access to run my apps and access my data.
It would be amusing if the 3D printers actually had a reasonable pricing structure such that, when tolerances became fine enough, it would be cheaper to print out a plastic sheet with the "ink" actually embedded in the sheet. After all, if you need to be able to print out large physical objects at a reasonable cost then a thin sheet of plastic would have to be just a fraction of the price. Wouldn't that just ruin the day for all the companies that manufacture regular ink cartridges?
:)
And suddenly i'm reminded of the plastic "flimsies" used in the Vorkosigan universe instead of paper
Everyone in the 10-30 range? So they're targeting absolutely everyone who grew up with the internet? That's a nice goal, but not really practical. Everyone who's comfortable with the level of social networking involved in MySpace has already moved on to Facebook, and everyone else is holding on desperately to their LiveJournal/DreamWidth or their Wordpress or their IRC or whatever they use for their communication with the world. One group has already moved on to something "bigger and better" and the other group is quite happy with what they have already.
Sorry about that, i originally had the second link, which includes a video of the unwrapping, as the first link. But then i decided to swap them because the (currently) second one went into more detail about the version confusion. I spent some time looking for a good article with a picture of the entire lineup of statues as well, but decided i already had too many links. As you seem to have noticed already there are a lot of copies of the video around but not a lot of simple pictures, at least not associated with decent articles so far.
"It is also true that 500 mil years ago, Earth was a ball of ice despite the fact that atmospheric CO2 was ~4200ppm (about 12 times higher than today). Oh yeah, you guys always forget to include that 'law of physics.'"
I am certainly not an expert in the subject, but my basic understanding of snowball earth is that first the continents got into a position that led to a runaway glaciation. More ice on the ground/water equals more light reflected equals more ice forming. Once the entire earth was covered in ice there was no photosynthesis going on, so carbon dioxide started to build up, mostly from volcanic activity. In fact according to the citations on wikipedia it didn't build just up to 12 times higher than today, but might have been more than 300 times higher before there was enough greenhouse heating to overcome the cooling effects of reflection from all the ice.
You seem to be implying that high levels of CO2 at the same time the earth was frozen over somehow contradicts global warming when in fact it supports the idea. Were you not aware of that? Or were you just hoping that we weren't? (And in any case, how is a fact or set of conditions a "law of physics"?)
A lot of details about _Gingerbread_ are beginning to leak. One of the things that is not confirmed, about which there has not even been a substantive leak, is that it will be version 3.0. A lot of people are assuming that, but it hasn't been confirmed and some people think that Gingerbread will actually be 2.5 and Honeycomb will be 3.0.
Opinions differ obviously. I saw Avatar in the theatres in 3D, and the graphics were pretty good, but i thought the movie was pretty mediocre and i didn't find it any more real, absorbing or dreamlike than any other movie.
"after much kerfuffle and uncertainty, the Hobbit film has finally been greenlit"
Sure there were some troubles, but it was inevitable it would eventually get made. After all you know what they say, "where there's a whip, there's a way."
Well part of the problem is that everyone agrees FF13 was rather busted, but people can't agree on _how_. I loved the open world of FF12, but i _hated_ the combat engine. Just program the AI and sit back and do nothing. I thought FF13 actually fixed the combat, at least _after_ the 10-20 hour "tutorial" was finished. I do miss the turn based battles (though that was something FF12 didn't have either) and not being able to directly control the other characters, but at least i felt like i was actively involved in the combat. To me a great game would be FF12's world and story (except maybe focused on Basch instead of Vaan, like they'd originally planed) but FF13's combat and leveling. Or FF10's combat and leveling. Anything but the boring mess that was FF12's system.
Obviously that kind of game wouldn't appeal to you however, which is why Squenix is always going to be upsetting _someone_ when they make a new game. It's kind of unfortunate however when they manage to upset _everyone_, which seems to have happened somewhat with FF13 and even more so with FF14.
Given the Isaac Newton article posted a couple days ago and my current reading material of the Baroque Cycle, i'm suddenly thinking that these guys are the modern day equivalents of people who clipped and scraped coins in order to melt the residue into bullion. Everyone else is busy trying to make an honest living while they are ripping out the foundation of the economic infrastructure. It's an activity that seems aggravating but somewhat trivial in small doses but can (and has in the past) destroy entire economies when allowed to get out of hand.
"and some were just batshit crazy by our current standards. For example; he [...] stuck pins in his eyes to investigate the nature of light"
Given that he's one of the founders of the whole field of optics, sticking pins in his eyes (or rather his eye sockets) to study how they worked may have taken an insane amount of guts on his part, but it definitely led to great scientific achievement so i wouldn't call it exactly "batshit crazy."
A Neal Stephenson book/series with a bungled ending? Say it ain't so!
"XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration."
You know, reading your summation (which i totally agree with) makes me think that perhaps they would have had another stellar game if they'd just taken the gameplay from 13 (minus the 10 hour long tutorial!!!) and combined it with the story and open world of 12.
Imagine, if you will, a train barreling down the tracks towards a helpless puppy. When the train is 1,000 miles away from the puppy, nobody really knows what is going to happen. You can't see the big picture. The folks looking at the puppy don't see the train, and the folks looking at the train can't see the puppy. If somebody were to shout out "oh no, the puppy's gonna get squished!" at that moment in time, it would be genius.
So the real geniuses are people like Babbage, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before that train was even built, and Leonardo da Vinci, who shouted "oh no, that train is going to squish that puppy!" before the idea of trains was even invented. Of course people thought Babbage was a bit of a nutter at the time, and we probably wouldn't even know who Leonardo da Vinci was today if he hadn't also been a great artist. Clearly being a real genius isn't of much practical value. The real money is in doing a good job at what someone else already thought up.
Several times in "The Door Into Summer" (1957) Heinlein used variations of the statement "Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad - but not before." He attributed it to Charles Fort, who apparently phrased it as "If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." (1931)
:)
So people were thinking the same thing almost 80 years ago, and i would not be at all surprised if others had stated the same idea in different ways even earlier. (Victor Hugo coined the phrase "One cannot resist an idea whose time has come" in 1851, even if it wasn't specifically about technology.) In terms of the idea of people coming up with the same ideas simultaneously, this guy is a little slow out the gate
"Seriously, why doesn't paste work in this stupid box any more? (Google Chrome 6.0.472.63, btw)"
Well there's your problem. It works just fine for me in Firefox 3.6.10. IMHO Chrome has gotten one thing right (splitting different tabs into different processes so you can kill them and get the memory back) and about a dozen other things wrong. Prime among them, switching back to Chrome after working on something else for a little while will cause my ENTIRE COMPUTER to freeze while Chrome slowly refreshes the page one scanline at a time. I'm really not surprised to hear it has other problems as well.
And to follow up on what hedwards said, it's not like they shut down their servers overnight and cut off everyone's access to their content. They informed everyone that they _would_ be shutting down a couple months from now in order to give everyone time to find alternatives and back up their data. Very different from the crap GOG was pulling, real or not.
Well like Metal Gear it won't be a launch game, and i don't know if it's the type of RPG you care about or not, but Class of Heroes is getting ported to 3DS.
As well as being an interesting (albeit divisive) RPG itself, the indication that PSP games will be getting ported to 3DS in general is very good news. I'm hoping to see a port of Jeanne d'Arc myself, and maybe the re-translated FF Tactics.
It's sad that they've reached the point of having to shut down, but i've got to say that at least they've handled the situation with a lot of class. They're giving their users several months warning rather than just shutting down the servers overnight, and when they did market research that indicated there wouldn't be enough demand for a subscription version to sustain them they just decided not to offer one and shut down gracefully. As opposed to what seems to be the more common tactic of convincing their biggest supporters to hand over money for a little while and then having to shut down anyways, and then figure out how to do refunds or just tell everyone to go suck it.
For all that it was a rather buggy clone of Civilization (albeit an officially sanctioned one) "Call to Power" introduced a lot of new ideas to the genre that the main Civilization series still hasn't picked up on. One of the best of those was the "public works" system. Civilization has been trying pretty much from the beginning to streamline management of Engineers but has always kept them around. Call to Power completely revamped the system by getting rid of the Engineer unit and allowing you to "tax" your production in order to accumulate "public works" points. At any time you could spend the points you'd accumulated to purchase improvements for tiles anywhere in your territory. They made the system even more interesting by having various upgrades to the basic improvements unlocked by advanced technologies. I'd be very happy to see this system brought over to Civilization.
The only improvement i can think of would be the addition of "Combat Engineers," who would allow you to build improvements on whatever tile they occupied, even if it wasn't under your control at the time. (Doing so inside another civ's borders would be an act of war of course.) That would allow you to build roads to a prospective new city site and improve the area around it while the Settler was still being built or in transit, or expand roads into an enemy's territory while at war with them.
But at least Civ 5 has Giant Death Robots now, even if it's a far cry short of underwater cities and orbital assault units.
I don't recall the technical details (i'm sure someone else will come along at some point and fill in the details) but Impulse has "light" DRM. I believe there's some kind of registration check at install, but nothing after that. You don't have to keep checking into some internet server to keep playing your game after it's installed. So worse than GOG but better than Steam in that regard.
My usual buying pattern when looking for games was to check first GOG, then Impulse, and finally Steam, and buy it from the first place i found it. However as i said, a lack of DRM doesn't mean i'm willing to put up with an infinite amount of bad treatment in other areas. I want to let GOG know that i'm unhappy, but i want to encourage them to improve their behaviour. "You're on my blacklist now and i'm gonna boycott you forever!" sounds kind of childish and doesn't provide much incentive for change. Either you're overrating and will eventually recant on your own, or you're serious and nothing they do will make a difference anyways. I intend to present them with a complaint about specific actions on their part, and evidence of a specific but finite amount of financial harm they have incurred because of it. Maybe they'll care, maybe they won't, but i think it's more productive than threatening some kind of boycott.
This is the second time GOG has treated me in a somewhat crappy manner, though at least this time i've got a lot of company. (Yay?) However i'm not willing to boycott them permanently because of this stunt since they're the only ones trying to do the no DRM thing, even if they are sometimes asses about the way in which they do business.
However i do think i shall compare their catalog to Impulse's, find several games i want that both sites have, purchase those games from Impulse, ("Age of Wonders" seems like a good place to start) and then be sure to inform GOG about what i did and why i did it. Being DRM free can only make up for a certain amount of bad behaviour in other areas.
The next concept after that is for a double decker, with flight attendants wearing miniskirts and no panties. Upper deck seats cost double.
...
Oh and did i mention that the flight attendants are all male?
That really wouldn't surprise me. I love the service GOG provides, but their PR sucks. I wrote them an email suggesting that they ought to include at least some regular text in their emails so those of us reading it with clients like Pine, or those of us using a web based mail browser at work where the images would be blocked by services like Websense, would have some idea of what their weekly updates were about. The whole point of such emails is to get people interested enough to check out the site, which is rather difficult with just the title of the email.
Their response was something to the effect of: sorry, we're trying to sell old games so we need to use newest and best marketing techniques to advertise them. We can't be bothered with people who read email using antiquated systems.
Both the tone and the attitude bothered me, and every time i visited the site after that i was torn between my interest in the games and my annoyance at the stupidity of the people running the place. If this is just a marketing stunt to announce their coming out of beta that conflict of emotions will only be amplified.