### I have the opposite problem. I can never remember which GameCube button is X, which is Y, and which is Z.
For most games you don't need to know the label of the button, since the buttons have distinctive shapes (which also give very good hints at their position) and colors and games use those shapes and colors often in documentation, both in-game and in the manual.
PS2 on the other side has just shapes, which except the triangle don't give much hint on their position. The situation with the PS2 however gets even more confusing, it not only has those shapes, many games also use the shapes differently. japanese games often use X for 'cancel' and O for 'ok', which is actually quite intuitive, however many other games don't follow that convention, some use [] for 'ok' and O for 'cancel' and there are even games that use/\ for 'cancel' and X for 'ok' if I remember correctly. On Gamecube on the other side A is pretty much always 'ok' and B always 'cancel', there shapes, colors and positions simply don't leave much room for other interpretation.
The XBox also seems to be reasonably consistent in the use of A and B. XBox however has the fault that it hasn't labeled its trigger buttons and analogsticks properly, causing some games to use extremly wordy descriptions of them instead of a simple symbol, first time I simply didn't get if they meant the trigger button or pressing the left analog stick (wording was something like 'switch left').
NintendoDS in comparism suffers from similar problems like the PS2 pad, the buttons have letters there, but are actually used in the same confusing manner as on PS2, sometimes its Y and B for ok/cancel, sometimes its A and B. I think this whole mess is because in times of SNES all games used Y/B for ok/cancel in europe, while in japan all games used A/B (due to shorter fingers of japanese people, who knows). Nintendo seems to have taken care back then that everybody followed that, today however there doesn't seem to be much quality control and some developers map the keys in the traditional way, while others don't. Even Nintendo itself doesn't get it right, while you can the mapping in NewSuperMarioBros depending on your preferences, you *always* have to use A to enter a level, no matter if you use B/A for run and jump or Y/B.
PS: The whole story about A/B and Y/B is mostly guess work on my part coming from experince from the games I have played, if the true story differs, somebody correct me please.
$250 would also be very close to the XBox, far to close given that the Wii doesn't have much CPU or GPU power, while the XBox360 has plenty of that. And the XBox360 could also still drop in price meaning it would have the same price as the Wii or be even cheaper, this just doesn't fit with Nintendos strategie.
$200 would be an ok price, but only $150 would be a good price. Nintendo wants to open up to new consumers, so a lower price would be logical and almost needed to put some space between 360 and Wii.
### One of the little-known pleasures of the N64: Playing Waverace with one hand, so the other is free to hold beer.
And one could also play PerfectDark with two controller, one for each hand, pretty nice stuff. The N64 Controller really was quite good, the biggest problem with it was that there simply weren't many 2d games, making the dpad part of the N64 controller pretty useless. For the Wii however, who will have both N64, NES and SNES games it would however be the perfect controller and I have some doubts how well that classic controller that we have now will work with N64 games. It certainly requires the buttons to be remaped, since it doesn't have the C buttons
### They previously showed that "shell" that looked exactly like a wave-bird that the Wii-mote slipped in like the DC memory cards slipped into the DC controller.
Wrong, they never showed the shell, that was just a Photoshop job from IGN (or whoever did it). There is so far no official shell, only rumors.
This isn't AI in the normal sense, but neither is it a problem that you can solve by simply adding more frames of animation. Animation in video games still looks rather awful, you have some motion capture here, some hand animated there, but most of the time you see in the game is blending of all that stuff together and it never really fits, characters feet don't land on stairs but they always glide up the stairs like it would be normal ground, when running against a wall the feeds often continue to move and such. Flashback had some pretty good animations back in 1992, it was 2D and grid based which is why they could make the animation blend together in a static, but very seamless way, I would like to see that type of quality animation done in a dynamic fashion in a 3d environment. I don't care much about polygoncount and texture resolutions when characters still move the same ugly way like they back on the PS1. And in the end I think this is an AI issue, since the characters have to actually have some kind of intelligence to control their walking and make it look realistically, since no amount of pregenerated animation can ever handle the dynamic environment of a gameworld.
For N64 games the pad is missing two more face-buttons. For many games that might not be to much of a problem, but for fighting games or other types of games which used all the buttons for action and not for camera movement it doesn't look so good.
What about analog triggers? What about moving the analog-stick into the primary position where I don't have to stretch by thumb so that it hurts after half an hour of gaming? What about having the start button be an actual button, not some triangular piece of junk that is a lot harder to press then necesary? How about rumble? How about a power-button?
I agree that they don't have to reinvent the controller just to look original, but the PS2 controller really is not without fault and they seem to happily repeat the same faults generation over generation again. The XBox360 controller, while not original at all, at least fixes pretty much all the flaws that the XBox controller at.
PS: I have yet to see a PS3 controller up close, the press releases mentioned something about larger L/R buttons, so maybe they can act more like the XBox triggers, we will see.
512mb SD cards are sold for 15EUR, thats not expensive and it can probally hold all the gamesaves I ever did in the last 20 years. Now memory cards for PS2 or Gamecube are a different matter, they are tiny and a hell of a lot more expensive then SD, but there is nothing that stops console manufactors from using cheap standard SD or USB storage, Nintendo actually does exactly that.
Having a build in HD is still nice, but with a price of 500-600EUR, it really is no fun.
The new PS3 controller not only rips of features from Wii, they droped the rumble support, PS3 gets less and less impressive:
"Pursuant to the introduction of this new six-axis sensing system, the vibration feature that is currently available on DUALSHOCK® and DUALSHOCK®2 controllers for PlayStation and PlayStation®2, will be removed from the new PS3 controller as vibration itself interferes with information detected by the sensor."
The biggest problem I see here is that physics are gameplay relevant, while graphics are not. In the early days of 3D acceleration most games provided both hardware and software rendering, since graphics didn't add any to the gameplay, that wasn't a big issue. With physics on the other side you have a problem, since you can't just fallback to software-rendering without changing the actual game. So it might be a bit more difficult to break into the gaming world for PPUs. On the other side it might of course be possible that most early PPU using games restrict there new physics to visual stuff, more realistic damage model, more depries flying around without actually impacting the player, so when using software rendering they could just ignore those without problems.
Another thing to take into account is that early 3D cards where seperate cards next to a normal 2D graphics card, today however those 3D cards no longer exists, the 3D capabilites are build into a normal 2D card, no more extra 3D card needed. If PPUs ever become mainstream, I beat thats what will happenen with them as well, ie. they will come on your gfx card, since it doesn't make all that much sense to have an extra card just for physics.
In the times where Gameboys where still green and blurry I used the SuperGameboy Adapter for the SNES a lot, in times where the GBA was increadible dark I used the GameboyPlayer for the Gamecube a lot, now however with the GBAsp and the DS the portable displays are good enough that I only very seldomly use the GameboyPlayer. This new TV adapter on the other side doesn't seem rather useless, since he doesn't produce a better picture then the portables, but simply caputured.
I think this is a case of over analysing things a bit to much, the real reason for Laras success is much simpler, the Tomb Raider games simply were good (well, at least the early ones) and one of the first real 3D games of the time. Tomb Raider basically put Prince of Persia into 3D and into a different setting, thats all, the breast thing was for most part an accident that then got used for marketing. If the games would have been not that good, there would have been much less hype and Lara would most likly be long forgotten. After all the Tomb Raider games doesn't even feature excessive use of violence, you defend yourself against a few aggressive animals and thats it, no human killing in TombRaider1 at all. If Tomb Raider really would have been about attracting teenage boys with sexy girls they would have added some more useless violence as well, wouldn't they?
### It's an explanation for why humans ever do anything that's not a biological imperative.
Any reasonably complex system will do things bejoint those it was designed or which it evolved to do, and the human is a damn complex system, so that would be no big suprise.
### You could, in principle, falsify it by building a mathematical model that succesfully predicted all of a human's actions.
For that you would not only need a mathematical model of the human, but one of the whole world. Humans don't act in isolation, they are largly influenced by their surrounding. So no, I wouldn't say its falsifyable any more or less then "god" (build model of universe, if it works without god, god doesn't exist...).
### Still, most all of us know, from our contexts in life, what freedom is, and what it is to will something to happen.
No, we don't know what freedom is, thats kind of the point, we have a very blurry feeling of what it might be, but nothing more, not enough to talk about it in any meaning full ways, especially not because my feeling of what freedom might be might be fundamentally different of yours.
Free-will is an even more blurry thing, 'free' of exactly what, outer influences? Without them we could do exactly nothing, since there would be nothing left to do. Lack of a free-will also doesn't imply that the outcome is set from the start, as you seem to imply in your previous post, its simply means that the will is controlled by a set of, extremly complex, rules. Your doing still influences the world and the world influences you, no matter if there is a free-will involved or not, even in a completly deterministic world your doing would influence the world, it wouldn't change the outcome, because your very doing is already part of the outcome. After all Luke Skywalker might not have a free-will, yet he still destroyed the deathstar, didn't fall to the dark side, because he made a choice and became a hero.
Last not least many people seem to imply that the lack of 'freedom' is a bad thing, it however isn't with the free-will kind of freedom. If I lock somebody in a box he might complain about his lack of freedom, he however does so because that box restricts him of what he wants to do. A lack of 'free-will freedom' however is a different thing, one that does not restrict your doing, because there is no "you" that gets restricted by it. Your will is defined by the laws of physics, not restricted by them.
### Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly.
I like to look at software, specifically games, in comparism. They are deterministic and designed by intelligent beings after all, so they shouldn't have any "free-will", yet, still interesting things happen. For example take a look at SuperMarioBros1, looks normal, yet, there is the MinusWorld, Mario can do wall-jumps and even jump over the pole at the end of the level[1]. Not sure, if some of the issues ever showed up in beta testing, but they for sure weren't designed or intended by those who wrote the game, they simply happened as a result of a complex system. Now, even if the human is being equally deterministic like SuperMario, the world and the rest of the universe provide a *much* larger system then the NES cardridge of SuperMarioBros1, so lots of interesting things can and will happen simply because the system is much to complex. I for one don't need a free-will, since the system is so complex that I can't predict its outcome anyway.
### 1. Why do you consciously try to deliberate over any choices?
According to some research consciousness is something that comes *after* the rest of your brain already made the choice. So you can't do anything consciously to begin with.
### 2. The next time you blame your girlfriend or boyfriend or boss for anything, why bother? After all, they have no freedom in what they do.
Good so, so their might be a higher chance that my doing might influence them, if they would be free it would be much harder to influence them, right?
### You could not possibly persuade us to freely change our minds through conscious deliberation on these questions.
Just because "you" can't make any "free" decisions doesn't mean that all your thinking is set into stone, quite the opposite actually, its largly influenced by outer input, that however doesn't mean that is bejoint physics, just that it is a quite complex system.
In the end that is however always bogus talk, since without defining "free" there is no way to talk about it in a meaningfull way.
###### The real throuble with repositories is that they won't work at all for current software, they are great for yesterdays software. ### BS!
Explain me how you install the latest Mozilla, KDE, gtetrinet, SuperTux or whatever on your stable distro *without* by passing the official Debian repository? Answer: You can't, you have to have to wait a year or two for the next stable or compile yourself, be lucky and find backports, run some cross-distro package somebody build, etc., see the problem?
### Either your packages are shiny new (and only tested by their developers) either they are old and ironed out. You cannot claim both.
A packages that has been tested by thousands still has to wait for the *whole* rest of the distro to get stable as well, which his causing *huge* details on release, and thats already the whole problem. Would distros have some infrastructures to get add-on/updated packages into their stable distros their might not be much of a problem left worth to talk about, but they don't have such a thing, only security updates make it into stable after release and nothing else, ironically not even bug fixes for non-security bugs.
### So clearly it will take time to download a game, but at today's speed, getting 5G using a 10M connection is going to be much faster than getting 600M at 56k as I used to do 6 years ago.
The throuble isn't downloading it, the throuble is setting up the mirrors. With 100GB it isn't to hard to find somebody willing to donate that, but if the repositories go to 2TB or larger it suddenly becomes quite an issue to provide that amount of space, so most mirrors would end up either being incomplete or completly shutdown. Try to image a repository that holds *ALL* software ever written for Windows, all games, all apps of the last 20 years, that wouldn't be so easy to get right and thats exactly why repositories have a problem with scaling up. Its not just server space, but also testing to be done when a stable release should be done.
### The whole point of open source is that testing is done by anybody with interest. If you think no testing is done by packagers, then you know squat about Debian.
You don't seem to have used Debian for long enough, many packages, especially those build for other architectures then x86 are not tested *ever* by *anybody*, they run through and automatic compile process and thats it. If you try to start them they will crash, end of story. Sure, sooner or later you might get bug reports or not. But more then once faulty stuff as sliped into stable, sure its not in the core packages, but in anything that isn't essential you can find tons of those issues. And that are only bugs caused by the packaging process, bugs in the software itself, unless they are extremly critical aren't touched at all.
### What the heck is current?
If something is released today, the user should be able to use it today, not tomorrow in two month, half a year or three years, at it is the case with todays repository based distribution.
### Have you tried Debian unstable?
Do you know that those are called *unstable* for a reason? If you go unstable get no testing, since you are the tester, no security updates and no guarntee that the next dist-upgrade doesn't fry your system. Yes, I do use unstable and I know how to fix it if there is throuble, my mom however probally wouldn't. The need to use Unstable is part of the problem, not the solution.
### Folks who are willing to deal with some breakage can use pre-release versions and get the latest and greatest.
Thats exactly the point, you have to accept that *the whole* distro becomes unstable to run *a single* unstable package on it. Would said software be distributed outside the distro everybody could install it with zero risk. And yes, I know you can backport and stuff to keep the risk lower, the point is that the distributions have absolutly no real official infrastructure for those add-on packages, its all just patchwork, which sometimes works and sometimes not.
### People who say that repositories are not uptodate are not reasonable. Most people want software that has undergone some testing,
Testing is done by the softwares developer, not the packager. That software in repositories undergoes any real testing, beyond what the original developer does, is a myth, nothing more.
The real throuble with repositories is that they won't work at all for current software, they are great for yesterdays software, but if you read somewhere about the cool new version of some piece of software a repository based setup forces you to wait month or years till you will be finally be able to install said software, if ever. That just doesn't work very well for anything beside software which you don't care about.
Last not least repositories just don't scale, just look at games, multiple gigabytes installs are not something uncommon these days, the current mirror setup which most distros use would simply be stretched beyond what it can handle if just a very few of those games that windows offer would ever make it into a repository. Sure, its unlikly that those games will go into a software repository anytime soon, but it clearly shows that distro managed repositories just aren't good for all software.
For core parts repositories are great, for the rest they are something between just outdated and completly unusable.
### 1: I'm guessing that was for cost and/or battery life reasons. Original GBA is far from a bad console, I got a lot of use out of mine.
I kind of doubt it, battery life might have been gone down by light, but it would be easy to make it make it toggleable, like they later did on the GBAsp. The biggest problem was that the missing light wasn't just a little annoyancy like it was with the former GBAs, but it made the GBA pretty much unusable under anything but almost perfect light conditions, since the GBA was quite a bit darker then its predecessors. My guess would be that Nintendo switches to another kind of LCD sortly before releasing it and that turned darker then expected, the dev kits for the GBA at least where a lot brighter then what got out to the massed.
### And the z is fine in that, it's just crap in games where it sees heavy use. I see their logic, I don't like it, but I can't say it's actually wrong.
Well, a bad z-button is better then no extra button, the Gamecube pad is already short on buttons, but as it stands the Z-trigger doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it doesn't press well, its only on one side and really doesn't fit very well in the overall controller design. I would bet that it wasn't planed to be there from the start, but something that got tacked on in the last few minutes before going into production.
### like the crappy shoulders on the SP,
More like I taste issue I would say, never had problems with them.
### the N64 controller which was either genius or madness
Wrong planing for most part, the controller would have been fine if there would have been classic 2D games for the N64, but there almost wasn't any, so almost no game made use of the dpad, which made the whole dpad section of the controller useless.
### Original xbox controller.
Thats definitivly a beast, wondering what mad cow drove them to stick not just one, but two memory slots in the controller (one of the reasons why its so damn fat), when memory slots on the console are a lot more usefull. That controller really shouldn't have made it beyond quality assurance.
### Biggest problem with some commercial apps is they insist on using C++ and all the bleeding edge features of GCC 4.x.y. That's why they have "portability" issues.
I have to disagree, while C++ incompatibilities between GCC versions are an issue, they are mostly an issue for distributors who try to link everything dynamically, for stand-alone packages that is hoverever not a problem, link statically and the problem is solved. The real throuble are mainly the Linux kernel itself and glibc, since those you can't solve by static linking or by including them in your package, and neither of the maintainer of them seems to care much about binary backward compatibility, so that the problem won't solve itself anytime soon in the future. And there is also the throuble with GCCs usability, which makes dynamic linking easy and static linking a nightmare to get right, which is why hardly anybody is using it in the first place, most simply don't know how.
Aren't the CPUs just rather normal G4 PowerPC processors? And the GPU something close to what we have in PC? Sure, its still a bunch of custom stuff, but the PS3 Cell and BluRay seem to be quite a bit more complex.
### Do you really Nintendo would not bother to beta test their flagship product?
GBA, the one without ligth and an extremly dark screen Virtual Boy that Z-Button on the Gamecube controller
Sure, Nintendo does beta test their stuff, but not-so-release-ready products have already been released by that company and it migth happen again. It migth not be likly that the controller sucks, but that it holds up to all expectations of the players isn't a sure thing either.
Slashdot Mirror
### I have the opposite problem. I can never remember which GameCube button is X, which is Y, and which is Z.
/\ for 'cancel' and X for 'ok' if I remember correctly. On Gamecube on the other side A is pretty much always 'ok' and B always 'cancel', there shapes, colors and positions simply don't leave much room for other interpretation.
For most games you don't need to know the label of the button, since the buttons have distinctive shapes (which also give very good hints at their position) and colors and games use those shapes and colors often in documentation, both in-game and in the manual.
PS2 on the other side has just shapes, which except the triangle don't give much hint on their position. The situation with the PS2 however gets even more confusing, it not only has those shapes, many games also use the shapes differently. japanese games often use X for 'cancel' and O for 'ok', which is actually quite intuitive, however many other games don't follow that convention, some use [] for 'ok' and O for 'cancel' and there are even games that use
The XBox also seems to be reasonably consistent in the use of A and B. XBox however has the fault that it hasn't labeled its trigger buttons and analogsticks properly, causing some games to use extremly wordy descriptions of them instead of a simple symbol, first time I simply didn't get if they meant the trigger button or pressing the left analog stick (wording was something like 'switch left').
NintendoDS in comparism suffers from similar problems like the PS2 pad, the buttons have letters there, but are actually used in the same confusing manner as on PS2, sometimes its Y and B for ok/cancel, sometimes its A and B. I think this whole mess is because in times of SNES all games used Y/B for ok/cancel in europe, while in japan all games used A/B (due to shorter fingers of japanese people, who knows). Nintendo seems to have taken care back then that everybody followed that, today however there doesn't seem to be much quality control and some developers map the keys in the traditional way, while others don't. Even Nintendo itself doesn't get it right, while you can the mapping in NewSuperMarioBros depending on your preferences, you *always* have to use A to enter a level, no matter if you use B/A for run and jump or Y/B.
PS: The whole story about A/B and Y/B is mostly guess work on my part coming from experince from the games I have played, if the true story differs, somebody correct me please.
Maybe that look-around-the-corner move that some FPS provide, that at least gets pretty close to 'roll'.
$250 would also be very close to the XBox, far to close given that the Wii doesn't have much CPU or GPU power, while the XBox360 has plenty of that. And the XBox360 could also still drop in price meaning it would have the same price as the Wii or be even cheaper, this just doesn't fit with Nintendos strategie.
$200 would be an ok price, but only $150 would be a good price. Nintendo wants to open up to new consumers, so a lower price would be logical and almost needed to put some space between 360 and Wii.
### One of the little-known pleasures of the N64: Playing Waverace with one hand, so the other is free to hold beer.
And one could also play PerfectDark with two controller, one for each hand, pretty nice stuff. The N64 Controller really was quite good, the biggest problem with it was that there simply weren't many 2d games, making the dpad part of the N64 controller pretty useless. For the Wii however, who will have both N64, NES and SNES games it would however be the perfect controller and I have some doubts how well that classic controller that we have now will work with N64 games. It certainly requires the buttons to be remaped, since it doesn't have the C buttons
### They previously showed that "shell" that looked exactly like a wave-bird that the Wii-mote slipped in like the DC memory cards slipped into the DC controller.
Wrong, they never showed the shell, that was just a Photoshop job from IGN (or whoever did it). There is so far no official shell, only rumors.
This isn't AI in the normal sense, but neither is it a problem that you can solve by simply adding more frames of animation. Animation in video games still looks rather awful, you have some motion capture here, some hand animated there, but most of the time you see in the game is blending of all that stuff together and it never really fits, characters feet don't land on stairs but they always glide up the stairs like it would be normal ground, when running against a wall the feeds often continue to move and such. Flashback had some pretty good animations back in 1992, it was 2D and grid based which is why they could make the animation blend together in a static, but very seamless way, I would like to see that type of quality animation done in a dynamic fashion in a 3d environment. I don't care much about polygoncount and texture resolutions when characters still move the same ugly way like they back on the PS1. And in the end I think this is an AI issue, since the characters have to actually have some kind of intelligence to control their walking and make it look realistically, since no amount of pregenerated animation can ever handle the dynamic environment of a gameworld.
For N64 games the pad is missing two more face-buttons. For many games that might not be to much of a problem, but for fighting games or other types of games which used all the buttons for action and not for camera movement it doesn't look so good.
To answer myself: PS3 seems to have analog triggers in style of the Gamecube or XBox:
l er_up_black.jpg
http://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/0605/ps3/control
What about analog triggers? What about moving the analog-stick into the primary position where I don't have to stretch by thumb so that it hurts after half an hour of gaming? What about having the start button be an actual button, not some triangular piece of junk that is a lot harder to press then necesary? How about rumble? How about a power-button?
I agree that they don't have to reinvent the controller just to look original, but the PS2 controller really is not without fault and they seem to happily repeat the same faults generation over generation again. The XBox360 controller, while not original at all, at least fixes pretty much all the flaws that the XBox controller at.
PS: I have yet to see a PS3 controller up close, the press releases mentioned something about larger L/R buttons, so maybe they can act more like the XBox triggers, we will see.
### Memory cards are expensive antiques.
512mb SD cards are sold for 15EUR, thats not expensive and it can probally hold all the gamesaves I ever did in the last 20 years. Now memory cards for PS2 or Gamecube are a different matter, they are tiny and a hell of a lot more expensive then SD, but there is nothing that stops console manufactors from using cheap standard SD or USB storage, Nintendo actually does exactly that.
Having a build in HD is still nice, but with a price of 500-600EUR, it really is no fun.
The new PS3 controller not only rips of features from Wii, they droped the rumble support, PS3 gets less and less impressive:
9 be.pdf
"Pursuant to the introduction of this new six-axis sensing system, the vibration feature that is currently available on DUALSHOCK® and DUALSHOCK®2 controllers for PlayStation and PlayStation®2, will be removed from the new PS3 controller as vibration itself interferes with information detected by the sensor."
See: http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/06050
The biggest problem I see here is that physics are gameplay relevant, while graphics are not. In the early days of 3D acceleration most games provided both hardware and software rendering, since graphics didn't add any to the gameplay, that wasn't a big issue. With physics on the other side you have a problem, since you can't just fallback to software-rendering without changing the actual game. So it might be a bit more difficult to break into the gaming world for PPUs. On the other side it might of course be possible that most early PPU using games restrict there new physics to visual stuff, more realistic damage model, more depries flying around without actually impacting the player, so when using software rendering they could just ignore those without problems.
Another thing to take into account is that early 3D cards where seperate cards next to a normal 2D graphics card, today however those 3D cards no longer exists, the 3D capabilites are build into a normal 2D card, no more extra 3D card needed. If PPUs ever become mainstream, I beat thats what will happenen with them as well, ie. they will come on your gfx card, since it doesn't make all that much sense to have an extra card just for physics.
In the times where Gameboys where still green and blurry I used the SuperGameboy Adapter for the SNES a lot, in times where the GBA was increadible dark I used the GameboyPlayer for the Gamecube a lot, now however with the GBAsp and the DS the portable displays are good enough that I only very seldomly use the GameboyPlayer. This new TV adapter on the other side doesn't seem rather useless, since he doesn't produce a better picture then the portables, but simply caputured.
I think this is a case of over analysing things a bit to much, the real reason for Laras success is much simpler, the Tomb Raider games simply were good (well, at least the early ones) and one of the first real 3D games of the time. Tomb Raider basically put Prince of Persia into 3D and into a different setting, thats all, the breast thing was for most part an accident that then got used for marketing. If the games would have been not that good, there would have been much less hype and Lara would most likly be long forgotten. After all the Tomb Raider games doesn't even feature excessive use of violence, you defend yourself against a few aggressive animals and thats it, no human killing in TombRaider1 at all. If Tomb Raider really would have been about attracting teenage boys with sexy girls they would have added some more useless violence as well, wouldn't they?
### It's an explanation for why humans ever do anything that's not a biological imperative.
Any reasonably complex system will do things bejoint those it was designed or which it evolved to do, and the human is a damn complex system, so that would be no big suprise.
### You could, in principle, falsify it by building a mathematical model that succesfully predicted all of a human's actions.
For that you would not only need a mathematical model of the human, but one of the whole world. Humans don't act in isolation, they are largly influenced by their surrounding. So no, I wouldn't say its falsifyable any more or less then "god" (build model of universe, if it works without god, god doesn't exist...).
### Still, most all of us know, from our contexts in life, what freedom is, and what it is to will something to happen.
No, we don't know what freedom is, thats kind of the point, we have a very blurry feeling of what it might be, but nothing more, not enough to talk about it in any meaning full ways, especially not because my feeling of what freedom might be might be fundamentally different of yours.
Free-will is an even more blurry thing, 'free' of exactly what, outer influences? Without them we could do exactly nothing, since there would be nothing left to do. Lack of a free-will also doesn't imply that the outcome is set from the start, as you seem to imply in your previous post, its simply means that the will is controlled by a set of, extremly complex, rules. Your doing still influences the world and the world influences you, no matter if there is a free-will involved or not, even in a completly deterministic world your doing would influence the world, it wouldn't change the outcome, because your very doing is already part of the outcome. After all Luke Skywalker might not have a free-will, yet he still destroyed the deathstar, didn't fall to the dark side, because he made a choice and became a hero.
Last not least many people seem to imply that the lack of 'freedom' is a bad thing, it however isn't with the free-will kind of freedom. If I lock somebody in a box he might complain about his lack of freedom, he however does so because that box restricts him of what he wants to do. A lack of 'free-will freedom' however is a different thing, one that does not restrict your doing, because there is no "you" that gets restricted by it. Your will is defined by the laws of physics, not restricted by them.
### Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly.
I like to look at software, specifically games, in comparism. They are deterministic and designed by intelligent beings after all, so they shouldn't have any "free-will", yet, still interesting things happen. For example take a look at SuperMarioBros1, looks normal, yet, there is the MinusWorld, Mario can do wall-jumps and even jump over the pole at the end of the level[1]. Not sure, if some of the issues ever showed up in beta testing, but they for sure weren't designed or intended by those who wrote the game, they simply happened as a result of a complex system. Now, even if the human is being equally deterministic like SuperMario, the world and the rest of the universe provide a *much* larger system then the NES cardridge of SuperMarioBros1, so lots of interesting things can and will happen simply because the system is much to complex. I for one don't need a free-will, since the system is so complex that I can't predict its outcome anyway.
[1] http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb_bugs.shtml
### 1. Why do you consciously try to deliberate over any choices?
According to some research consciousness is something that comes *after* the rest of your brain already made the choice. So you can't do anything consciously to begin with.
### 2. The next time you blame your girlfriend or boyfriend or boss for anything, why bother? After all, they have no freedom in what they do.
Good so, so their might be a higher chance that my doing might influence them, if they would be free it would be much harder to influence them, right?
### You could not possibly persuade us to freely change our minds through conscious deliberation on these questions.
Just because "you" can't make any "free" decisions doesn't mean that all your thinking is set into stone, quite the opposite actually, its largly influenced by outer input, that however doesn't mean that is bejoint physics, just that it is a quite complex system.
In the end that is however always bogus talk, since without defining "free" there is no way to talk about it in a meaningfull way.
###### The real throuble with repositories is that they won't work at all for current software, they are great for yesterdays software.
### BS!
Explain me how you install the latest Mozilla, KDE, gtetrinet, SuperTux or whatever on your stable distro *without* by passing the official Debian repository? Answer: You can't, you have to have to wait a year or two for the next stable or compile yourself, be lucky and find backports, run some cross-distro package somebody build, etc., see the problem?
### Either your packages are shiny new (and only tested by their developers) either they are old and ironed out. You cannot claim both.
A packages that has been tested by thousands still has to wait for the *whole* rest of the distro to get stable as well, which his causing *huge* details on release, and thats already the whole problem. Would distros have some infrastructures to get add-on/updated packages into their stable distros their might not be much of a problem left worth to talk about, but they don't have such a thing, only security updates make it into stable after release and nothing else, ironically not even bug fixes for non-security bugs.
### So clearly it will take time to download a game, but at today's speed, getting 5G using a 10M connection is going to be much faster than getting 600M at 56k as I used to do 6 years ago.
The throuble isn't downloading it, the throuble is setting up the mirrors. With 100GB it isn't to hard to find somebody willing to donate that, but if the repositories go to 2TB or larger it suddenly becomes quite an issue to provide that amount of space, so most mirrors would end up either being incomplete or completly shutdown. Try to image a repository that holds *ALL* software ever written for Windows, all games, all apps of the last 20 years, that wouldn't be so easy to get right and thats exactly why repositories have a problem with scaling up. Its not just server space, but also testing to be done when a stable release should be done.
### The whole point of open source is that testing is done by anybody with interest. If you think no testing is done by packagers, then you know squat about Debian.
You don't seem to have used Debian for long enough, many packages, especially those build for other architectures then x86 are not tested *ever* by *anybody*, they run through and automatic compile process and thats it. If you try to start them they will crash, end of story. Sure, sooner or later you might get bug reports or not. But more then once faulty stuff as sliped into stable, sure its not in the core packages, but in anything that isn't essential you can find tons of those issues. And that are only bugs caused by the packaging process, bugs in the software itself, unless they are extremly critical aren't touched at all.
### What the heck is current?
If something is released today, the user should be able to use it today, not tomorrow in two month, half a year or three years, at it is the case with todays repository based distribution.
### Have you tried Debian unstable?
Do you know that those are called *unstable* for a reason? If you go unstable get no testing, since you are the tester, no security updates and no guarntee that the next dist-upgrade doesn't fry your system. Yes, I do use unstable and I know how to fix it if there is throuble, my mom however probally wouldn't. The need to use Unstable is part of the problem, not the solution.
### Folks who are willing to deal with some breakage can use pre-release versions and get the latest and greatest.
Thats exactly the point, you have to accept that *the whole* distro becomes unstable to run *a single* unstable package on it. Would said software be distributed outside the distro everybody could install it with zero risk. And yes, I know you can backport and stuff to keep the risk lower, the point is that the distributions have absolutly no real official infrastructure for those add-on packages, its all just patchwork, which sometimes works and sometimes not.
### People who say that repositories are not uptodate are not reasonable. Most people want software that has undergone some testing,
Testing is done by the softwares developer, not the packager. That software in repositories undergoes any real testing, beyond what the original developer does, is a myth, nothing more.
The real throuble with repositories is that they won't work at all for current software, they are great for yesterdays software, but if you read somewhere about the cool new version of some piece of software a repository based setup forces you to wait month or years till you will be finally be able to install said software, if ever. That just doesn't work very well for anything beside software which you don't care about.
Last not least repositories just don't scale, just look at games, multiple gigabytes installs are not something uncommon these days, the current mirror setup which most distros use would simply be stretched beyond what it can handle if just a very few of those games that windows offer would ever make it into a repository. Sure, its unlikly that those games will go into a software repository anytime soon, but it clearly shows that distro managed repositories just aren't good for all software.
For core parts repositories are great, for the rest they are something between just outdated and completly unusable.
### 1: I'm guessing that was for cost and/or battery life reasons. Original GBA is far from a bad console, I got a lot of use out of mine.
I kind of doubt it, battery life might have been gone down by light, but it would be easy to make it make it toggleable, like they later did on the GBAsp. The biggest problem was that the missing light wasn't just a little annoyancy like it was with the former GBAs, but it made the GBA pretty much unusable under anything but almost perfect light conditions, since the GBA was quite a bit darker then its predecessors. My guess would be that Nintendo switches to another kind of LCD sortly before releasing it and that turned darker then expected, the dev kits for the GBA at least where a lot brighter then what got out to the massed.
### And the z is fine in that, it's just crap in games where it sees heavy use. I see their logic, I don't like it, but I can't say it's actually wrong.
Well, a bad z-button is better then no extra button, the Gamecube pad is already short on buttons, but as it stands the Z-trigger doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it doesn't press well, its only on one side and really doesn't fit very well in the overall controller design. I would bet that it wasn't planed to be there from the start, but something that got tacked on in the last few minutes before going into production.
### like the crappy shoulders on the SP,
More like I taste issue I would say, never had problems with them.
### the N64 controller which was either genius or madness
Wrong planing for most part, the controller would have been fine if there would have been classic 2D games for the N64, but there almost wasn't any, so almost no game made use of the dpad, which made the whole dpad section of the controller useless.
### Original xbox controller.
Thats definitivly a beast, wondering what mad cow drove them to stick not just one, but two memory slots in the controller (one of the reasons why its so damn fat), when memory slots on the console are a lot more usefull. That controller really shouldn't have made it beyond quality assurance.
### Biggest problem with some commercial apps is they insist on using C++ and all the bleeding edge features of GCC 4.x.y. That's why they have "portability" issues.
I have to disagree, while C++ incompatibilities between GCC versions are an issue, they are mostly an issue for distributors who try to link everything dynamically, for stand-alone packages that is hoverever not a problem, link statically and the problem is solved. The real throuble are mainly the Linux kernel itself and glibc, since those you can't solve by static linking or by including them in your package, and neither of the maintainer of them seems to care much about binary backward compatibility, so that the problem won't solve itself anytime soon in the future. And there is also the throuble with GCCs usability, which makes dynamic linking easy and static linking a nightmare to get right, which is why hardly anybody is using it in the first place, most simply don't know how.
Aren't the CPUs just rather normal G4 PowerPC processors? And the GPU something close to what we have in PC? Sure, its still a bunch of custom stuff, but the PS3 Cell and BluRay seem to be quite a bit more complex.
### Do you really Nintendo would not bother to beta test their flagship product?
GBA, the one without ligth and an extremly dark screen
Virtual Boy
that Z-Button on the Gamecube controller
Sure, Nintendo does beta test their stuff, but not-so-release-ready products have already been released by that company and it migth happen again. It migth not be likly that the controller sucks, but that it holds up to all expectations of the players isn't a sure thing either.