The score-scale is really a different problem, I actually don't even consider it a problem at all, since in video game reviews its a pretty well established fact that the actual average is around 70%, not around 50%.
### Does anyone still go to Gamestop caring what one of their reviewers think of a game?
For most part I look at metacritic and gameranking instead of a single review side, but yes, I do care. The difference isn't so much if I buy or not buy a game, but when I buy it. If a game got a bad reviews, but it still interest me, I likely wait a few month and buy it used for cheap instead of brand new when its out. I doubt that I am alone in that behavior.
### I'm just posing the observation that console prices are quickly approaching the prices of the games we play on them
This has always been the case for consoles. Back in the day of the SNES games where 100-150DM and I payed for the console 266DM, The N64 was 300DM, and games where often 100-150DM. Gamecube was 400DM, games were 100DM. If anything, games have gotten cheaper (even so XBox360/PS3 seem to try to conquer that trend, since prices are $10 up from last generation).
Guitar Hero is the *very rare* exception, not the rule. Aside from Steel Battalion and Rock Band, which also come with huge special controller(s), I really don't know a single other game that comes as such a high price. Now are the controllers overpriced? Yes, I would definitvly say so. I would also say that Guitar Hero is overpriced, considering that the game is really just a few music tracks plus notes and hasn't changed much at all over the years.
However you are really comparing apples and oranges when you mix that with PC pricing, since PCs always have been *far* more expensive then a console. Back in the day of the N64 I payed 3000DM for my PC, thats ten times what a console cost at that time.
### I'm betting that if it's automatic it will label all pictures of the Blackpool tower "the Eiffel Tower" since they look very similar...
Have a look at the Photosynth demo again, the software doesn't just look for 'similar' pictures, it reconstruct the exact point and angle at which a picture was taken and in turn is able to construct a full 3D model of the scene. So just 'similar' isn't enough to fit in. The software can of course still be "wrong", i.e. it allows you for example to zoom from a poster of the Eiffel tower into the Eiffel tower itself, but that really isn't wrong, its actually kind of clever. How good the software would perform on random picture collections that aren't pre-sorted we of course have to wait an see, but the possibility to go to a close up picture of some object in an image just by clicking on that object sounds quite fantastic, it simply removes the 'border' from one picture to another and allows you to smoothly travel through a series of pictures.
The whole focus on violent behavior is quite bullshit. Sure, a video game might cause or motivate some kids to behave violently. But given how widespread video games are used, this really only seems to be a very tiny minority, who would likely get their fix from something else when video games wouldn't be at hand anyway. I would like to have a little more widespread discussion on the topic. For example how do video games change the perception of war for example? After hundreds of hours with Call of Duty and similar games can a kid still tell the difference between that and real war footage? At which points does the fiction blend into the historic facts? This of course doesn't only include video games, but war movies, Fox News and all that other stuff as well, which far to often claim to be "based on historic facts", but have a very lose definition of 'based on'. Other questions could be: How do car games change your driving habits? Do unrealistic physic engine change the prediction of real world physics and stuff like that.
We really shouldn't ask "Do video games cause violence?", but approach this whole thing with an open mind and simply ask "How do video games change society, how do they change the individual?". Since no matter how you twist it, they do have some influence and it would be nice to approach and identify these influences with an open mind and not turn it into a "Lets prove video games are evil"-thing.
As said, Photosynth isn't much interesting for your own photos alone, since you likely won't have enough to make it interesting, but for stuff like Flickr, where you have billions of photos. Without a tool like Photosynth you simply don't have a good way to navigate them. With Photosynth on the other side you can navigate them by exploring the place they represent. In addition the photos automatically get tagged and enriched by information, because the information no longer is attached to a single photo alone, but to the thing that the photograph displays. So if somebody adds info on the Eiffel tower, all photos showing the Eiffel tower will have that information and that will change the way we handle photos quite a bit.
Its popular because it looks cool, not because its makes you more productive. It does have some advantages such as smoother edge-flipping, but the 3D cube really adds nothing.
### we always seem to spend an excessive amount of time in attempting to get a better indication of the amount of power left in a battery
How about throwing all the physics and chemistry out of the window and simply using good old statistics? In a lot of chases the device should now when the battery was charged, for how long it was charged and for how long it ran on that charge, just use that data to extrapolate how long it will last the next time you charge it.
### I think examples like this show that it *can* be more restrictive in some cases.
Where is that EULA that doesn't restrict your use of the software at all and gives you the freedom to redistribute it under certain conditions? The common EULA restricts *use* and gives you *no* right to redistribute the piece of software at all, you often aren't even allowed to install it on a second computer.
Thing is: the GPL gives you rights, a EULA takes them away. How can an EULA be better?
How obvious is the knock-off? Did they recycle graphics or stuff? Since the gameplay itself wasn't invented by FrozenBubble, FrozenBubble is itself a knock-off of the original PuzzleBubble.
### If it's an interface what is it an interface to?
Its an interface to *huge* collection of photos. The app goes way beyond just stitching photos, it recreates the 3D environment. That *completly* changes the way you can navigate photos. Instead of just looking at photos you can walk through the virtual city, recreated from the photos. Yes, it still uses the mouse and the keyboard, but it completly changes the way you access your data and that is what user interfaces do.
### It is more efficient when you are stuck with a 2d display
The problem is that human eyeballs can only see 2D, thanks to having two of them you get a little depth into a picture, but if one object is behind another one you simply can't see it. You can add transparency into the mix and move the viewpoint around to find it, but you still end up with a hide&seek game that just doesn't work very efficiently. Just look at Apples Exposé, what do they do to give you an overview over your windows? They flatten the whole 3D window order to a flat 2D view where no window is hiding behind another one. No more hide&seek, you simply click the Window you want to have. Very intuitive and very quick and its really just a small glimpse at what 2D zoomable interfaces can do.
### Well, that's true. But stacks are solid. If you could build an interface with semi-transparent X-ray vision, we could use that.
That would lead to a bunch of gibberish, not to something usable or readable. Our eyes see 2D, its the brain that tries to guess the 3D back into the picture, we simply don't have a direct way to input 3D in our brain. And unless you fix that having a stack in a user interface isn't very helpful.
CAT scan and stuff like that. We however don't have a way to see through a stack of paper, so it would be rather pointless to organize stuff like that. You want a way to organize stuff that is easy to navigate and easy to get an overview over, most 3D interfaces do the exact opposite.
I mean just look at that BumpTop thing, having your documents be upside down, stacked on top of each other and bump into each other via physic engine doesn't exactly make anything easy. It makes a cute tech demo, but I wouldn't want to use such an interface outside say of a video game. Now compare that with Microsoft Seadragon, which is very simple and does nothing more then present you document/photos side by side and allows you to zoom. Its trivial to understand and yet gives you a very powerful way to navigate through tens of thousands of photos in a easy way.
### A paper in a stack is only un-selectable if you don't remember where it was when you put it there.
Thats the whole point why 3D interfaces suck. Your vision isn't 3D, its 2D+depths. In a full 3D interface you always end up having stuff hidden, invisible or otherwise in a place where its hard to reach or even now that its there.
### Stacks are useful when storing related items in a sorted order such as numerical, alphabetical, or tempora
Stacks are useful because the real world has physic limits, in a computer stacks are totally idiotic, because you don't have physical limits. A zoomable interface gives you all the space-saving of a stack *and* complete visibility of everything.
### Touch Screen - 3 times - available now - not futuristic?
While available, multi-touchscreens are still pretty rare, most touch screens only support a single click at once, which limits what you can do a lot, i.e. zooming and rotation is trivial with two touch points, but very cumbersome with just a single one. Also multi-user stuff on a single large surface just can't work with just a single touch interface. Last not least single-touch is a thing that has dominating interface design for decades (you only have one mouse pointer) and this will likely change sooner or later.
### Photosynth - Can't see why this is a "user interface"?
Its an interface because it completly changes the way you navigate 2D photos. Instead of looking at them side by side, you end up navigating around the place that they represent, that quite a huge jump, especially when you not only navigate your own photos, but navigate around something like all of flickr with billions of photos. Give it a few years and we might end up with a Google-earth like thing, just with the whole world in 3D.
### However, apart from some experimentation with oil spheres, I don't think there are feasible options yet.
Actually there is, haptic devices are used quite a lot in the gaming industry, i.e. you see them in every second making-of video of a game. Now these aren't consumer items due to price, but the hardware is there.
### Our brains have clearly evolved for a 3D world.
From where did you get that? Our movement is for most part pretty much limited to 2D (forward,backward,left,right are good, but up and down are heavily restricted), the earth is flat (at least from a human point of view) and there really isn't all that much true 3D in our daily lives. Sometimes we stuck a bunch of 2D things into a hierarchical structure, but thats as 3D as it ever gets. Our eyes of course also only see 2D view of the world, sure a little depth mixed in, but nothing close to full 3D.
If we would be build for 3D we wouldn't get dizzy when playing Descent, but quite frankly, most do.
There is of course also that little problem with interfaces: A bunch of papers spread before me allows me to easily grab exactly what I want with a single click, picking the right piece of paper from a stack is much harder, since I simply can't see what is in the stack. I only see a 2D projection of the stack and even a 3D display wouldn't change that.
That said, a little 3D does have its place, you do want have the ability to zoom-out, maybe add a little depth to see which Window is on top and such. But having to search for a Window that is hidden behind a stable of other Windows just isn't fun, but thats exactly what you get with 3D.
A 500GB hard disk can store a *complete year* of non-stop audio in MP3 and it cost $100. Now sure, for proper backup and archival one might be up to use something more robust, uncompressed, redundant, etc. But really, the cost to just store something is very very tiny, especially when it comes to just audio.
### For $399, I can buy Asus EEE, which is great as an ebook reader plus does a lot of other things.
The EEE can't be hold like a book and I don't think its display is readable in sunlight either, which makes it a poor general book replacement. That said, I think the OLPC XO-1 makes a fantastic eBook reader, its very cheap, has a sunlight readable display with a huge black&white resolution, can be folded to a flat tablet mode and is a completly open platform. The only two problems that the XO-1 has is lack of easy availability and lack of touchscreen.
Do URL shrinkers make matters worse? Maybe. But on the other side the web has always been a single-point-of-failure architecture. If the webserver hosting your content is down, your content is no longer reachable on the net. Things get worse when you only have only a few webserver/provider that are hosting stuff, youtube, facebook, myspace and friends host a ton of content, if they ever go down, you lose a whole bunch of content. Sure, they have plenty of redundancy and are pretty stable so its unlikely to happen for longer periods of time. But you still hand over a hell of a lot of control to a tiny few companies.
Solution? Turn the web into something where you refer to content instead of servers. Request documents by their MD5/SHA1/whatever checksum and whatever server has that piece of content sends it to you. You no longer have a single point of failure. Freenet, Bittorrent and a bunch of other P2P tools are already doing it in one way or another, because it is simply a more failsafe and faster way to handle content distribution. The days where everybody had his own little webserver are long over and it might be time to start addressing this issue on a big scale.
### It's hard to get a feel for what you've read, how much you've read, how much is left,
That really shouldn't be a problem, a simple statusbar or the usual 10/700 page indicator tell you perfectly fine where you are. One could even go further and track exactly what you have already read, how long you spend on specific pages, how often you revisited them and when one installs a eye-tracker into these things you could have a word-by-word track-record of what you have actually read from the book. Sure, it might take a moment to get used to it, but its really not a disadvantage of eBooks, just a matter of getting used to a new tool.
### It's also harder to scan ahead for pictures, which are landmarks, due to loading time. With a paper book or magazine, you have a 3-dimensional sense of where things are.
Its certainly a problem, since PDF-eBooks are very slow on redraw, even on a powerful PC you can't skim through a whole 700 page book in a matter of seconds. That dedicated eBook readers aren't exactly fast on redrawing even simple text pages of course doesn't help either. However a zooming interface, combined with high resolution display (see Seadragon demo) could go along way to give you all the benefit you have when skimming through a real book.
Depends, if a game doesn't try to replicate the story of the movie and instead focuses on telling its own story in the same universe there is a good chance that it can be good. The bad movie games are most often those that try to mimic the movies story and that kind of never works.
Any Wiimote software that can display the raw IR data will work (wmgui for example). However, thats the easy part, the hard part is finding software or writing it so that you can actually do something usefull with that data.
Slashdot Mirror
The score-scale is really a different problem, I actually don't even consider it a problem at all, since in video game reviews its a pretty well established fact that the actual average is around 70%, not around 50%.
### Does anyone still go to Gamestop caring what one of their reviewers think of a game?
For most part I look at metacritic and gameranking instead of a single review side, but yes, I do care. The difference isn't so much if I buy or not buy a game, but when I buy it. If a game got a bad reviews, but it still interest me, I likely wait a few month and buy it used for cheap instead of brand new when its out. I doubt that I am alone in that behavior.
### Is the game as bad as he said?
He gave it a 6/10, Metacritic had an average of 6.5/10 last time I looked, so he isn't alone with his opinion.
### I'm just posing the observation that console prices are quickly approaching the prices of the games we play on them
This has always been the case for consoles. Back in the day of the SNES games where 100-150DM and I payed for the console 266DM, The N64 was 300DM, and games where often 100-150DM. Gamecube was 400DM, games were 100DM. If anything, games have gotten cheaper (even so XBox360/PS3 seem to try to conquer that trend, since prices are $10 up from last generation).
Guitar Hero is the *very rare* exception, not the rule. Aside from Steel Battalion and Rock Band, which also come with huge special controller(s), I really don't know a single other game that comes as such a high price. Now are the controllers overpriced? Yes, I would definitvly say so. I would also say that Guitar Hero is overpriced, considering that the game is really just a few music tracks plus notes and hasn't changed much at all over the years.
However you are really comparing apples and oranges when you mix that with PC pricing, since PCs always have been *far* more expensive then a console. Back in the day of the N64 I payed 3000DM for my PC, thats ten times what a console cost at that time.
### I'm betting that if it's automatic it will label all pictures of the Blackpool tower "the Eiffel Tower" since they look very similar ...
Have a look at the Photosynth demo again, the software doesn't just look for 'similar' pictures, it reconstruct the exact point and angle at which a picture was taken and in turn is able to construct a full 3D model of the scene. So just 'similar' isn't enough to fit in. The software can of course still be "wrong", i.e. it allows you for example to zoom from a poster of the Eiffel tower into the Eiffel tower itself, but that really isn't wrong, its actually kind of clever. How good the software would perform on random picture collections that aren't pre-sorted we of course have to wait an see, but the possibility to go to a close up picture of some object in an image just by clicking on that object sounds quite fantastic, it simply removes the 'border' from one picture to another and allows you to smoothly travel through a series of pictures.
The whole focus on violent behavior is quite bullshit. Sure, a video game might cause or motivate some kids to behave violently. But given how widespread video games are used, this really only seems to be a very tiny minority, who would likely get their fix from something else when video games wouldn't be at hand anyway. I would like to have a little more widespread discussion on the topic. For example how do video games change the perception of war for example? After hundreds of hours with Call of Duty and similar games can a kid still tell the difference between that and real war footage? At which points does the fiction blend into the historic facts? This of course doesn't only include video games, but war movies, Fox News and all that other stuff as well, which far to often claim to be "based on historic facts", but have a very lose definition of 'based on'. Other questions could be: How do car games change your driving habits? Do unrealistic physic engine change the prediction of real world physics and stuff like that.
We really shouldn't ask "Do video games cause violence?", but approach this whole thing with an open mind and simply ask "How do video games change society, how do they change the individual?". Since no matter how you twist it, they do have some influence and it would be nice to approach and identify these influences with an open mind and not turn it into a "Lets prove video games are evil"-thing.
As said, Photosynth isn't much interesting for your own photos alone, since you likely won't have enough to make it interesting, but for stuff like Flickr, where you have billions of photos. Without a tool like Photosynth you simply don't have a good way to navigate them. With Photosynth on the other side you can navigate them by exploring the place they represent. In addition the photos automatically get tagged and enriched by information, because the information no longer is attached to a single photo alone, but to the thing that the photograph displays. So if somebody adds info on the Eiffel tower, all photos showing the Eiffel tower will have that information and that will change the way we handle photos quite a bit.
Its popular because it looks cool, not because its makes you more productive. It does have some advantages such as smoother edge-flipping, but the 3D cube really adds nothing.
### we always seem to spend an excessive amount of time in attempting to get a better indication of the amount of power left in a battery
How about throwing all the physics and chemistry out of the window and simply using good old statistics? In a lot of chases the device should now when the battery was charged, for how long it was charged and for how long it ran on that charge, just use that data to extrapolate how long it will last the next time you charge it.
### I think examples like this show that it *can* be more restrictive in some cases.
Where is that EULA that doesn't restrict your use of the software at all and gives you the freedom to redistribute it under certain conditions? The common EULA restricts *use* and gives you *no* right to redistribute the piece of software at all, you often aren't even allowed to install it on a second computer.
Thing is: the GPL gives you rights, a EULA takes them away. How can an EULA be better?
How obvious is the knock-off? Did they recycle graphics or stuff? Since the gameplay itself wasn't invented by FrozenBubble, FrozenBubble is itself a knock-off of the original PuzzleBubble.
### If it's an interface what is it an interface to?
Its an interface to *huge* collection of photos. The app goes way beyond just stitching photos, it recreates the 3D environment. That *completly* changes the way you can navigate photos. Instead of just looking at photos you can walk through the virtual city, recreated from the photos. Yes, it still uses the mouse and the keyboard, but it completly changes the way you access your data and that is what user interfaces do.
### It is more efficient when you are stuck with a 2d display
The problem is that human eyeballs can only see 2D, thanks to having two of them you get a little depth into a picture, but if one object is behind another one you simply can't see it. You can add transparency into the mix and move the viewpoint around to find it, but you still end up with a hide&seek game that just doesn't work very efficiently. Just look at Apples Exposé, what do they do to give you an overview over your windows? They flatten the whole 3D window order to a flat 2D view where no window is hiding behind another one. No more hide&seek, you simply click the Window you want to have. Very intuitive and very quick and its really just a small glimpse at what 2D zoomable interfaces can do.
### Well, that's true. But stacks are solid. If you could build an interface with semi-transparent X-ray vision, we could use that.
That would lead to a bunch of gibberish, not to something usable or readable. Our eyes see 2D, its the brain that tries to guess the 3D back into the picture, we simply don't have a direct way to input 3D in our brain. And unless you fix that having a stack in a user interface isn't very helpful.
### What, to you, is "full 3D"?
CAT scan and stuff like that. We however don't have a way to see through a stack of paper, so it would be rather pointless to organize stuff like that. You want a way to organize stuff that is easy to navigate and easy to get an overview over, most 3D interfaces do the exact opposite.
I mean just look at that BumpTop thing, having your documents be upside down, stacked on top of each other and bump into each other via physic engine doesn't exactly make anything easy. It makes a cute tech demo, but I wouldn't want to use such an interface outside say of a video game. Now compare that with Microsoft Seadragon, which is very simple and does nothing more then present you document/photos side by side and allows you to zoom. Its trivial to understand and yet gives you a very powerful way to navigate through tens of thousands of photos in a easy way.
### A paper in a stack is only un-selectable if you don't remember where it was when you put it there.
Thats the whole point why 3D interfaces suck. Your vision isn't 3D, its 2D+depths. In a full 3D interface you always end up having stuff hidden, invisible or otherwise in a place where its hard to reach or even now that its there.
### Stacks are useful when storing related items in a sorted order such as numerical, alphabetical, or tempora
Stacks are useful because the real world has physic limits, in a computer stacks are totally idiotic, because you don't have physical limits. A zoomable interface gives you all the space-saving of a stack *and* complete visibility of everything.
### Touch Screen - 3 times - available now - not futuristic?
While available, multi-touchscreens are still pretty rare, most touch screens only support a single click at once, which limits what you can do a lot, i.e. zooming and rotation is trivial with two touch points, but very cumbersome with just a single one. Also multi-user stuff on a single large surface just can't work with just a single touch interface. Last not least single-touch is a thing that has dominating interface design for decades (you only have one mouse pointer) and this will likely change sooner or later.
### Photosynth - Can't see why this is a "user interface"?
Its an interface because it completly changes the way you navigate 2D photos. Instead of looking at them side by side, you end up navigating around the place that they represent, that quite a huge jump, especially when you not only navigate your own photos, but navigate around something like all of flickr with billions of photos. Give it a few years and we might end up with a Google-earth like thing, just with the whole world in 3D.
### However, apart from some experimentation with oil spheres, I don't think there are feasible options yet.
Actually there is, haptic devices are used quite a lot in the gaming industry, i.e. you see them in every second making-of video of a game. Now these aren't consumer items due to price, but the hardware is there.
### Our brains have clearly evolved for a 3D world.
From where did you get that? Our movement is for most part pretty much limited to 2D (forward,backward,left,right are good, but up and down are heavily restricted), the earth is flat (at least from a human point of view) and there really isn't all that much true 3D in our daily lives. Sometimes we stuck a bunch of 2D things into a hierarchical structure, but thats as 3D as it ever gets. Our eyes of course also only see 2D view of the world, sure a little depth mixed in, but nothing close to full 3D.
If we would be build for 3D we wouldn't get dizzy when playing Descent, but quite frankly, most do.
There is of course also that little problem with interfaces: A bunch of papers spread before me allows me to easily grab exactly what I want with a single click, picking the right piece of paper from a stack is much harder, since I simply can't see what is in the stack. I only see a 2D projection of the stack and even a 3D display wouldn't change that.
That said, a little 3D does have its place, you do want have the ability to zoom-out, maybe add a little depth to see which Window is on top and such. But having to search for a Window that is hidden behind a stable of other Windows just isn't fun, but thats exactly what you get with 3D.
A 500GB hard disk can store a *complete year* of non-stop audio in MP3 and it cost $100. Now sure, for proper backup and archival one might be up to use something more robust, uncompressed, redundant, etc. But really, the cost to just store something is very very tiny, especially when it comes to just audio.
### For $399, I can buy Asus EEE, which is great as an ebook reader plus does a lot of other things.
The EEE can't be hold like a book and I don't think its display is readable in sunlight either, which makes it a poor general book replacement. That said, I think the OLPC XO-1 makes a fantastic eBook reader, its very cheap, has a sunlight readable display with a huge black&white resolution, can be folded to a flat tablet mode and is a completly open platform. The only two problems that the XO-1 has is lack of easy availability and lack of touchscreen.
Do URL shrinkers make matters worse? Maybe. But on the other side the web has always been a single-point-of-failure architecture. If the webserver hosting your content is down, your content is no longer reachable on the net. Things get worse when you only have only a few webserver/provider that are hosting stuff, youtube, facebook, myspace and friends host a ton of content, if they ever go down, you lose a whole bunch of content. Sure, they have plenty of redundancy and are pretty stable so its unlikely to happen for longer periods of time. But you still hand over a hell of a lot of control to a tiny few companies.
Solution? Turn the web into something where you refer to content instead of servers. Request documents by their MD5/SHA1/whatever checksum and whatever server has that piece of content sends it to you. You no longer have a single point of failure. Freenet, Bittorrent and a bunch of other P2P tools are already doing it in one way or another, because it is simply a more failsafe and faster way to handle content distribution. The days where everybody had his own little webserver are long over and it might be time to start addressing this issue on a big scale.
### It's hard to get a feel for what you've read, how much you've read, how much is left,
That really shouldn't be a problem, a simple statusbar or the usual 10/700 page indicator tell you perfectly fine where you are. One could even go further and track exactly what you have already read, how long you spend on specific pages, how often you revisited them and when one installs a eye-tracker into these things you could have a word-by-word track-record of what you have actually read from the book. Sure, it might take a moment to get used to it, but its really not a disadvantage of eBooks, just a matter of getting used to a new tool.
### It's also harder to scan ahead for pictures, which are landmarks, due to loading time. With a paper book or magazine, you have a 3-dimensional sense of where things are.
Its certainly a problem, since PDF-eBooks are very slow on redraw, even on a powerful PC you can't skim through a whole 700 page book in a matter of seconds. That dedicated eBook readers aren't exactly fast on redrawing even simple text pages of course doesn't help either. However a zooming interface, combined with high resolution display (see Seadragon demo) could go along way to give you all the benefit you have when skimming through a real book.
Depends, if a game doesn't try to replicate the story of the movie and instead focuses on telling its own story in the same universe there is a good chance that it can be good. The bad movie games are most often those that try to mimic the movies story and that kind of never works.
Any Wiimote software that can display the raw IR data will work (wmgui for example). However, thats the easy part, the hard part is finding software or writing it so that you can actually do something usefull with that data.