The 3DS can do face tracking just fine, that's just software after all. The problem is that you can't move your head while in 3D mode, if you do that, the 3D effect will break, thus you can't really do any of the fun stuff with shifting the view while you have your head.
Sure, half those (vertical) lines are from a different viewpoint but that's surely not a performance hit?
As far as I understand the 3DS is always rendering a 400x240 picture, in 3D mode it simply has to render two of them. It doesn't switch to 800x240 when the 3D is switched off, it simply only renders one eye.
How would you even make 3D the core part of the game? All the 3DS does is give you depth. You could probably build a puzzle platformer where you need depth to tell how to do the next jump, but that is really rather gimmicky and wouldn't work for a lot of games. That aside there isn't really much you can do with 3d, it doesn't give you any additional degrees of freedom as far as the camera is concerned, in fact it takes them away, as you can do longer use the tilt sensor and camera to shift the view around, the fixed viewing position makes such games on the 3DS impossible to do in 3D.
So the problem really isn't the slider, but that depth isn't a gameplay changer, its just additional fidelity, like going from 16bit colordepth to 32bit. Looks a little nicer, but doesn't really change the games you can do.
There isn't really that much you can reuse. All the vertice have to be processed twice, all the pixel have to be painted twice, etc. If you have real time environment mapping you can of course reuse the environment map without regenerating it and you only need to load a texture once to draw it to both views, but you still have to essentially do everything else twice to get 3D and thus get basically half the frames.
I think the biggest problem of todays "3D" is simply that it is relatively useless for gameplay. All you get is stereoscopy from a single fixed viewpoint, essentially the same what a 2D display gives you, except with two views. Thus you get depth, but not the ability to look around objects or change your view position.
The ability to look around things is where stuff would actually get interesting, as it could enhance gameplay and fix perspective errors, basically giving you extremely intuitive camera controls and a proper view, simply by moving your head around. The irony is that that effect doesn't actually work in 3D mode, tilting the console or your head breaks 3D, thus games that allow you to "look around" objects only work in 2D with having the camera or tilt sensor do the tracking and thus changes of the view position.
There is still some hope that Sony or Microsoft might add head tracking to their console, thus giving you 3D and the ability to look around things, but as far as glass-less 3D is concerned that is basically impossible with current flat displays and thus with the 3DS.
That pretty much depends on the number of wireless gadgets you have and the usefulness of their error messages. I certainly wasted more then a few hours in my live trying to get some stubborn wireless stuff to work, not made any easier by user interfaces that refused to display the password and didn't allow you to tell the difference between a wrong password and some other misshape in the network configuration.
There is of course also legacy gear like the original NintendoDS that makes it impossible to secure your WiFi properly, as it only supports WEP.
Yeah, but there isn't a need for hurry with that. Earth isn't getting wiped out anytime soon and even if, we neither have found another habitable planet nor the technology to get there. Toying around on the moon won't change that.
If you are worried about survival of mankind at this point in time it would make a hell of a lot more sense to build a few huge underground bunker so that you have some protection against an asteroid.
That whole "lets get to the moon for mankind survival" talk always feels for me like caveman discussion how to colonize America. Yeah, we might eventually do that, but it is not quite the right time to worry about that.
Given the rumors of a 6.2" screen on the controller this sounds more and more like they are building an iPad competitor that will get gameplay streamed from the console. Kind of like Sony already did with the PSP and PS3, which could be linked to play PS3 games on the PSP, however only a small number of games actually supported that and it was slow and laggy.
People would laugh at the idea of mandatory age-ratings on books, so why do they accept it on movies and games?
I think that has one very simple reasons: Violence in books is text, not picture, thus much more abstract and less interesting for children.
And when it comes to picture books, well pornography is already regulated, try to sell that to minors and see how far you get with that. And with violent picture books, aka comics, there also have been quite a few outcries and tries to get it regulated.
So its not really that books are handled different because they are books, but because they actually are different and when they are not, you have pretty much the same issues.
What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.
My player can play it out of the box just fine. You also have to look beyond the music industry, it might not have killed MP3 there, but when it comes to commercial computer games for example the penetration of OGG is extremely high, I see it used quite a bit more these days then MP3. I have even seen Theora being used (that one however is pretty rare). So while OGG isn't exactly an MP3 killer everywhere, it certainly has found a few niches where it is extremely popular.
Yep, my thoughts exactly, when I saw the summary I thought about simple things, like a generator, a lamp, a stove, maybe a lathe and similar tools, but this goes into building a full blown modern industrial nation, they even include stuff like a 3D printer and scanner. Maybe I am a little pessimistic, but I don't quite see how they could jump start something aimed that high with so many pre-requirements.
because the way copyright is being massively, willfully infringed is a violation of the social contract.
No, thats just how the world works and always has been working. Before the Internet people would lend books to friends, record stuff from TV or radio and so on. Copying and lending stuff has always been done without the copyright holder consent, it wasn't even illegal most countries. The thing that changed with the Internet is that you can now lend your stuff to the whole world at once. Its not the behaver of sharing that has changed, but the underlying technology that makes it a lot easier.
And while the enforcing is troublesome, the underlying and biggest problem is simply the timescale of copyright, copyright that last longer then a human lifetime means that you essentially no longer have a public domain of culturally relevant stuff. And that is a big issue for society, as cultural goods essentially become controlled by a few big cooperations.
I just have a hard time having sympathy for people who take the position that their greed is somehow morally correct.
Greed implies ownership and possession, keeping things for oneself. Sharing things with the world is as far away from greed as you can get.
Wait, how is desiring to collect more entertainment than could ever be consumed in a human lifetime without compensating the creators not a form of personal greed?
The whole trouble with the current copyright thing isn't that the producers want compensation, but that they interfere with my freedom in order to get at that compensation. Be it stuff like DMCA and DRM that prevents me from watching my legally purchased content or that copyright has been extended into infinity (works created in my life time not entering public domain in my lifetime is pretty much equal to infinity). Plenty of other issues get of course mixed in as well, such as that the compensation doesn't actually go to the creators, but to the ones owning the distribution rights, which does nothing more then secure their market dominance with no benefit to society.
Completely abolishing copyright might not be the best idea, but the way copyright currently works is really a perversion of the original idea that needs to get fixed.
By looking if the user does a PDF export or a regular save as Word document, the former should reduce the document to only the visible parts, the later one of course has all the hidden information.
Its easy to ridicule such mistakes, but I couldn't even tell you how to not make them as a regular user with the software at hand, as text redaction doesn't even seem to be in the feature set of your average Word processor and isn't easily replicated with manual effort (just overwriting the text would destroy the layout with proportional fonts).
If (background == foreground) {
printf("Thats not doing what you want\n"); }
If the user is drawing a black rectangle over stuff the app could be clever enough to clip away everything that gets overdrawn instead of storing it in the file when doing PDF export (might help performance too).
The user fundamentally needs to know the difference between adding information to a document and removing information
When working with sensitive information that certainly couldn't hurt, that however doesn't excuse applications doing a shitty job in support the user doing that (metadata generally hidden down in some deep submenu, thus easily exported by accident, there might not even exist functionality to securely black out text in the first place, etc.).
Ideally you would move away from the current location based Internet and move to a content driven network, i.e. you don't tell the user location where the information is (server, directory, filename), but what the information is (say by an md5 checksum). The job of the network would then be to find the nearest cached copy of that data, i.e. basically the way Freenet or many other P2P networks work. In the simplest case that could of course also just mean to send along a cached copy with your work, not so great when referencing a HD movie, but perfectly fine for say including a URL in a email. Of course there are some technical hurdles and probably even more important legal ones, but it would really solve quite a few issues and annoyances with the way the Internet currently works.
Even if somebody is keeping a local copy, they might not bother to reupload it to another service and fix all the now obsolete links to the old content, which is why always a large part of the content will be lost in a take down of a service. Sad to see such a move from Google, who not only are not bankrupt, but also have another video service right next door to which they could move the content.
After Google send the mail half my videos didn't have download links, now, a few hours later, all have them. Seems like the download feature requires some work on their side and wasn't instantly applied to every video.
You want to change the MTU of your network card in Windows, you have to use regedit, you want to change it in Linux, you have to edit some config file, you want to change it in MacOSX, you just input it into your network settings. You want to run with DHCP but with a fixed IP, you click "DHCP with fixed IP" in MacOSX, in Linux you mess around with network manager, then search around Google then throw the network manager out of the window and mess around with old/etc/network/interfaces. Basically MacOSX seemed to be designed with people actually using it in mind, while Linux and Windows stuff feels like the result of a million monkeys hacking around on typewriters.
Simply put, on Windows there are always a bazillion options, made harder to reach with each version as even more layers of useless helper widget get in your way. On MacOSX there is no need for useless helper widget as somebody actually put some thought into designing a good GUI, instead of trying to fix up a bad one with clippy.
That said, MacOSX isn't perfect either, getting Timemachine backup to work after a motherboard replacement required messing around with ACLs and extended attributes on the console, needing tools that they actually removed from the latest version of their OS.
PS: This is of course a little out of date, I haven't tried Windows7, but so far everything after Windows95 felt like a downgrade, same old stuff, just now even more illogically organized. And I can't really remember a single moment where I thought something was well done in Windows, but a million ones where the design was just so awful that one had to wonder how that ever ended up in a finished product.
The only weird thing with OSX is the way it handles application launch and closing, it takes a while to realize that an application with a little arrow under it is still actually running even so no windows are open. The rest of the GUI is pretty standard, just like what you would get on Linux or Windows, just a bit more consistent, better organized (you can actually find what you are searching for without going by tons of useless cruft) and simply better done in general (modal windows for example are so much nicer then anywhere else).
Not only it the whole interface very touchscreen-phone-ish, the thing has its own tie-in to canonical's new App Store/Android Market/OVI wannabe as well.
Yep, thats the thing that is puzzling me. What the fuck has a touchscreen interface to do on my desktop machine (its default in Natty for some stupid reason)? Its not that the interface is completely awful, it looks like it would fit well enough on a small-screen touch device, but on my large screen desktop with no touch none of the changes make any sense at all, its a downgrade in basically every way and that dock/launcher thing is completely incapable of handling more then a few apps before it gets completely overfilled and completely unusable.
On top of that Unity is full of bugs, when running with a multi-monitor setup the whole thing was completely unusable, the GUI was stretched out over both screens and full of graphical glitches, even switching multi-monitor stuff of didn't fix the glitches. I was happy that I even managed to get the machine back in a running state so broken was that thing (removing overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0 unity ubuntu-netbook did the trick).
Shell code is much easier to write then any other language, thats why we type it into our xterms after all instead of Python code. So naturally shell one-liners grow into shell scripts. There is also a mismatch between what Python/Ruby provides and what your shell provides, thus converting shell scripts into Python/Ruby isn't exactly straight forward and its easier to keep things as shell instead of doing a complete rewrite.
Making something easy doesn't reduce its power, it can do quite the opposite if done right. Look at Google start page, its nothing more then a "enter text here" area, you can't get much more simple then that, yet it gives you instant access to an insane amount of information. Try to browse that same amount of information with your regular hierarchical file manager, it probably will neither be as easy to use, as fast or as powerful.
Simply put: A lot of what makes current computers hard to use has absolutely nothing to do with giving the user power, but is simply the result of inconsistent interface design and incompatible protocols and data formats.
Yet another visionary wanting to do something different just for the sake being different.
Where do you get that idea? He doesn't want it because it is different, but because it is vastly more powerful then what we currently have. What he is talking about is basically a Wiki on steroids.
In reality, some things haven't changed in a long time because we've figured out something that works well.
Only if you have really low expectations for "work well". I consider todays software completely abysmal as it is completely awful at doing even basic things (at least a dozen different ways to enter text, all of them more or less incompatible and different). Simply put, todays computers are like computers 30 years ago, except with more colorful icons.
Every time I hear one of these "revolutionary" interface ideas
It is not about the interface, its about how we store and structure data and as far as that is concerned, the web is rather terrible. Basic example: An URL is an address where you have to go to to find the data, what it really should be is an unique identifier of the data itself along with a cached copy (i.e. no more trouble with 404, deleted content, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
The 3DS can do face tracking just fine, that's just software after all. The problem is that you can't move your head while in 3D mode, if you do that, the 3D effect will break, thus you can't really do any of the fun stuff with shifting the view while you have your head.
Sure, half those (vertical) lines are from a different viewpoint but that's surely not a performance hit?
As far as I understand the 3DS is always rendering a 400x240 picture, in 3D mode it simply has to render two of them. It doesn't switch to 800x240 when the 3D is switched off, it simply only renders one eye.
How would you even make 3D the core part of the game? All the 3DS does is give you depth. You could probably build a puzzle platformer where you need depth to tell how to do the next jump, but that is really rather gimmicky and wouldn't work for a lot of games. That aside there isn't really much you can do with 3d, it doesn't give you any additional degrees of freedom as far as the camera is concerned, in fact it takes them away, as you can do longer use the tilt sensor and camera to shift the view around, the fixed viewing position makes such games on the 3DS impossible to do in 3D.
So the problem really isn't the slider, but that depth isn't a gameplay changer, its just additional fidelity, like going from 16bit colordepth to 32bit. Looks a little nicer, but doesn't really change the games you can do.
There isn't really that much you can reuse. All the vertice have to be processed twice, all the pixel have to be painted twice, etc. If you have real time environment mapping you can of course reuse the environment map without regenerating it and you only need to load a texture once to draw it to both views, but you still have to essentially do everything else twice to get 3D and thus get basically half the frames.
And the 3D-effects are underwhelming at most.
I think the biggest problem of todays "3D" is simply that it is relatively useless for gameplay. All you get is stereoscopy from a single fixed viewpoint, essentially the same what a 2D display gives you, except with two views. Thus you get depth, but not the ability to look around objects or change your view position.
The ability to look around things is where stuff would actually get interesting, as it could enhance gameplay and fix perspective errors, basically giving you extremely intuitive camera controls and a proper view, simply by moving your head around. The irony is that that effect doesn't actually work in 3D mode, tilting the console or your head breaks 3D, thus games that allow you to "look around" objects only work in 2D with having the camera or tilt sensor do the tracking and thus changes of the view position.
There is still some hope that Sony or Microsoft might add head tracking to their console, thus giving you 3D and the ability to look around things, but as far as glass-less 3D is concerned that is basically impossible with current flat displays and thus with the 3DS.
Prices will only continue to drop.
While size increase is almost certain, price drop really is not. The low end prices for most technology stays pretty constant over the years.
Is it that hard to set up a password?
That pretty much depends on the number of wireless gadgets you have and the usefulness of their error messages. I certainly wasted more then a few hours in my live trying to get some stubborn wireless stuff to work, not made any easier by user interfaces that refused to display the password and didn't allow you to tell the difference between a wrong password and some other misshape in the network configuration.
There is of course also legacy gear like the original NintendoDS that makes it impossible to secure your WiFi properly, as it only supports WEP.
Because if man is to survive as a species,
Yeah, but there isn't a need for hurry with that. Earth isn't getting wiped out anytime soon and even if, we neither have found another habitable planet nor the technology to get there. Toying around on the moon won't change that.
If you are worried about survival of mankind at this point in time it would make a hell of a lot more sense to build a few huge underground bunker so that you have some protection against an asteroid.
That whole "lets get to the moon for mankind survival" talk always feels for me like caveman discussion how to colonize America. Yeah, we might eventually do that, but it is not quite the right time to worry about that.
Given the rumors of a 6.2" screen on the controller this sounds more and more like they are building an iPad competitor that will get gameplay streamed from the console. Kind of like Sony already did with the PSP and PS3, which could be linked to play PS3 games on the PSP, however only a small number of games actually supported that and it was slow and laggy.
People would laugh at the idea of mandatory age-ratings on books, so why do they accept it on movies and games?
I think that has one very simple reasons: Violence in books is text, not picture, thus much more abstract and less interesting for children.
And when it comes to picture books, well pornography is already regulated, try to sell that to minors and see how far you get with that. And with violent picture books, aka comics, there also have been quite a few outcries and tries to get it regulated.
So its not really that books are handled different because they are books, but because they actually are different and when they are not, you have pretty much the same issues.
What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.
My player can play it out of the box just fine. You also have to look beyond the music industry, it might not have killed MP3 there, but when it comes to commercial computer games for example the penetration of OGG is extremely high, I see it used quite a bit more these days then MP3. I have even seen Theora being used (that one however is pretty rare). So while OGG isn't exactly an MP3 killer everywhere, it certainly has found a few niches where it is extremely popular.
Yep, my thoughts exactly, when I saw the summary I thought about simple things, like a generator, a lamp, a stove, maybe a lathe and similar tools, but this goes into building a full blown modern industrial nation, they even include stuff like a 3D printer and scanner. Maybe I am a little pessimistic, but I don't quite see how they could jump start something aimed that high with so many pre-requirements.
because the way copyright is being massively, willfully infringed is a violation of the social contract.
No, thats just how the world works and always has been working. Before the Internet people would lend books to friends, record stuff from TV or radio and so on. Copying and lending stuff has always been done without the copyright holder consent, it wasn't even illegal most countries. The thing that changed with the Internet is that you can now lend your stuff to the whole world at once. Its not the behaver of sharing that has changed, but the underlying technology that makes it a lot easier.
And while the enforcing is troublesome, the underlying and biggest problem is simply the timescale of copyright, copyright that last longer then a human lifetime means that you essentially no longer have a public domain of culturally relevant stuff. And that is a big issue for society, as cultural goods essentially become controlled by a few big cooperations.
I just have a hard time having sympathy for people who take the position that their greed is somehow morally correct.
Greed implies ownership and possession, keeping things for oneself. Sharing things with the world is as far away from greed as you can get.
Wait, how is desiring to collect more entertainment than could ever be consumed in a human lifetime without compensating the creators not a form of personal greed?
The whole trouble with the current copyright thing isn't that the producers want compensation, but that they interfere with my freedom in order to get at that compensation. Be it stuff like DMCA and DRM that prevents me from watching my legally purchased content or that copyright has been extended into infinity (works created in my life time not entering public domain in my lifetime is pretty much equal to infinity). Plenty of other issues get of course mixed in as well, such as that the compensation doesn't actually go to the creators, but to the ones owning the distribution rights, which does nothing more then secure their market dominance with no benefit to society.
Completely abolishing copyright might not be the best idea, but the way copyright currently works is really a perversion of the original idea that needs to get fixed.
How is the application to know the difference?
By looking if the user does a PDF export or a regular save as Word document, the former should reduce the document to only the visible parts, the later one of course has all the hidden information.
Its easy to ridicule such mistakes, but I couldn't even tell you how to not make them as a regular user with the software at hand, as text redaction doesn't even seem to be in the feature set of your average Word processor and isn't easily replicated with manual effort (just overwriting the text would destroy the layout with proportional fonts).
How would the application know?
If (background == foreground) {
printf("Thats not doing what you want\n");
}
If the user is drawing a black rectangle over stuff the app could be clever enough to clip away everything that gets overdrawn instead of storing it in the file when doing PDF export (might help performance too).
The user fundamentally needs to know the difference between adding information to a document and removing information
When working with sensitive information that certainly couldn't hurt, that however doesn't excuse applications doing a shitty job in support the user doing that (metadata generally hidden down in some deep submenu, thus easily exported by accident, there might not even exist functionality to securely black out text in the first place, etc.).
Ideally you would move away from the current location based Internet and move to a content driven network, i.e. you don't tell the user location where the information is (server, directory, filename), but what the information is (say by an md5 checksum). The job of the network would then be to find the nearest cached copy of that data, i.e. basically the way Freenet or many other P2P networks work. In the simplest case that could of course also just mean to send along a cached copy with your work, not so great when referencing a HD movie, but perfectly fine for say including a URL in a email. Of course there are some technical hurdles and probably even more important legal ones, but it would really solve quite a few issues and annoyances with the way the Internet currently works.
Even if somebody is keeping a local copy, they might not bother to reupload it to another service and fix all the now obsolete links to the old content, which is why always a large part of the content will be lost in a take down of a service. Sad to see such a move from Google, who not only are not bankrupt, but also have another video service right next door to which they could move the content.
After Google send the mail half my videos didn't have download links, now, a few hours later, all have them. Seems like the download feature requires some work on their side and wasn't instantly applied to every video.
Explain with real world examples please.
You want to change the MTU of your network card in Windows, you have to use regedit, you want to change it in Linux, you have to edit some config file, you want to change it in MacOSX, you just input it into your network settings. You want to run with DHCP but with a fixed IP, you click "DHCP with fixed IP" in MacOSX, in Linux you mess around with network manager, then search around Google then throw the network manager out of the window and mess around with old /etc/network/interfaces. Basically MacOSX seemed to be designed with people actually using it in mind, while Linux and Windows stuff feels like the result of a million monkeys hacking around on typewriters.
Simply put, on Windows there are always a bazillion options, made harder to reach with each version as even more layers of useless helper widget get in your way. On MacOSX there is no need for useless helper widget as somebody actually put some thought into designing a good GUI, instead of trying to fix up a bad one with clippy.
That said, MacOSX isn't perfect either, getting Timemachine backup to work after a motherboard replacement required messing around with ACLs and extended attributes on the console, needing tools that they actually removed from the latest version of their OS.
PS: This is of course a little out of date, I haven't tried Windows7, but so far everything after Windows95 felt like a downgrade, same old stuff, just now even more illogically organized. And I can't really remember a single moment where I thought something was well done in Windows, but a million ones where the design was just so awful that one had to wonder how that ever ended up in a finished product.
The only weird thing with OSX is the way it handles application launch and closing, it takes a while to realize that an application with a little arrow under it is still actually running even so no windows are open. The rest of the GUI is pretty standard, just like what you would get on Linux or Windows, just a bit more consistent, better organized (you can actually find what you are searching for without going by tons of useless cruft) and simply better done in general (modal windows for example are so much nicer then anywhere else).
Not only it the whole interface very touchscreen-phone-ish, the thing has its own tie-in to canonical's new App Store/Android Market/OVI wannabe as well.
Yep, thats the thing that is puzzling me. What the fuck has a touchscreen interface to do on my desktop machine (its default in Natty for some stupid reason)? Its not that the interface is completely awful, it looks like it would fit well enough on a small-screen touch device, but on my large screen desktop with no touch none of the changes make any sense at all, its a downgrade in basically every way and that dock/launcher thing is completely incapable of handling more then a few apps before it gets completely overfilled and completely unusable.
On top of that Unity is full of bugs, when running with a multi-monitor setup the whole thing was completely unusable, the GUI was stretched out over both screens and full of graphical glitches, even switching multi-monitor stuff of didn't fix the glitches. I was happy that I even managed to get the machine back in a running state so broken was that thing (removing overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0 unity ubuntu-netbook did the trick).
Shell code is much easier to write then any other language, thats why we type it into our xterms after all instead of Python code. So naturally shell one-liners grow into shell scripts. There is also a mismatch between what Python/Ruby provides and what your shell provides, thus converting shell scripts into Python/Ruby isn't exactly straight forward and its easier to keep things as shell instead of doing a complete rewrite.
Making something easy doesn't reduce its power, it can do quite the opposite if done right. Look at Google start page, its nothing more then a "enter text here" area, you can't get much more simple then that, yet it gives you instant access to an insane amount of information. Try to browse that same amount of information with your regular hierarchical file manager, it probably will neither be as easy to use, as fast or as powerful.
Simply put: A lot of what makes current computers hard to use has absolutely nothing to do with giving the user power, but is simply the result of inconsistent interface design and incompatible protocols and data formats.
Yet another visionary wanting to do something different just for the sake being different.
Where do you get that idea? He doesn't want it because it is different, but because it is vastly more powerful then what we currently have. What he is talking about is basically a Wiki on steroids.
In reality, some things haven't changed in a long time because we've figured out something that works well.
Only if you have really low expectations for "work well". I consider todays software completely abysmal as it is completely awful at doing even basic things (at least a dozen different ways to enter text, all of them more or less incompatible and different). Simply put, todays computers are like computers 30 years ago, except with more colorful icons.
Every time I hear one of these "revolutionary" interface ideas
It is not about the interface, its about how we store and structure data and as far as that is concerned, the web is rather terrible. Basic example: An URL is an address where you have to go to to find the data, what it really should be is an unique identifier of the data itself along with a cached copy (i.e. no more trouble with 404, deleted content, etc).