I used to love the old Infocom games, but unfortunately, didn't keep most of them around after I stopped playing them. I was wandering around a few years ago and found an independent bookshop going out of business that was selling a bunch of stuff, and lo and behold, I found a copy of Zork Zero, Zork I, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and Starcross, all still sealed in plastic, being sold for $0.50 each! I've still got those, although I did break down at one point and open the Hitchhiker's box.
Wow. I had no idea that ACiD was still around. They did some BBS ads for me back in 1988 or 1989 I think. May have been as late as 1990, but I don't think so. I had no idea that they were still around. Its a good to see that you guys lasted this long, and its a shame to see another era end.
This question was asked before. Its because the images get sent in packets, with each packet making up a square/rectangular area on the screen. Sometimes the packets don't get transmitted correctly, due to interference, etc., and those parts of the picture are then dropped out. If a part of a picture gets dropped out that NASA thinks is important and they feel they have to see it, they will just have the rover send a picture a second time.
I saw a special on the news on this, where they were using an identical mars rover here on earth, and trying to get it to drive off a cliff. They were doing this somewhere near CalTech/JPL I believe. Anyway, the rover has a bunch of sensors that detect dangerous situations, and it will not respond to the commands if they would put the rover in jeopardy. So basically, they were not able to drive the rover off a cliff, no matter how hard they tried.
This site has the problem most projector sales sites have. These are computer projectors more than they are TV projectors. 1024x768 isn't a standard TV or HD resolution, which means you end up with interpolated pixels, even at high resolution, resulting in a blurry picture. I'm looking for a site that sells projectors that are intended for TV rather than ones that are intended for data projection. I haven't found many that sell these sorts of projectors, which means I have to directly buy from the manufacturer or from specialty stores, resulting in a higher price.
I am a game developer, and I have to say, I hate SecureROM games. I hate CD keys, and I hate having to have the CD to play the game. I have 4 machines in my house, plus 2 laptops, and trying to keep track of all my game originals is difficult, much less remembering to take it with me when I want to play on a laptop. I can't recall the last game I have bought where I couldn't get a warez version before it was available in stores. People will copy the game, and people will not pay for it. There is little I or anyone else can do to stop it, and SecureROM primarily just pisses off legitimate users. As for your statement about CD keys making games "hard if not impossible to fake, and if you want to play online you basically need a legit key", I disagree. Call Of Duty, which has an online play mode and requires both the original CD and a CD key, has both no-CD cracks and KeyGens available. They have both been available since the game came out, and requiring a CD-key hasn't stopped anyone from playing it online.
Most TiVo's don't have a tuner at all. It uses IR or serial to change the channels on your satellite or cable box. Because it uses the cable/satellite box to tune, you would need to own 2 cable satellite boxes to tape 2 shows at once. That is why only the integrated DirecTV/TiVo boxes have 2 or more tuners, becuase they can put into one box.
Those of us in the video game industry will tend to call it the PSX, as that was the name it was presented to most of us with before it was released publically. The programming manuals all refer to the original playstation as PSX as well.
That isn't adaptive AI, as the players in the game play the same. It's called catchup code. Its used often in racing games as well. Basically, in NBA Jam, if you are behind, your shooting percentage goes up, regardless of the player. Same with the AI. This has the drawback of the easiest way to win at NBA Jam in single player is to just make sure you are never in the lead for most of the game. In the 4th quarter, if you've let the AI maintain a lead for most of the game, you can start doing stuff like making full court 3 point shots, as well as always being able to succesfully steal the ball. Quite irritating in my view. Racing games tend to do this quite a bit too, Need for Speed Underground being a good recent example. No matter how far ahead you get, the other cars tend to always be right behind you, and vice versa, if you crash, you can almost always catch up. This just turns the race into something where you can crash as much as you want, as long as its not on the last lap or two. Getting ahead does nothing for you, as the AI is always right behind you. Its an old trick from the coin op days, where the games tend to last 2 minutes or so, so it makes it more exciting. But I find it quite irritating on home games.
Being a console programmer, and having done quite a bit of work on the PS2, there is something in your comment that is a common misperception. You say that hyperthreading works great when you have people who know their processor upside and down and are not afraid of assembler, well, I am not afraid of assembler, and have done quite a bit of it. The problem is that writing in assembler tends to be slow, especially when trying to do heavy optimization. This takes time, a luxury generally not available to those of us in video games who tend to have hard christmas deadlines to ship our product. For Sony to assume that people are going to learn how to program in assembly is a mistake, as learning assembly isn't the issue, having the time to optimize the code in assembly is the issue. This isn't helped by the fact that most of the tools made available to us are piss poor, which makes working on the code much more difficult. For example, the PS2 has the vector units that are generally programmed in assembly. Not only do you need to make sure that the processing done by the vector units synchronizes with your main CPU, but you don't have ANY sort of debugging capability on these. Because of this, programming vector unit code is incredibly slow.
In addition, video games are things that don't always lend themselves particularly well to running in multiple threads. I have my artificial intelligence code, collision & physics code, and my rendering code. These 3 parts are the main parts of the code that take roughly 90-95% of the total CPU time available to me. I can't run collisions and physics until after the AI has run, and I can't run my rendering until the collision & physics have been run. I can multi-thread individual game objects, but even these constantly interact with each other. This isn't normally a problem if you double buffer it in a way that, for example, after the AI has run, I keep the current frame's AI output around somewhere while I run the next frame, but this requires additional memory, another resource that is scarce on consoles.
Of course, you could just buy a Tivo box for less, and even with the lifetime subscription, probably end up cheaper once you are all said and done, and still be running linux.
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"The author of the original message probably could have worded the comment at the end of their message a little better. But speeding is not a freedom, it is a violation of a freedom. To allow law enforcement officers to issue tickets based on GPS would not be giving up a freedom."
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I strongly disagree. Allowing law enforcement officers to issue tickets based on GPS does give up freedom, and quite a bit. Freedom through obscurity is an important part of our everyday freedom. Using that same argument, what if we had face recognition technology, and it was installed by the government in all public places? They would know where everyone would be, in public, but its not sacrificing a freedom because you're in a public place, and anyone else could see that you were there. And the government, if they so choose, could follow you to track your movements, so what's the difference between using face recognition and tracking and knowing where you are ALL the time? They would only use it if they had a court order though, so you are safe:) Personally, that sort of future sounds quite scary to me.
It doesn't have an input medium other than the cartridge, and the decoding is done in software, so there is no decoding chip. It is a standard 15-20 dollar cart for 45 minutes of video.
I spent a lot of time doing some research into this, and I basically couldn't find a way to charge money without it being either really expensive (in which case, people can use tmobile at starbucks just as well), or without losing money on it. The problem was just in maintaining a PC that people have to login into, selling accounts, etc. just got to be such a headache that it wasn't worth it, not to mention, the increased cost of having a commercial DSL or cable vs. the residential one. Instead, we just went with the free access. This worked out great, as our general policy is that you can't hang out inside leeching off the access without buying something. We get quite a few people who just hang out and use the free wifi, and they consistently sit there and buy coffee after coffee. In the end, I spent $40 on a cheap wifi access point, another $50 to get the DSL installed, and $30 a month in DSL monthly fees. It more than pays for itself in people buying coffee. And we have nothing restricted, all of it is open, and have yet to have a problem with anyone sitting there and tying up all the bandwidth. It just hasn't been an issue, so we haven't spent any time dealing with it. Just thought I'd give you my experience on this.
I have no problem with paying ATM fees to the owner of the ATM. What pisses me off is banks like Bank Of America, that charge YOU a $1.50 if you are a B of A customer and use an ATM that someone else owns. They should be paying you! There's less maintenance on their ATM to access your money! They just do it to make more money. That's why I won't bank at a bank that charges me ATM fees.
Nope, hasn't changed at all. Its absolutely impossible to get Tempest parts on the internet or on Ebay. Want to sell me your machine though? I collect dead cabinets:)
Actually, surprisingly enough, this has little to do with it. I was working at Midway when they closed their arcade division. The real reasons they were closed is, 1, there is a lack of arcades in the US, compared to what their used to be. This means you have to keep the price of the actual machine hardware down to make them affordable for a place like, say, 7-11, or the local laundromat. Most of the arcade operators I know don't worry too much about spending $5k-$10k a machine, at least not nearly as much as a laundromat does. Part of this also has to do with the fact that if something goes wrong on the machine, the arcade operator is likely to know how to fix it, not the case with the laundromat operator. The 2nd reason, and this being the big one, is that it makes little difference if you are rendering, say 6 million polygons a second, compared to say, 20 million polygons a second. I mean, visually, it is a bit of a difference, but not nearly as striking as the difference between say, 256 colors and 16, or even 4. This means that the visual gap between what is available at home vs. what is available on an arcade machine for a reasonable price has declined significantly. This is a large reason why most of the games you see tend to be dancing games, shooting games, or driving games. Its not because the creativity ran out, but because that is one of the few things that we were able to offer on the machines that you would never be able to get at home. You'd never have one of those full motion seats for Ridge Racer on your Playstation. Dancing games and shooting games, same sort of thing, although less so. The way we were able to seperate arcade machines from what you get at home was by the interface. This once again drives up the original cost of the machine, as well as the maintenance costs and likelyhood of something breaking. All of these things led to the decline and eventual collapse (at least in the US) of the arcade industry.
"...1,000 studies conducted by distinguished scientists that showed a correlation between the viewing of violent media images and increased aggression and acceptance of violence among children."
The above statement is one of the more misleading parts of the story. Let me give you an example of a study on violence and video games. Put a bunch of kids in a white room, with a one way mirror, surrounded by adults asking them lots of questions while forcing them to watch or play something that they don't necessarily want to play, and you will get increased aggression. What I've seen in most of these studies is they view the behavior of the children exposed to these kinds of media right after their viewing, which doesn't tend to give you valid results. You have to examine the children on a longer term, even say, the next day after playing these games, and see if their aggression is still up. That is what is missing from most of these video game aggression studies.
Why would you need non-cash to pay rent and bills? I decided I didn't like the banks where I was living and lived for over a year on all cash, and it wasn't a problem. Paid rent and my bills in cash. The car payments were a pain, because there's no payment office I could go to, but I was able to get money orders at the cost of about 30 cents each, so 30 cents a month to pay my car rather than 1.50 every day I hit the ATM was a good price.
Lack of foresight has less to do with it than cost. Putting more memory into it brings up the cost. The PS2 has enough memory, only its segmented in such a way to make much of it practically useless. Who needs 8 megs of sound RAM when you only have 4 megs of video RAM?
And I do want "caller pays" and can't get it here in the US. You argue that "One-size-fits-all SUCKS", and yes, it does. But in Europe, as many other posters have mentioned, you have a choice. Here in the US, you have one.
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I used to love the old Infocom games, but unfortunately, didn't keep most of them around after I stopped playing them. I was wandering around a few years ago and found an independent bookshop going out of business that was selling a bunch of stuff, and lo and behold, I found a copy of Zork Zero, Zork I, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and Starcross, all still sealed in plastic, being sold for $0.50 each! I've still got those, although I did break down at one point and open the Hitchhiker's box.
Wow. I had no idea that ACiD was still around. They did some BBS ads for me back in 1988 or 1989 I think. May have been as late as 1990, but I don't think so. I had no idea that they were still around. Its a good to see that you guys lasted this long, and its a shame to see another era end.
This question was asked before. Its because the images get sent in packets, with each packet making up a square/rectangular area on the screen. Sometimes the packets don't get transmitted correctly, due to interference, etc., and those parts of the picture are then dropped out. If a part of a picture gets dropped out that NASA thinks is important and they feel they have to see it, they will just have the rover send a picture a second time.
I saw a special on the news on this, where they were using an identical mars rover here on earth, and trying to get it to drive off a cliff. They were doing this somewhere near CalTech/JPL I believe. Anyway, the rover has a bunch of sensors that detect dangerous situations, and it will not respond to the commands if they would put the rover in jeopardy. So basically, they were not able to drive the rover off a cliff, no matter how hard they tried.
This site has the problem most projector sales sites have. These are computer projectors more than they are TV projectors. 1024x768 isn't a standard TV or HD resolution, which means you end up with interpolated pixels, even at high resolution, resulting in a blurry picture. I'm looking for a site that sells projectors that are intended for TV rather than ones that are intended for data projection. I haven't found many that sell these sorts of projectors, which means I have to directly buy from the manufacturer or from specialty stores, resulting in a higher price.
For those of us in the video game industry, gaming is the office!
I am a game developer, and I have to say, I hate SecureROM games. I hate CD keys, and I hate having to have the CD to play the game. I have 4 machines in my house, plus 2 laptops, and trying to keep track of all my game originals is difficult, much less remembering to take it with me when I want to play on a laptop. I can't recall the last game I have bought where I couldn't get a warez version before it was available in stores. People will copy the game, and people will not pay for it. There is little I or anyone else can do to stop it, and SecureROM primarily just pisses off legitimate users. As for your statement about CD keys making games "hard if not impossible to fake, and if you want to play online you basically need a legit key", I disagree. Call Of Duty, which has an online play mode and requires both the original CD and a CD key, has both no-CD cracks and KeyGens available. They have both been available since the game came out, and requiring a CD-key hasn't stopped anyone from playing it online.
The first Wipeout for the Playstation had Red Bull advertisements. That was how I "discovered" the joys of Red Bull.
Most TiVo's don't have a tuner at all. It uses IR or serial to change the channels on your satellite or cable box. Because it uses the cable/satellite box to tune, you would need to own 2 cable satellite boxes to tape 2 shows at once. That is why only the integrated DirecTV/TiVo boxes have 2 or more tuners, becuase they can put into one box.
Those of us in the video game industry will tend to call it the PSX, as that was the name it was presented to most of us with before it was released publically. The programming manuals all refer to the original playstation as PSX as well.
Don't you mean that gaming has cut short your work and college life?
That isn't adaptive AI, as the players in the game play the same. It's called catchup code. Its used often in racing games as well. Basically, in NBA Jam, if you are behind, your shooting percentage goes up, regardless of the player. Same with the AI. This has the drawback of the easiest way to win at NBA Jam in single player is to just make sure you are never in the lead for most of the game. In the 4th quarter, if you've let the AI maintain a lead for most of the game, you can start doing stuff like making full court 3 point shots, as well as always being able to succesfully steal the ball. Quite irritating in my view. Racing games tend to do this quite a bit too, Need for Speed Underground being a good recent example. No matter how far ahead you get, the other cars tend to always be right behind you, and vice versa, if you crash, you can almost always catch up. This just turns the race into something where you can crash as much as you want, as long as its not on the last lap or two. Getting ahead does nothing for you, as the AI is always right behind you. Its an old trick from the coin op days, where the games tend to last 2 minutes or so, so it makes it more exciting. But I find it quite irritating on home games.
Being a console programmer, and having done quite a bit of work on the PS2, there is something in your comment that is a common misperception. You say that hyperthreading works great when you have people who know their processor upside and down and are not afraid of assembler, well, I am not afraid of assembler, and have done quite a bit of it. The problem is that writing in assembler tends to be slow, especially when trying to do heavy optimization. This takes time, a luxury generally not available to those of us in video games who tend to have hard christmas deadlines to ship our product. For Sony to assume that people are going to learn how to program in assembly is a mistake, as learning assembly isn't the issue, having the time to optimize the code in assembly is the issue. This isn't helped by the fact that most of the tools made available to us are piss poor, which makes working on the code much more difficult. For example, the PS2 has the vector units that are generally programmed in assembly. Not only do you need to make sure that the processing done by the vector units synchronizes with your main CPU, but you don't have ANY sort of debugging capability on these. Because of this, programming vector unit code is incredibly slow.
In addition, video games are things that don't always lend themselves particularly well to running in multiple threads. I have my artificial intelligence code, collision & physics code, and my rendering code. These 3 parts are the main parts of the code that take roughly 90-95% of the total CPU time available to me. I can't run collisions and physics until after the AI has run, and I can't run my rendering until the collision & physics have been run. I can multi-thread individual game objects, but even these constantly interact with each other. This isn't normally a problem if you double buffer it in a way that, for example, after the AI has run, I keep the current frame's AI output around somewhere while I run the next frame, but this requires additional memory, another resource that is scarce on consoles.
Of course, you could just buy a Tivo box for less, and even with the lifetime subscription, probably end up cheaper once you are all said and done, and still be running linux.
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:) Personally, that sort of future sounds quite scary to me.
"The author of the original message probably could have worded the comment at the end of their message a little better. But speeding is not a freedom, it is a violation of a freedom. To allow law enforcement officers to issue tickets based on GPS would not be giving up a freedom."
-------------------
I strongly disagree. Allowing law enforcement officers to issue tickets based on GPS does give up freedom, and quite a bit. Freedom through obscurity is an important part of our everyday freedom. Using that same argument, what if we had face recognition technology, and it was installed by the government in all public places? They would know where everyone would be, in public, but its not sacrificing a freedom because you're in a public place, and anyone else could see that you were there. And the government, if they so choose, could follow you to track your movements, so what's the difference between using face recognition and tracking and knowing where you are ALL the time? They would only use it if they had a court order though, so you are safe
It doesn't have an input medium other than the cartridge, and the decoding is done in software, so there is no decoding chip. It is a standard 15-20 dollar cart for 45 minutes of video.
I spent a lot of time doing some research into this, and I basically couldn't find a way to charge money without it being either really expensive (in which case, people can use tmobile at starbucks just as well), or without losing money on it. The problem was just in maintaining a PC that people have to login into, selling accounts, etc. just got to be such a headache that it wasn't worth it, not to mention, the increased cost of having a commercial DSL or cable vs. the residential one. Instead, we just went with the free access. This worked out great, as our general policy is that you can't hang out inside leeching off the access without buying something. We get quite a few people who just hang out and use the free wifi, and they consistently sit there and buy coffee after coffee. In the end, I spent $40 on a cheap wifi access point, another $50 to get the DSL installed, and $30 a month in DSL monthly fees. It more than pays for itself in people buying coffee. And we have nothing restricted, all of it is open, and have yet to have a problem with anyone sitting there and tying up all the bandwidth. It just hasn't been an issue, so we haven't spent any time dealing with it. Just thought I'd give you my experience on this.
I have no problem with paying ATM fees to the owner of the ATM. What pisses me off is banks like Bank Of America, that charge YOU a $1.50 if you are a B of A customer and use an ATM that someone else owns. They should be paying you! There's less maintenance on their ATM to access your money! They just do it to make more money. That's why I won't bank at a bank that charges me ATM fees.
Nope, hasn't changed at all. Its absolutely impossible to get Tempest parts on the internet or on Ebay. Want to sell me your machine though? I collect dead cabinets :)
Actually, surprisingly enough, this has little to do with it. I was working at Midway when they closed their arcade division. The real reasons they were closed is, 1, there is a lack of arcades in the US, compared to what their used to be. This means you have to keep the price of the actual machine hardware down to make them affordable for a place like, say, 7-11, or the local laundromat. Most of the arcade operators I know don't worry too much about spending $5k-$10k a machine, at least not nearly as much as a laundromat does. Part of this also has to do with the fact that if something goes wrong on the machine, the arcade operator is likely to know how to fix it, not the case with the laundromat operator. The 2nd reason, and this being the big one, is that it makes little difference if you are rendering, say 6 million polygons a second, compared to say, 20 million polygons a second. I mean, visually, it is a bit of a difference, but not nearly as striking as the difference between say, 256 colors and 16, or even 4. This means that the visual gap between what is available at home vs. what is available on an arcade machine for a reasonable price has declined significantly. This is a large reason why most of the games you see tend to be dancing games, shooting games, or driving games. Its not because the creativity ran out, but because that is one of the few things that we were able to offer on the machines that you would never be able to get at home. You'd never have one of those full motion seats for Ridge Racer on your Playstation. Dancing games and shooting games, same sort of thing, although less so. The way we were able to seperate arcade machines from what you get at home was by the interface. This once again drives up the original cost of the machine, as well as the maintenance costs and likelyhood of something breaking. All of these things led to the decline and eventual collapse (at least in the US) of the arcade industry.
"...1,000 studies conducted by distinguished scientists that showed a correlation between the viewing of violent media images and increased aggression and acceptance of violence among children." The above statement is one of the more misleading parts of the story. Let me give you an example of a study on violence and video games. Put a bunch of kids in a white room, with a one way mirror, surrounded by adults asking them lots of questions while forcing them to watch or play something that they don't necessarily want to play, and you will get increased aggression. What I've seen in most of these studies is they view the behavior of the children exposed to these kinds of media right after their viewing, which doesn't tend to give you valid results. You have to examine the children on a longer term, even say, the next day after playing these games, and see if their aggression is still up. That is what is missing from most of these video game aggression studies.
Why would you need non-cash to pay rent and bills? I decided I didn't like the banks where I was living and lived for over a year on all cash, and it wasn't a problem. Paid rent and my bills in cash. The car payments were a pain, because there's no payment office I could go to, but I was able to get money orders at the cost of about 30 cents each, so 30 cents a month to pay my car rather than 1.50 every day I hit the ATM was a good price.
Lack of foresight has less to do with it than cost. Putting more memory into it brings up the cost. The PS2 has enough memory, only its segmented in such a way to make much of it practically useless. Who needs 8 megs of sound RAM when you only have 4 megs of video RAM?
And I do want "caller pays" and can't get it here in the US. You argue that "One-size-fits-all SUCKS", and yes, it does. But in Europe, as many other posters have mentioned, you have a choice. Here in the US, you have one.
Neither CNN nor NPR's slogan is Fair and Balanced, so its a moot point.