Websites have been doing this for at least a few years now already. They've got heat maps that show where people keep their mouse. I don't really see how Google's idea is any different, unless they feed it through some mouse gesture software to get a deeper meaning.
My weirdest experience with gaming has been with the Left 4 Dead series.
In both games, Valve has spent the first two or three weeks after release fixing any bug big bugs. After that they basically only fix a bug if it ends up crashing the game client. Bugs that allow you to lag out the players, crash the server, change maps when you're not supposed to, get maximum scores for an entire map even when your team dies, and spawn extra infected AI bots exist for both games, and never get fixed.
After those first few weeks, the only changes they make are ones that are trivial to implement -- very minor balancing fixes like changing the damage things do, or adding game modes that vary what weapons/monsters get spawned. None of the changes the community actually requests are ever added, like a working lobby system. There is basically no communication between the developers and community.
It's an odd disconnect. Especially for an industry that likes to hire directly out of it's hobby modding community.
Probably not. x264 has a number of innate visual advantages to compressing video that were previously mpeg compressed. VP8 generally seems to win on raw uncompressed video in the races I've seen.
Then you've been fooled. The study you're referring to used videos pre-compressed with other MPEG standards, and the VP8 guys claimed that that biased it toward other MPEG-like codecs. They said VP8 got better with an uncompressed source.
VP8 got better. On a single test. A single test is not conclusive for anything but that single test. Note that, even for that single test, it still didn't beat H.264 -- it merely got better.
What we know (not assume), is that the core of VP8 is almost identical to the H.264 Baseline profile. VP8 is an MPEG-like codec! It's got a few small tweaks, some that help and some that don't. The features that would give it an obvious advantage or disadvantage on pre-compressed video are identical.
Someone needs to make an Android app that does the exact same thing these vans did, and publish all the captured data online, free and open. Maybe then the govt. could take their eyes off Google for long enough to realize the real problem here isn't Google -- it's the silly politicians who think recording SSIDs is malicious (the same politicians who'd start training a multi-million-man army for the coming "cyber war" apocalypse if they could), and the stupid networking (hardware or ISP) companies who don't default to secure settings, and don't educate their customers how to maintain their security.
Apple is closely involved with Webkit (it's the backend Safari uses), and this feature that made better ad-blocking possible was contributed by Apple. So it's not entirely random.
You're going to charge me $30 upfront, right?
on
DRM vs. Unfinished Games
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Right? Not $60 for an unfinished game, then two or three extra $10 for addons?
Force Unleashed 2 has a good chance to unseat Jedi Academy as my favorite Star Wars game, but the original did have some faults. I want a more varied world and new game play. Less blowing past stormtroopers, more lightsaber battles. Do away with the quick time events and the minigame with awkward controls (pulling down the star destroyer). Let me customize my character more. Add some puzzles.
Most of all, make the PC a first-class platform. The port Aspyr did was pretty terrible -- bugs and performance issues all over the place. I shouldn't have to save every 5 minutes for fear of crashing.
And everyone who wants to replay their copy of Half-Life 2, it's expansions, or Counter-Strike: Source now has to put up with a bunch of random glitches brought on by the new cross-platform engine. In my case it's even worse as the new engine has a strange interaction with my video card that renders games unplayable. This on a PC that handles Left 4 Dead2 and TF2 just fine, as well as Crysis on high settings. Thanks Valve, for the convenience.
The configuration of the variable-sized "pixels" depends on the image, so you're not going to get a new screen with more detail -- this is for storing images. From what I can tell, he's doing a basic form of an old and well known compression technique ("macroblocks" in JPEG, H.264, and others) and calling it a new form of pixel.
You can enable DEP on Windows and still allocate executable memory. You just can't to get it from malloc(). This feature is needed so little that it should be a pretty trivial amount of modifications to get code working. It's probably not that they can't, but that they simply won't because it's too low a priority compared to the next big shiny feature.
They weren't trying to measure all facets of internet speed on broadband. If I misunderstood and that actually was their intention, I agree there are even more holes in their methodology. From TFS:
I'm sure I'll get modded down for saying this, but I'm not too sure I want Wikipedia brought up as the shining example of Open Source licensing. People had been contributing under the GFDL, only to have Wikipedia and GNU work together to subvert that and convert everything to the Creative Commons license. Agree with the license change or not (I personally do, I believe CC is a better fit!), the way they did it was still pretty fucked up.
I suggest that a Linux distribution designed specifically for journalists be created. Maybe call it Xerotrace. It has to be a liveCD, it can include Tor, Freenet, GNUNet, and encrypted truecrypt container for permanent storage.
I'm having trouble believing that this test is useful for anything, if I'm understanding their methodology.
They should be giving TOTAL TIME to download a web page and all its assets, including DNS lookups. That's the only measurement that matters for web browsing.
Transfer rate is such a small importance to most people -- as an example, their slowest transfer rate (Frontier DSL) would download one of their ~21KB review pages in about 31ms. Their fastest (Verizon FIOS)? About 14ms. The difference is negligible, and I bet most people will take far longer to perform DNS lookups and initiate the connection than it takes to actually transmit the data. Transfer rate is not the right measurement.
Doesn't their religion say that such irreverent things MUST be stopped? In which case it's just their sacred duty to censor, not them being scared of anything. Perhaps their belief is so strong that they view their religion as unquestionably obvious fact, and are just as scared of irreverent speech as we are of someone saying something obviously incorrect like "2 + 2 = 1".
Religious blinders aren't exclusive to the fanatics. Most religious people I've talked to have them, however small. Most religions have just evolved to be tolerant of people saying things which are, to them, nonsensical.
...how is this any different than radio and TV? Do we not already have the emergency broadcast system that can barge in and essentially "turn off" radio and TV services?
The Radio and TV that they can interrupt are receive-only. They don't block phones, which people use to communicate. They shouldn't block internet.
TFA doesn't mention why they went with this over a more established and modern GPU like Imagination's PowerVR or Nvidia's Tegra. OpenGL ES 1.1 isn't really anything to brag about, so I assume it either uses a lot less power, or (more likely) is much cheaper to make.
I figured they'd take this opportunity to make a single-purpose gaming device that was more powerful than the phones they're now having to compete with, so this seems like a weird choice.
I deal with some people who would rather wait a week to have a 30min phone call than have a short conversation over the course of a day via email between three people. Not for lack of trying, some people simply seem incapable and stuck in their old ways. I had hopes that Wave would give just enough extra interface over what email provides to make having these 3+ person conversations work for them, but it still wasn't enough.
Other than that, yea I didn't really know what I was going to use it for -- I'd hoped that if I could get someone to use it for longer than a week, some greater understanding would "click" and we'd find a good use.
Every time I've tried to use it, the conversation dies off quickly and new ones go right back to Email. As a last ditch effort I even added a small paragraph at the top of a Wave that explained how to use it, and still the very first reply to it was sent over Email.
It's just not intuitive or compelling enough to replace anything with.
Windows Mobile looks like crap, and they know it. They maintained compatibility above all else, and the result is that you can use most of the familiar Windows API on it, and make all your apps look like tiny desktop apps. They worked but weren't very intuitive, especially in the new world of touch. Because of this, "Windows Phone 7" was announced as a completely incompatible OS, supporting only Silverlight apps. It's meant to be the next-gen platform that can compete with the slickness of the iPhone.
The problem is that Windows Mobile had a lot of business users and they weren't too happy with everything they make and use becoming obsolete overnight. That's the void this fills. This "Windows Embedded Handheld" maintains the compatibility platform they bought into.
I suspect the only difference between the two will be that one uses the old shell and one uses the new Silverlight shell -- it's already easy to confirm that Windows Phone 7 uses a similar (if not the same) platform underneath the new UI.
I don't think anyone with a gaming system will be interested, but everyone else may be. Some games like RPGs can be played acceptably with a little lag, and I wouldn't mind being able to see some nice graphics on my Eee PC when I'm away from home.
Will it work well with an FPS? Doubtful. Before anyone says "Hey! I used to frag in Quake with a 300 ping and it was plenty playable!" -- I used to too. But that was 300ms of network latency, not input latency - very big difference. Lag compensation makes a world of difference, and that's impossible when you're just piping video.
The OnLive Game Service (the "Service") Fee will be waived for the first 12 months from the date you activate your OnLive Account. During these 12 months, your access to the Service will include free demos and community features, such as member Profiles, Friending, Chat, Spectating and Brag Clip(TM) videos, but will not include any games, content or other services that are offered for purchase, and which must be purchased separately.
Sounds like you're going to need to pay to test their stuff. At least they're up front about it?
Not so brilliant for a netbook, though. Most of them have just enough screen width to get the average website layout working optimally. People design webpages to scroll vertically, not horizontally, so a tiny bit of vertical space is not a big deal. I think the best thing to do would make the menu auto-hide. It wouldn't matter which orientation it was in then.
Slashdot Mirror
Websites have been doing this for at least a few years now already. They've got heat maps that show where people keep their mouse. I don't really see how Google's idea is any different, unless they feed it through some mouse gesture software to get a deeper meaning.
My weirdest experience with gaming has been with the Left 4 Dead series.
In both games, Valve has spent the first two or three weeks after release fixing any bug big bugs. After that they basically only fix a bug if it ends up crashing the game client. Bugs that allow you to lag out the players, crash the server, change maps when you're not supposed to, get maximum scores for an entire map even when your team dies, and spawn extra infected AI bots exist for both games, and never get fixed.
After those first few weeks, the only changes they make are ones that are trivial to implement -- very minor balancing fixes like changing the damage things do, or adding game modes that vary what weapons/monsters get spawned. None of the changes the community actually requests are ever added, like a working lobby system. There is basically no communication between the developers and community.
It's an odd disconnect. Especially for an industry that likes to hire directly out of it's hobby modding community.
Then you've been fooled. The study you're referring to used videos pre-compressed with other MPEG standards, and the VP8 guys claimed that that biased it toward other MPEG-like codecs. They said VP8 got better with an uncompressed source.
VP8 got better. On a single test. A single test is not conclusive for anything but that single test. Note that, even for that single test, it still didn't beat H.264 -- it merely got better.
What we know (not assume), is that the core of VP8 is almost identical to the H.264 Baseline profile. VP8 is an MPEG-like codec! It's got a few small tweaks, some that help and some that don't. The features that would give it an obvious advantage or disadvantage on pre-compressed video are identical.
Someone needs to make an Android app that does the exact same thing these vans did, and publish all the captured data online, free and open. Maybe then the govt. could take their eyes off Google for long enough to realize the real problem here isn't Google -- it's the silly politicians who think recording SSIDs is malicious (the same politicians who'd start training a multi-million-man army for the coming "cyber war" apocalypse if they could), and the stupid networking (hardware or ISP) companies who don't default to secure settings, and don't educate their customers how to maintain their security.
Apple is closely involved with Webkit (it's the backend Safari uses), and this feature that made better ad-blocking possible was contributed by Apple. So it's not entirely random.
Right? Not $60 for an unfinished game, then two or three extra $10 for addons?
Force Unleashed 2 has a good chance to unseat Jedi Academy as my favorite Star Wars game, but the original did have some faults. I want a more varied world and new game play. Less blowing past stormtroopers, more lightsaber battles. Do away with the quick time events and the minigame with awkward controls (pulling down the star destroyer). Let me customize my character more. Add some puzzles.
Most of all, make the PC a first-class platform. The port Aspyr did was pretty terrible -- bugs and performance issues all over the place. I shouldn't have to save every 5 minutes for fear of crashing.
And everyone who wants to replay their copy of Half-Life 2, it's expansions, or Counter-Strike: Source now has to put up with a bunch of random glitches brought on by the new cross-platform engine. In my case it's even worse as the new engine has a strange interaction with my video card that renders games unplayable. This on a PC that handles Left 4 Dead2 and TF2 just fine, as well as Crysis on high settings. Thanks Valve, for the convenience.
Think of the new awesome realism this would give Settlers of Catan! Someone get this guy a patent.
The configuration of the variable-sized "pixels" depends on the image, so you're not going to get a new screen with more detail -- this is for storing images. From what I can tell, he's doing a basic form of an old and well known compression technique ("macroblocks" in JPEG, H.264, and others) and calling it a new form of pixel.
You can enable DEP on Windows and still allocate executable memory. You just can't to get it from malloc(). This feature is needed so little that it should be a pretty trivial amount of modifications to get code working. It's probably not that they can't, but that they simply won't because it's too low a priority compared to the next big shiny feature.
VP8 shares a lot of features with H.264's Baseline profile. I'd expect a lot of code to be sharable between them.
They weren't trying to measure all facets of internet speed on broadband. If I misunderstood and that actually was their intention, I agree there are even more holes in their methodology. From TFS:
I'm sure I'll get modded down for saying this, but I'm not too sure I want Wikipedia brought up as the shining example of Open Source licensing. People had been contributing under the GFDL, only to have Wikipedia and GNU work together to subvert that and convert everything to the Creative Commons license. Agree with the license change or not (I personally do, I believe CC is a better fit!), the way they did it was still pretty fucked up.
Several already exist.
I'm having trouble believing that this test is useful for anything, if I'm understanding their methodology.
They should be giving TOTAL TIME to download a web page and all its assets, including DNS lookups. That's the only measurement that matters for web browsing.
Transfer rate is such a small importance to most people -- as an example, their slowest transfer rate (Frontier DSL) would download one of their ~21KB review pages in about 31ms. Their fastest (Verizon FIOS)? About 14ms. The difference is negligible, and I bet most people will take far longer to perform DNS lookups and initiate the connection than it takes to actually transmit the data. Transfer rate is not the right measurement.
Doesn't their religion say that such irreverent things MUST be stopped? In which case it's just their sacred duty to censor, not them being scared of anything. Perhaps their belief is so strong that they view their religion as unquestionably obvious fact, and are just as scared of irreverent speech as we are of someone saying something obviously incorrect like "2 + 2 = 1".
Religious blinders aren't exclusive to the fanatics. Most religious people I've talked to have them, however small. Most religions have just evolved to be tolerant of people saying things which are, to them, nonsensical.
The Radio and TV that they can interrupt are receive-only. They don't block phones, which people use to communicate. They shouldn't block internet.
TFA doesn't mention why they went with this over a more established and modern GPU like Imagination's PowerVR or Nvidia's Tegra. OpenGL ES 1.1 isn't really anything to brag about, so I assume it either uses a lot less power, or (more likely) is much cheaper to make.
I figured they'd take this opportunity to make a single-purpose gaming device that was more powerful than the phones they're now having to compete with, so this seems like a weird choice.
I deal with some people who would rather wait a week to have a 30min phone call than have a short conversation over the course of a day via email between three people. Not for lack of trying, some people simply seem incapable and stuck in their old ways. I had hopes that Wave would give just enough extra interface over what email provides to make having these 3+ person conversations work for them, but it still wasn't enough.
Other than that, yea I didn't really know what I was going to use it for -- I'd hoped that if I could get someone to use it for longer than a week, some greater understanding would "click" and we'd find a good use.
Every time I've tried to use it, the conversation dies off quickly and new ones go right back to Email. As a last ditch effort I even added a small paragraph at the top of a Wave that explained how to use it, and still the very first reply to it was sent over Email.
It's just not intuitive or compelling enough to replace anything with.
That's exactly what they did!
Windows Mobile looks like crap, and they know it. They maintained compatibility above all else, and the result is that you can use most of the familiar Windows API on it, and make all your apps look like tiny desktop apps. They worked but weren't very intuitive, especially in the new world of touch. Because of this, "Windows Phone 7" was announced as a completely incompatible OS, supporting only Silverlight apps. It's meant to be the next-gen platform that can compete with the slickness of the iPhone.
The problem is that Windows Mobile had a lot of business users and they weren't too happy with everything they make and use becoming obsolete overnight. That's the void this fills. This "Windows Embedded Handheld" maintains the compatibility platform they bought into.
I suspect the only difference between the two will be that one uses the old shell and one uses the new Silverlight shell -- it's already easy to confirm that Windows Phone 7 uses a similar (if not the same) platform underneath the new UI.
I don't think anyone with a gaming system will be interested, but everyone else may be. Some games like RPGs can be played acceptably with a little lag, and I wouldn't mind being able to see some nice graphics on my Eee PC when I'm away from home.
Will it work well with an FPS? Doubtful. Before anyone says "Hey! I used to frag in Quake with a 300 ping and it was plenty playable!" -- I used to too. But that was 300ms of network latency, not input latency - very big difference. Lag compensation makes a world of difference, and that's impossible when you're just piping video.
From their beta signup page:
The OnLive Game Service (the "Service") Fee will be waived for the first 12 months from the date you activate your OnLive Account. During these 12 months, your access to the Service will include free demos and community features, such as member Profiles, Friending, Chat, Spectating and Brag Clip(TM) videos, but will not include any games, content or other services that are offered for purchase, and which must be purchased separately.
Sounds like you're going to need to pay to test their stuff. At least they're up front about it?
Not so brilliant for a netbook, though. Most of them have just enough screen width to get the average website layout working optimally. People design webpages to scroll vertically, not horizontally, so a tiny bit of vertical space is not a big deal. I think the best thing to do would make the menu auto-hide. It wouldn't matter which orientation it was in then.