Speaking of deciding what one can buy, how is PayPal getting away with this?
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that: [...] relate to sales of (a) narcotics, steroids, certain controlled substances or other products that present a risk to consumer safety, (b) drug paraphernalia, (c) items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity, (d) items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime, (e) items that are considered obscene, (f) items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction, (g) certain sexually oriented materials or services, or (h) ammunition, firearms, or certain firearm parts or accessories, or (i),certain weapons or knives regulated under applicable law
It's not only blocking some customers, but blocking whole industries from its service and essentially trying to enforce morals via its payment service.
Re:This is seriously a world first?!!??
on
USB Foot Controls
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· Score: 1
The interesting part of this foot control device is that those things aren't just buttons, but that each "button" is essentially an analog stick with a pressure sensor and you have 10 of those things. So you have a lot more input data to play around with then on a regular foot pedal. So while it might not exactly be the worlds first, it looks like an interesting input device to play around with.
Could take a while till movies would be designed in such a way to make use of it, if ever, after all one of nice things with them is that they can show you all crazy stuff while you sit at a safe distance, smell could bring you a good bit closer then would be comfortable. I think the most likely use for Smell-o-Vision would be advertisment, as it could make all those pleasant pictures of food and stuff make smell even more pleasant. And as far as I know, it already is used in shop malls for that purpose for years.
And more importantly: Do we even know how a blockbuster game for women would look like? For males we have clear recipe, some military dudes, some big guns and plenty of big explosions, the rest is just a matter of polishing the gameplay and art. For women there really aren't that well established genres, we have The Sims here, FarmVille there and maybe some Wii Sports, but those are all not exactly games that you could easily evolve on for the yearly AAA blockbuster title. While they do get their sequels and add-on packs, they are still essentially singular unique games, not well established genres of game types that appeal to women.
while sitting in a hot tub being accompanied with a beer or cocktail.
The chance of getting a water proof Kindle are a lot higher then ever getting a water proof paper book. Also Kindles are starting to get really cheap, ePaper reader are no longer expensive tech gadgets for the rich.
The point isn't that you are going to throw away your paper books, but that there is soon no reason left to build a paper book collection in the first place. If you move, will you take your book collection with you? If you die will your children take them, value them? The answer for most people will be: No. Books will essentially be become as useless as old VHS tapes.
Funny enough, the most valuable thing on my VHS tapes are actually the advertisment breaks, not the TV shows I recorded, as the later one are readily available via Netflex, Hulu, DVD and BluRay, while old advertisment is quite a bit harder to find.
Generation-M investors receive their "profits" directly from the investment of Generation-M+n.
Isn't an important part you are missing here that generation M+n has to be larger then generation M? If both generations are of equal size there is no problem, as the 'scheme' can continue forever. The problem with social security is that size of those generations is changing, people live longer, etc. which creates an imbalance.
Put another way - If you buy tulip bulbs and the market crashes, you still have (possibly worthless) tulip bulbs. If you give me $100 today with nothing but a promise that I'll give you $200 next week, and I vanish from the planet, you have nothing.
You still have the promise, it might be worth nothing, but your tulip bulbs might also be worth nothing if the situation changes. A hell of a lot of our money scheme depends on essentially nothing more then promise and trust, that doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme.
I was expecting to whine about the fact that they left out this feature again, but this is a damn good point.
Except one of the Wii U's big selling feature is that you can watch and play stuff on your controller while somebody uses the TV for something else, that won't work so great when you can't actually watch anything on your controller duo to a lack of DVD and BluRay support and a separate DVD player won't fix that.
That will only disable the automatic background download, it will still require a patch when you start the game and it doesn't help you with getting rid of an already installed patch.
Surely this is a problem with *any* online distribution system?
Not with GOG.com, which doesn't have any DRM at all. Playstation Network lets you install games on five consoles or something like that. And outside of games the Nook and Kindle have "lend to a friend" features.
The most annoying practical problem I have with Steam is that it forgets its password every now and then, even so that little "Save Password" thing is checked. That aside, the forced patches are also an issue, its nice that you can auto-patch your games, but it really sucks that you have to. If the latest patch broke something in the game, you are fucked till the developer fixes it. Games on disc don't have that problem.
The biggest problem with Steam and DRM however is the lack of a family&friends mode. If I buy a disc game, I can lend it to a friend, let my brother play it, sell it or whatever. That's essentially how I got to play a large amount of games when I was younger. With Steam I am not allowed to do any of that, once bought it is locked to the account and giving away the account is forbidden by TOS and can potentially lead to a locked account.
Another few issues aside from DRM: Steam is expensive 9 times out of 10 I can buy the games cheaper on Amazon then on Steam, the only exception are Steam sales, but even with those Amazon gets really close. Another problem local to Germany: The Steam Store is censored, so I can't even buy some games, even worse, that fact isn't made obvious, so a "Steam Sale" banner might promise games, but clicking on it will lead to a dead end or only show a few of games, with no explanation what happened to the rest.
Yep, on top of that it is really hard to do a control scheme that is both flexible and context sensitive at the same time, to many game mechanics depend on those things and it is by no means easy to come up with something that fits both. There is also always the risk of having the user produce invalid configurations, a game might require certain keys to be pressed at once, but when the user has them spread all over the keyboard some of those combination might end up being impossible or extremely uncomfortable to press, something that one might only realize ours into the game when one acquires the ability/item that requires the keypress combination.
Also I found the complaining about the Street Fighter IV config in III. a little stupid, as that is exactly how I wished more config dialogs would look like, far to often it is completely unclear how important a given action is from a config screen. So say there is a button for "Flashlight", how often will I use that? Will it be a central part of the game (Doom3) or something I use ten ours into the game like once? Knowing this is rather important to create a good input layout, but a flat list of dozens of actions doesn't give me that information, its not even clear if a binding will be needed at al, as things like journal for example are often available via GUI interaction, not needing a key to begin with. Knowing the controller button however gives me a pretty damn good idea on the importance of a mapping. Of course that's not to say that the SFIV screen couldn't be improved by showing the user the position of the A, B, X and Y keys and giving a little hint at what the keys would do.
And hey, half the problems wouldn't even exist if PC gamers would just buy a controller to play the game as it was designed, instead of trying to shoehorn another input device into the mix that really doesn't fit. If anything, I find games build for a controller that don't support it properly on PC (Beyond Good&Evil) far more annoying then the other way around.
Yeah, but if you had a floppy in the drive, doesn't it boot directly from that?
No, it would always boot into BASIC from which the user then had to load the game manually with LOAD "*",8,1:RUN. Only the later Amiga did auto-boot into whatever floppy you had in the drive. The C64 however had a module slot, so that you could for example insert an enhanced BASIC module and if that was inserted, on power on, the C64 would boot directly into that, instead of the default BASIC, again that was essentially a second.
Now of course, actually loading a game from floppy could take minutes, but having the BASIC interpreter essentially always in a second was quite impressive, I can't even start a modern browser that fast even when the OS is already loaded.
Do you mean booting to (presumably) the BASIC interpreter (built into ROM)
The one second boot is booting into BASIC interpreter, as that essentially was the C64s OS/commandline. Loading stuff from a floppy of course took a whole lot longer.
I simply can't explain why an average student needs to know this. Whatever they're taught, unlike English or math, will be obsolete inside a decade.
The fundamentals of programming a computer have essentially not changed at all in quite a few decades. The only real difference between now and 30 years ago is that today you have more memory and CPU to waste and languages that do a bit of the stuff automatically that you used to manage manual. The core programming concepts are essentially the same.
The Google demo video only showed places, art and animals, not people. As far as I know Google has the tech for that already, but not enabled due to privacy concerns. There is however PicTriev for face search, which however seems to be relatively low quality.
TinyEye only searches for exact image matches (including cropping, size and color changes), which has some use if you stumble across an image and want to find its origin or look for people who might violate your copyright. Google search seems to go further and search for the actual thing on the image, not just the image itself.
So, in a world where developers were required by law to make their products fully accessible,
Requiring full accessibility would certainly go to far and would simply be impossible in a general fashion, but it wouldn't hurt to much to force them to actually follow proper USB HID standards or publish the protocol their controller use, to at least make building third party controllers a little easier. Currently even something simple as an arcade stick that works on Xbox360 and PS3 is already a mess, both use USB, except hat Microsoft specifically locks out any unlicensed third party gear. PS3 in that regard is the most open console, as it actually supports standard USB HID controller, but even that kind of falls short, as it doesn't allow button or axis remapping, thus most regular USB HID controller will have their buttons all mixed up and be unusable.
and avoids the performance hit of writing everything twice every time you save (which admittedly won't be a big deal in most cases).
I think you misunderstand copy-on-write. Copy-on-write doesn't write stuff twice, the point of it is that it writes almost nothing at all. If I have a file Foobar1 and copy it to Foobar2 both of them will point to the same data on the drive. The file will not be copied, but instead the filesystem will simply recorded that Foobar2 is a copy of Foobar1. However when I change blocks in Foobar2, the changes will be written to new blocks and not change blocks of Foobar1.
It is essentially the same what Volume Shadow Copy does, just a more powerful generalized way of doing it.
That would still mean a shitload of data to copy around. The point of copy-on-write snapshots is that the cost of copying your whole file system is essentially zero.
To make an normal application analogy: Of course you don't really need Undo/Redo, you can just "Save As" your file at any step of the way, but Undo/Redo makes things a hell of a lot more convenient and more importantly it helps you in those situation where you would have considered a "Save As" to be to much work to bother with and thus have no backup to fall back to.
Judging from the Google blog this doesn't sound much like a rip protection, but more as a way to allow searches like "Show me everything else the author of this particle has written". That said, rip protection should be possible, when they would mark the first page that they find with content as special and then everything with the same content as copy.
Would it be feasible to pre-render every possible scene in the game and then just throw that up based on which direction the user moves?
Feasible? Not so much. Possible in theory, yes. The issue is that you need lots and lots of storage for complete free movement. Older CD based games like Myst3 did essentially that, but you couldn't move freely, just rotate. Movement was restricted to a fixed position every few meters. There was some adventure game prototype a few month/years (discussed on Slashdot) back that did move that tech to the next level and allow free movement an a single plane, but that still ended up looking kind of awkward as you couldn't do things like ducking. It of course also couldn't do dynamic objects, which pretty much ruins it for modern action games.
This "OnLive" like brute-force streaming solutions will die for a simple reason of increasing cheap computing power and also increasing display resolutions (and bandwidth)
I doubt it. It might certainly change its target audience, as it doesn't seem to be all that good to replace a gamer PC or a console right now. But its hard to beat having access to a demo in a matter of seconds vs a matter of hours on the PC. With OnLive you could, in theory at least, flip through games like you flip through TV channels, you'll never get that ability when you have to download multiple GB before you can even see the title screen.
$==€ has been standard practice for consoles and Apple products for years. Also US prices are without VST, while Euro prices including VST, Euro has mandatory 2 year warranty, US doesn't, so the price difference is not quite as big as it seems.
And anyway, that's nothing. Back when the Xbox1 launched Microsoft converted $299 to 479€, which of course was an obvious rip off and they had to cut down the price soon after launch and give out free games to people who bought it for 479€.
Right now, 1 EUR = 1.4682 USD. Thanks for trying to fuck us over again, Sony.
US prices are generally excluding VST, while European prices include VST. Also Europe has two years mandatory warranty on electric stuff, US doesn't. So while Europe still ends up paying a little more, it not half as bad as it seems. Also its not exactly a new thing, the whole EUR == USD thing for stuff like consoles has been going on for a long long while.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of deciding what one can buy, how is PayPal getting away with this?
It's not only blocking some customers, but blocking whole industries from its service and essentially trying to enforce morals via its payment service.
The interesting part of this foot control device is that those things aren't just buttons, but that each "button" is essentially an analog stick with a pressure sensor and you have 10 of those things. So you have a lot more input data to play around with then on a regular foot pedal. So while it might not exactly be the worlds first, it looks like an interesting input device to play around with.
Could take a while till movies would be designed in such a way to make use of it, if ever, after all one of nice things with them is that they can show you all crazy stuff while you sit at a safe distance, smell could bring you a good bit closer then would be comfortable. I think the most likely use for Smell-o-Vision would be advertisment, as it could make all those pleasant pictures of food and stuff make smell even more pleasant. And as far as I know, it already is used in shop malls for that purpose for years.
And more importantly: Do we even know how a blockbuster game for women would look like? For males we have clear recipe, some military dudes, some big guns and plenty of big explosions, the rest is just a matter of polishing the gameplay and art. For women there really aren't that well established genres, we have The Sims here, FarmVille there and maybe some Wii Sports, but those are all not exactly games that you could easily evolve on for the yearly AAA blockbuster title. While they do get their sequels and add-on packs, they are still essentially singular unique games, not well established genres of game types that appeal to women.
while sitting in a hot tub being accompanied with a beer or cocktail.
The chance of getting a water proof Kindle are a lot higher then ever getting a water proof paper book. Also Kindles are starting to get really cheap, ePaper reader are no longer expensive tech gadgets for the rich.
I have no plans on ditching them.
The point isn't that you are going to throw away your paper books, but that there is soon no reason left to build a paper book collection in the first place. If you move, will you take your book collection with you? If you die will your children take them, value them? The answer for most people will be: No. Books will essentially be become as useless as old VHS tapes.
Funny enough, the most valuable thing on my VHS tapes are actually the advertisment breaks, not the TV shows I recorded, as the later one are readily available via Netflex, Hulu, DVD and BluRay, while old advertisment is quite a bit harder to find.
Generation-M investors receive their "profits" directly from the investment of Generation-M+n.
Isn't an important part you are missing here that generation M+n has to be larger then generation M? If both generations are of equal size there is no problem, as the 'scheme' can continue forever. The problem with social security is that size of those generations is changing, people live longer, etc. which creates an imbalance.
Put another way - If you buy tulip bulbs and the market crashes, you still have (possibly worthless) tulip bulbs. If you give me $100 today with nothing but a promise that I'll give you $200 next week, and I vanish from the planet, you have nothing.
You still have the promise, it might be worth nothing, but your tulip bulbs might also be worth nothing if the situation changes. A hell of a lot of our money scheme depends on essentially nothing more then promise and trust, that doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme.
I was expecting to whine about the fact that they left out this feature again, but this is a damn good point.
Except one of the Wii U's big selling feature is that you can watch and play stuff on your controller while somebody uses the TV for something else, that won't work so great when you can't actually watch anything on your controller duo to a lack of DVD and BluRay support and a separate DVD player won't fix that.
You can disable automatic updates for each game.
That will only disable the automatic background download, it will still require a patch when you start the game and it doesn't help you with getting rid of an already installed patch.
Surely this is a problem with *any* online distribution system?
Not with GOG.com, which doesn't have any DRM at all. Playstation Network lets you install games on five consoles or something like that. And outside of games the Nook and Kindle have "lend to a friend" features.
The most annoying practical problem I have with Steam is that it forgets its password every now and then, even so that little "Save Password" thing is checked. That aside, the forced patches are also an issue, its nice that you can auto-patch your games, but it really sucks that you have to. If the latest patch broke something in the game, you are fucked till the developer fixes it. Games on disc don't have that problem.
The biggest problem with Steam and DRM however is the lack of a family&friends mode. If I buy a disc game, I can lend it to a friend, let my brother play it, sell it or whatever. That's essentially how I got to play a large amount of games when I was younger. With Steam I am not allowed to do any of that, once bought it is locked to the account and giving away the account is forbidden by TOS and can potentially lead to a locked account.
Another few issues aside from DRM: Steam is expensive 9 times out of 10 I can buy the games cheaper on Amazon then on Steam, the only exception are Steam sales, but even with those Amazon gets really close. Another problem local to Germany: The Steam Store is censored, so I can't even buy some games, even worse, that fact isn't made obvious, so a "Steam Sale" banner might promise games, but clicking on it will lead to a dead end or only show a few of games, with no explanation what happened to the rest.
Yep, on top of that it is really hard to do a control scheme that is both flexible and context sensitive at the same time, to many game mechanics depend on those things and it is by no means easy to come up with something that fits both. There is also always the risk of having the user produce invalid configurations, a game might require certain keys to be pressed at once, but when the user has them spread all over the keyboard some of those combination might end up being impossible or extremely uncomfortable to press, something that one might only realize ours into the game when one acquires the ability/item that requires the keypress combination.
Also I found the complaining about the Street Fighter IV config in III. a little stupid, as that is exactly how I wished more config dialogs would look like, far to often it is completely unclear how important a given action is from a config screen. So say there is a button for "Flashlight", how often will I use that? Will it be a central part of the game (Doom3) or something I use ten ours into the game like once? Knowing this is rather important to create a good input layout, but a flat list of dozens of actions doesn't give me that information, its not even clear if a binding will be needed at al, as things like journal for example are often available via GUI interaction, not needing a key to begin with. Knowing the controller button however gives me a pretty damn good idea on the importance of a mapping. Of course that's not to say that the SFIV screen couldn't be improved by showing the user the position of the A, B, X and Y keys and giving a little hint at what the keys would do.
And hey, half the problems wouldn't even exist if PC gamers would just buy a controller to play the game as it was designed, instead of trying to shoehorn another input device into the mix that really doesn't fit. If anything, I find games build for a controller that don't support it properly on PC (Beyond Good&Evil) far more annoying then the other way around.
It might be offensive, but its something that was already in Duke Nukem 3D, so its nothing new.
Yeah, but if you had a floppy in the drive, doesn't it boot directly from that?
No, it would always boot into BASIC from which the user then had to load the game manually with LOAD "*",8,1:RUN. Only the later Amiga did auto-boot into whatever floppy you had in the drive. The C64 however had a module slot, so that you could for example insert an enhanced BASIC module and if that was inserted, on power on, the C64 would boot directly into that, instead of the default BASIC, again that was essentially a second.
Now of course, actually loading a game from floppy could take minutes, but having the BASIC interpreter essentially always in a second was quite impressive, I can't even start a modern browser that fast even when the OS is already loaded.
Do you mean booting to (presumably) the BASIC interpreter (built into ROM)
The one second boot is booting into BASIC interpreter, as that essentially was the C64s OS/commandline. Loading stuff from a floppy of course took a whole lot longer.
I simply can't explain why an average student needs to know this. Whatever they're taught, unlike English or math, will be obsolete inside a decade.
The fundamentals of programming a computer have essentially not changed at all in quite a few decades. The only real difference between now and 30 years ago is that today you have more memory and CPU to waste and languages that do a bit of the stuff automatically that you used to manage manual. The core programming concepts are essentially the same.
The Google demo video only showed places, art and animals, not people. As far as I know Google has the tech for that already, but not enabled due to privacy concerns. There is however PicTriev for face search, which however seems to be relatively low quality.
TinyEye only searches for exact image matches (including cropping, size and color changes), which has some use if you stumble across an image and want to find its origin or look for people who might violate your copyright. Google search seems to go further and search for the actual thing on the image, not just the image itself.
So, in a world where developers were required by law to make their products fully accessible,
Requiring full accessibility would certainly go to far and would simply be impossible in a general fashion, but it wouldn't hurt to much to force them to actually follow proper USB HID standards or publish the protocol their controller use, to at least make building third party controllers a little easier. Currently even something simple as an arcade stick that works on Xbox360 and PS3 is already a mess, both use USB, except hat Microsoft specifically locks out any unlicensed third party gear. PS3 in that regard is the most open console, as it actually supports standard USB HID controller, but even that kind of falls short, as it doesn't allow button or axis remapping, thus most regular USB HID controller will have their buttons all mixed up and be unusable.
and avoids the performance hit of writing everything twice every time you save (which admittedly won't be a big deal in most cases).
I think you misunderstand copy-on-write. Copy-on-write doesn't write stuff twice, the point of it is that it writes almost nothing at all. If I have a file Foobar1 and copy it to Foobar2 both of them will point to the same data on the drive. The file will not be copied, but instead the filesystem will simply recorded that Foobar2 is a copy of Foobar1. However when I change blocks in Foobar2, the changes will be written to new blocks and not change blocks of Foobar1.
It is essentially the same what Volume Shadow Copy does, just a more powerful generalized way of doing it.
Use an incremental backup?
That would still mean a shitload of data to copy around. The point of copy-on-write snapshots is that the cost of copying your whole file system is essentially zero.
To make an normal application analogy: Of course you don't really need Undo/Redo, you can just "Save As" your file at any step of the way, but Undo/Redo makes things a hell of a lot more convenient and more importantly it helps you in those situation where you would have considered a "Save As" to be to much work to bother with and thus have no backup to fall back to.
Judging from the Google blog this doesn't sound much like a rip protection, but more as a way to allow searches like "Show me everything else the author of this particle has written". That said, rip protection should be possible, when they would mark the first page that they find with content as special and then everything with the same content as copy.
Would it be feasible to pre-render every possible scene in the game and then just throw that up based on which direction the user moves?
Feasible? Not so much. Possible in theory, yes. The issue is that you need lots and lots of storage for complete free movement. Older CD based games like Myst3 did essentially that, but you couldn't move freely, just rotate. Movement was restricted to a fixed position every few meters. There was some adventure game prototype a few month/years (discussed on Slashdot) back that did move that tech to the next level and allow free movement an a single plane, but that still ended up looking kind of awkward as you couldn't do things like ducking. It of course also couldn't do dynamic objects, which pretty much ruins it for modern action games.
This "OnLive" like brute-force streaming solutions will die for a simple reason of increasing cheap computing power and also increasing display resolutions (and bandwidth)
I doubt it. It might certainly change its target audience, as it doesn't seem to be all that good to replace a gamer PC or a console right now. But its hard to beat having access to a demo in a matter of seconds vs a matter of hours on the PC. With OnLive you could, in theory at least, flip through games like you flip through TV channels, you'll never get that ability when you have to download multiple GB before you can even see the title screen.
$==€ has been standard practice for consoles and Apple products for years. Also US prices are without VST, while Euro prices including VST, Euro has mandatory 2 year warranty, US doesn't, so the price difference is not quite as big as it seems.
And anyway, that's nothing. Back when the Xbox1 launched Microsoft converted $299 to 479€, which of course was an obvious rip off and they had to cut down the price soon after launch and give out free games to people who bought it for 479€.
Right now, 1 EUR = 1.4682 USD. Thanks for trying to fuck us over again, Sony.
US prices are generally excluding VST, while European prices include VST. Also Europe has two years mandatory warranty on electric stuff, US doesn't. So while Europe still ends up paying a little more, it not half as bad as it seems. Also its not exactly a new thing, the whole EUR == USD thing for stuff like consoles has been going on for a long long while.